This post is Part Two of a series that references the baseball movie Moneyball to make the case that Deep Link Rate is the "On Base Percentage" of National Media.
Hopefully I've piqued your interest with Part One of this series. To truly understand the power of Deep Link Rate, we have to look at the three primary strategies brands use to route their traffic from media to retail.
Let's break down the funnel across three scenarios: Interstitial, Forced Traffic, and Agentic Shoppable Media. To analyze these funnels, we need to track three stages: Media Clicks, Successful Transfers (traffic that actually makes it to a retailer), and Deep Linked Shoppers (traffic that successfully opens the app with the shopper logged in).
Interstitials are the landing pages that pop up between an ad click and the final retail destination. They often ask the user to "Choose where to buy." While they seem helpful in theory, the data tells a different story.
Notice the catastrophic drop-off from media clicks to successful transfers. This happens because interstitial pages are incredibly disruptive to the shopper's momentum. They do not fit modern expectations for a seamless experience. Instead of a bridge, an interstitial acts as a 50-foot wall between brand marketing and commerce. A 4% DLR is abysmal, but unfortunately, it is the industry standard for this approach.
In this scenario, a brand bypasses the interstitial entirely and forces a fraction of the 100,000 clicks to each Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Walgreens with no logic behind who goes where.
With this strategy, you successfully transfer all your traffic. However, you are forcing shoppers into a retail environment they likely have no affinity for. If, for example, a shopper doesn't have the Target app installed on their phone, they are kicked into a mobile web browser. As we established earlier, this will likely require the user to navigate a number of CX hurdles before checking out. This experience can kill conversion rates because setting up an account and inputing billing details absolutely introduces additional friction that can frustrate the user and prompt them to abandon the sale.
This is Ampd's breakthrough solution. Agentic Shoppable Media (ASM) dynamically acts on behalf of the shopper's preferences while fulfilling the brand's routing goals.
These are not fictitious numbers. This is the expected outcome for most brands utilizing Ampd’s ASM solution.
How does it work? ASM uses powerful contextual and device-level data to become aware of each shopper’s preferred retailer—specifically, what retail apps they already have installed on their smartphone. This data allows the technology to ensure shoppers are sent to the right destination, without a disruptive interstitial, agentically, every single time.
The only thing holding ASM back from a 100% Deep Link Rate is the requirement of "Fair and Equitable" distribution. Brands must maintain good relationships with all their retail partners by sending a fair portion of traffic to each. ASM is built to mathematically optimize these fair and equitable traffic splits to meet vendor quotas, while simultaneously maximizing the Deep Link Rate across the board. That means ASM is the only solution that prioritizes both compliance and commerce.
With Agentic Shoppable Media, shoppers land in-app, on their preferred retailer, ready for one-click commerce.
Check out those stats in the graphic above. When you combine a 70% Deep Link Rate with a 5x conversion multiplier, the revenue implications for your brand are immense.
By taking your standard media budget, your average cost-per-click, your average selling price, and your required retail traffic splits, Ampd can accurately project the revenue impact of fixing your DLR.
When you run the math, the business case becomes undeniable:
Compared to the old ways of routing traffic, Ampd's Agentic Shoppable Media increases sales by an average of 55% versus Forced Traffic, and a staggering 936% versus Interstitial strategies.
No more drop-offs from unnecessary landing pages. No more sending shoppers to retailers they don't use. Fully compliant with fair and equitable mandates. Maximized for deep linking and sales velocity.
The game has officially changed for brand marketers. We have brought Moneyball thinking to the shopper journey. The brands that recognize this evolution and optimize for Deep Link Rate will fundamentally out-position and out-sell the competitors who are still swinging at vanity metrics.
It’s time to stop looking at metrics that don't move the needle on commerce outcomes.
Let's get on base. Let's get in-app.
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