Free Deeplinking Solution?

Instagram Marketing
#1

I know there’s a method of doing it on FireBase but it won’t work for me. The link goes to browser version of IG.

And URLgenius 1 cent per click kind of defeats the purpose of worldwide low cost clicks…

Can anyone help me, lots of clients and myself need the swipe up ads working…

#2

Saw several people talk about deeplinks lately - may I ask what exactly are those and how can you use them to your advantage?

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#3

a link where you click it it opens a profile etc within the app rather than taking you to the browser version where you aren’t logged in.

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#4

Good for ads, so that swipe up in stories don’t open the browser where the user might be not logged in.

#5

I played around with them yesterday on Firebase. Bearing in mind that I have very little knowledge of coding, it was surprisingly easy. I was wondering why that won’t work? Happy to hear because it might affect me in the future.

N.B. As an aside, one MASSIVE problem I ran into was getting stuck in some sort of loop on iOS Safari (Android and Chrome seemed to work fine), where you couldn’t reopen Safari without the redirect being pushed at you - ended up having to close it while disconnected from the internet.

I think URLgenius automatically fixes that but it’s beyond my knowledge with Firebase. (If anyone knows a fix, feel free to shout!)

#6

Firebase wont work for me. For some reason the links just open browser not the app.
Did everything exactly the same.

Yeah I think URLGenius is the way to go.

#7

@EauDeBo What kind of issue do you have now? We are using Firebase Dynamic Links without any issues for long time saving a good amount of money.

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#8

For me it works very well with an own tracking/redirect switch.
Works in JS or PHP.

For Instagram/Facebook that flow works very well for me:

First off all Check the Browser User Agent.
if(strpos($browser, ‘Instagram’) == true OR strpos($browser, ‘FBAV’) == true )

If that matches with mobile traffic you are in the inApp Browser.

Then check if its Android or iOS. Easy to check for example with mobile_detect.php (github)

If Android --> make a 301 redirect to the chrome intent url. The links opens than in Chrome Browser or better in the installed App. For Example if you use Facebook/Instagram/twitter/ebay/Amazon link or so…

If iOS you could do nearly the same, but the user needs to click one time in the inApp Browser. Seems this is an Apple security thing. I didn’t get rid of that click till now.

For Pinterest inApp Browser i tried a lot of things to get out of that Pinterest Browser webview thing… till now nothing works…

How does that Firebase solution work? Maybe it works for Pinterest too?

#9

So the Firebase Dynamic Link worked perfectly with Android using one of their domain links (couldn’t be bothered to set up my custom domain as a dynamic link for this).

When I went to test it on an iPhone (Safari on iOS), it would redirect the first time - opening the url web page, then asking if you want to view it in the app.

But then, every time you opened Safari afterwards, it would load that url as the last page you visited and you were stuck in that loop unable to close that page because you were being redirected to the app.

Does that make sense?

#10

Im going to try this:

var destination = "instagram://user?username={USERNAME}"; 
if( navigator.userAgent.match(/Android/i) ) {
  // use Android's redirect
  document.location = destination;   
}   
else {
  // use iOS redirect
  window.location.replace( destination );
}

Edit: Tried, only worked on my Chrome on PC, not anything else.

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