Playing "Moneyball" with National Media

Why Deep Link Rate is the Post-Click Metric That Matters

Have you ever seen the movie Moneyball? You know, the one with Brad Pitt as the frustrated general manager and Jonah Hill as the brilliant, spreadsheet-wielding underdog?

If you have, hear me out on this one. If you haven't, you're in for a treat.

The premise of the movie—based on the true story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics—is that traditional baseball scouting hadn't evolved in over a century. For decades, talent evaluators were relying on outdated metrics and "gut feelings" to gauge a prospect's talent. They looked for flashy players with high batting averages, huge home run numbers, and the stereotypical "look" of a baseball star.

Then enters Jonah Hill’s character (based on real-life executive Paul DePodesta). As a completely unseasoned, Ivy League-educated outsider, he looks at the raw numbers and realizes the entire industry is building teams the wrong way. He discovers that there is a vastly superior way to build a winning roster by focusing on a metric that almost nobody in the old guard was talking about: On-Base Percentage (OBP).

Unlike flashy metrics like batting average or slugging percentage, On-Base Percentage simply computes the likelihood that a player doesn't get out during their at-bat. Whether it’s a hit, a walk, or getting hit by a pitch, it doesn't matter. Did you get on base?

He found that this single, unglamorous metric was more closely tied to scoring runs—and therefore winning games—than any other stat in baseball. Armed with this updated algorithm, he helped the lowest-payroll team in the Major Leagues have one of the winningest seasons in history. To put it in perspective: the Oakland A's payroll that year was around $40 million. The New York Yankees' payroll was over $125 million.

Yet, the A's matched the Yankee’s league-leading 103 wins in the regular season. They leveled the playing field by simply buying players who excelled in the one metric that actually mattered.

Bringing this back to the largest marketing line-item in today’s world—national media—there is a massive parallel. And if you follow these five principles, you'll see exactly how the game is about to change.

The 5 Principles of the Modern National Media Landscape

1. Search, Social, and Programmatic are where consumers spend their time. This is the top of the funnel. It's where discovery happens, where inspiration strikes, and where attention is captured.
2. Retailer sites are where consumers prefer to buy. Shoppers trust the infrastructure of retail giants. They want the fast shipping, the easy returns, and the familiar checkout process of platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Target.
3. Tying these two sides together is the largest growth opportunity for brands. Connecting the discovery on national media directly to the checkout on retail sites is the holy grail of modern marketing.
4. The conduit connecting these channels is called Shoppable Media. This is the bridge that turns a passive scroller on Instagram into an active buyer on a retail app.
5. Shoppable Media is currently distracted by flashy vanity metrics and muddy attribution. Just like those old baseball scouts looking at batting averages, modern marketers are obsessing over the wrong numbers. They are looking at clicks, impressions, and complex attribution models, completely missing the "On-Base Percentage" of the digital shopper journey.

The metric that is being overlooked is Deep Link Rate.

Why Deep Link Rate is the "On-Base Percentage" of National Media

I believe, with considerable passion and the data to back it up, that Deep Link Rate (DLR) is the single most important aspect of what happens after the click in national media. It matters more than multi-touch attribution, more than sparse 1p data, and more than audience building.

Now, what exactly is Deep Link Rate? Deep Link Rate divides the total number of shoppers who landed directly inside a retailer’s mobile app—logged in and ready for commerce actions—by the total number of clicks generated from the media buy.

• The Formula: 67,800 deep links / 100,000 media clicks = 67.8% DLR

But why does DLR matter more than anything else? Here is the fun part.

At Ampd, we have analyzed aggregated data across millions of dollars in ad spend, comparing the behavior of deep linked shoppers versus shoppers who are dropped into a standard mobile web browser.

The results are staggering: Deep linked shoppers convert 5x as often as browser landed shoppers.

“With Ampd’s assistance, we definitively proved the true power of deep linking. We saw first hand the 4-5x increase in conversion rates by prioritizing a deep linked experience for every shopper.”

-John Shea, Commerce executive at PMG

Let that sink in. Think about your own shopping habits. If you click an ad on social media and it opens a clunky, in-app web browser asking you to log into a retailer, what do you do? You probably can't remember your password. Your credit card isn't saved. The friction is incredibly high, so you bounce. A wonky browser experience might equate to a measly .4% conversion rate.

But a deep link? A deep link opens the native retailer app already installed on your phone. You are already logged in. Your shipping address is saved. Your credit card is on file. The path to purchase is a frictionless, one-click experience. That same traffic, routed properly, averages a 2% conversion rate.

Do you see how massive this is? There is virtually no other optimization in digital marketing that can multiply your commerce outcomes by 5x across your entire budget.

This is our sole focus at Ampd. We have built a solution that acts as the algorithm Jonah Hill used to make the poorest team in baseball the best team in the league. We call it Agentic Shoppable Media.

Look for Part Two of our "Moneyball" series, coming soon.  

Can't Wait? Book a Deep Link Rate strategy call with Ampd >