Stop sending paid installs to your homepage

Here is the most expensive bug in mobile growth, and it isn't in your code. You buy a tap on a specific product, creator, or offer. The user doesn't have your app, so they install. They open it — and land on your homepage, with no memory of what they tapped. You paid for intent and then threw the intent away at the door.

The homepage tax

The stores sit between the ad and the first open, and they don't forward context. Without a deferred deep link, every install from a 'see this thing' link resets to your default screen. The drop-off is not subtle: industry benchmarks consistently show deep-linked installs converting at roughly double the rate of installs that land on home — a third to a half of the conversion you paid for, gone at the door.

• Product links from shopping ads — the user wanted that sneaker, not your catalog.
• Creator and influencer links — the context was a specific profile or drop, flattened to home.
• Offer links — the discount that earned the tap is nowhere on the screen they land on.

A campaign link that remembers

The fix is a deferred deep link with a payload rich enough that the first screen feels personal, not just routed. You create the link with the destination path and the context that should ride along to first open.

{
  "deepLinkPath": "/product/air-zoom-9",
  "customData": {
    "creative": "ig-reel-0612",
    "discount": "LAUNCH15",
    "creator": "alex-rivera"
  }
}

Handle it on first open

When the SDK delivers the deferred link, route to the path and use the payload to pre-fill the experience — open the product, apply the discount, credit the creator.

LinkTrail.shared?.onLink { link, source in
  router.navigate(to: link.path)
  if let code = link.customData["discount"] {
    cart.apply(code)
  }
}

Why can't the ad platform just do this?

Because the ad platform's job ends at the store. It can send a user to your App Store or Play Store page and it can report that an install followed, but it has no channel into your app's first launch to say which ad produced it. That channel doesn't exist on iOS, and on Android it exists only as the Play Install Referrer, which carries a campaign string rather than your product ID and payload.

So the platform genuinely cannot fix this for you. Something has to hold the click context and hand it back at first open, and that something has to be a service that saw both events. This is the whole reason deferred deep linking is a product category rather than a checkbox.

What about App Clips and Instant Apps?

They solve an adjacent problem, not this one. An App Clip lets someone use a slice of your app without installing, which is excellent for a one-off transaction at point of sale. It does not carry context into a subsequent full install, and it requires you to build and maintain a second, constrained version of your experience.

If your goal is a full install that lands in the right place, a deferred deep link is the direct answer and an App Clip is a detour. The two also compose fine — a Clip for the immediate transaction, a deferred link for the install that follows.

What to measure

Don't measure installs — measure the paid event one step down the funnel: add-to-cart, signup, or purchase from the linked install, split against installs that landed on home. That delta is the homepage tax you just stopped paying.

One caveat on the split: installs that land on home aren't a clean control group, because the reason they landed there — no consent, a missed match, an unlinked channel — may correlate with intent. Treat the delta as a strong indicator, and if the number is going to drive a real budget decision, prove it with a proper lift test.