Can A Little Web Magic Revive Forgotten Apps?

There's a dirty little secret about apps--actually, two dirty little secrets.

The first secret is that most people who download apps either never use them or try them a few times and promptly forget about them. The other secret: Trying to send people to a particular place in an app via a link from an ad, like you can on the World Wide Web is a real pain--which makes it really tough to get them to start using the app again.

Two companies today aim to solve both problems. Bitly, the company best known for Web link shorteners, is announcing a deal with URX, a startup that allows marketers to "deep link" inside apps. Using URX's technology, Bitly will help marketers that want to get people re-engaged with an app to create and distribute mobile deep links much more easily. That way, they can send people to the precise place in the app to get them interested again.

The problem today is that, amazingly enough, marketers within many companies have no idea how to link to a particular part of their app. Viacom's mobile team, for instance, may know how, but the marketing team at, say, the MTV app doesn't, and it's a hassle for the busy mobile team to track and provide all those links. "Marketers don't have the pull to compel the mobile team to give them deep links" for each app in every app store, says Matt Thomson, Bitly's chief product officer. "It's kind of crazy, but that's the reality."

So this deal allows marketers to embed deep linking into all their app's links without having to bug the mobile team. URX's index will be integrated into Bitly's Brand Tools, a service that uses the massive data produced by its link-shortening to help marketers keep track of when and where people click on the links. Then marketers can let Bitly pair the mobile deep links with web links, making it easier to share app links when they need to, such as in an ad.

The PGA, for instance, wanted people to watch golf tournaments on its app, partly because video plays better on native apps than on a mobile Web browser. It used Bitly with the URX index to drive users into the app via an ad with deep links. "This is mostly about app re-engagement," says Thomson.

And that's a lucrative market.  Facebook uses deep linking to help app developers run ads to promote app installations and remind people who have already installed an app to use it more. Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have made this a $6 billion market.

Bitly's URX deal deal is part of a fitful move to make apps a little more like the open Web, which for all its faults is built on the idea that every site should be able to link easily to another. That's something that has been lost in the app era.

But for his part, Thomson thinks apps are here to stay for the foreseeable future. "Most apps today are a pretty solid combination of software and the Web," he says.