Upside Uses Mobot to Expedite Deep Link Testing and Improve Mobile Campaign Performance

What challenges have you had when implementing deep links?

Eddie Benedito: “Whenever you're wrapping these links within an email in particular, things can break, things can change, right? And our experience has been when wrapping said URLs within certain comms, that experience can be a little bit inconsistent depending on the user's device, the user's mail client. And we found a lot of inconsistencies just internally when we were doing our own team testing. What that led to was us really not understanding what upside users are experiencing when we send them a campaign of communications across email and others. In terms of the conversations that were happening with engineering and product, they were not as productive at that time because they were only our user experiences. in terms of our teams, the marketing teams. So we were playing a bit of whack-a-mole, right? Rather than having a true documentation of what was happening with our users regarding email deep links in particular.”

How did deep link issues affect your perception of your campaign performance?

Eddie Benedito: “So yeah, I put a lot of doubt in the lifecycle marketing team's eyes in terms of the performance of our campaigns, right? And how it could have performed better. Because what I'd say is, We have a really good methodology around understanding what email and what push notifications are doing in terms of how it's performing, because what we have is a testing control methodology where what we do is a certain subset of our population does not get the campaign that we send, and then we're able to analyze those users separately and how they perform. In the majority of our campaigns, there is always a lift in... in what we're doing, but where we were at was what if we were really much more confident in where users were going, what could it do to those results? What could it do to our retention of our user base if we're able to send them to the right place at the right time?”

How often do deep link problems affect your growth team’s effectiveness?

Eddie Benedito: “It's been a consistent challenge for us Because I imagine this is part of the reason why mobile exists, right? Because deep links can be notoriously broken for a very long time because Google and Apple make changes every day to what users are ultimately experiencing and what that looks like for them in terms of their mail client, right? There are changes towards Gmail, there's changes toward iOS mail client. There are changes within just like a software updates with an Android and iOS that are very hard to keep up with. And I'd say Branch in particular does a very good job at keeping up with those changes. And they do have a solution for that. And we procured that solution fairly recently. And that's why it drove us to really wanting to understand more of the detail regarding what our users are experiencing.”

How Mobot’s deep link bug documentation helps drive better user experience

Eddie Benedito: “I'd say the most important part for me is the documentation of the actual experience itself. So we as a business are trying to get more consumer focus. And for us to be able to really get to that point where we want to be, we need to have a more maniacal focus regarding what our users are experiencing at a given timeframe. I think for us, some of the things that I'm seeing in terms of the larger benefits of using Mobot have been understanding when and where, what is happening when a user clicks on a specific campaign. And ultimately, what was their software? What were they doing? What was the mail client that they're using? What was the device that they're using? We documented timestamps across the board so that we can ultimately have a more fruitful conversation with our product and engineering teams.”

Can Mobot help mobile growth teams save on campaign testing?

Eddie Benedito: “I definitely think it's been a time saver for us because some of the things that I've seen my teams go through is they launch a campaign, they test it themselves, they see errors, and they're not as confident with the campaign. Errors in terms of where they're expecting they should be when they click on this link. And now that we've procured a solution like Mobot for us, we can either send that same campaign that we're sending to Mobot, or we just have an evergreen test that we have going, which is what we have right now, so that we're ultimately telling Product and Eng what we're seeing within a formatted set of columns for us that we're then able to ultimately track differences in user experiences over time. so if we're able, if, if we put a software update out there, you know, we're able to kind of, again, like meet the need there with our product and edge partners to tell them this is when and where this happened this is the software that was tested, or this is, this was the version of the app that, that we tested this in. This is either android or iOS. This is either a gmail or a native mail client. uh this is, this is what we're seeing. That's been, um, what we're seeing has been the big benefit.”

How do Mobot bug reports help you fix deep link issues?

Eddie Benedito: “The logistics today is there is a QA engineer. There is an upside QA engineer in the Slack channel today, and they're able to look at said reports every week. What then happens is I think what we're working on is an automated Jira ticket to be created. But I think at the time right now, the team is creating Jira tickets themselves manually.”

Benny @ Mobot: “And so that kind of leads me to my next question, which was, you know, in a perfect world, right, you'd have mobile tests coming in, results. And then when bugs are found, when issues are found, it's automatically opening up Jira tickets. It's really a way to expedite the issue such that the testing really never actually has to go through the marketing team. and it just goes directly to QA and end, you can then triage it from there. Would you say that's an ideal state for you?”

Eddie Benedito: “Yes, that's an ideal state because it's not, I'd never ever tell my team to say something is not your job, but we're a startup and when we see something is broken, we say something, right? But when we see and say something that takes time away from optimizing, that takes time away from looking at creative, that takes time away from ultimately optimizing our campaigns to the best of our capabilities, right? And- But with a solution like this, we're confident in that we can get this triage much faster rather than us doing the work of actually doing the triaging.”

What were your goals for a mobile campaign monitoring solution?

Eddie Benedito: “My main goals were to be able to show a regular documentation that lives and breathes and to be able to show that to our product and engineering teams to prove that the issues that my team has been seeing are real and with video proof, ultimately, that this is happening. If it's happening in testing, it's happening to our users.”

Why are deep link issues challenging for mobile marketing teams?

Eddie Benedito: “Look, I think where we're at as a company is that there's no shortage of things to work on. When you're dealing in a world, again, of limited resources, we're not Facebook, we're not Google, we're not these giant tech businesses that have unlimited energy sources, right? The temperature in the room has always been very cordial, right? It's more about like, how do I get this prioritized? And how do I get this fixed? And it's very hard to prioritize something that just like a team of marketers just like, every time i run a campaign and test it this is what i'm seeing right so for me again the goal of this is to be able to show regular documentation of of our user experience when we send an email and it's again it's more about and i think for uh for us as a business it's about everything is about prioritization.”

What’s been your experience working with Mobot?

Eddie Benedito: “So far it's been really seamless uh for me as a marketer again, I've been joining the latest weeklies because it really, I think for me, we have a good process and the team is there and there's regular reporting of what is happening and how deep links are evolving over time in terms of where users are going to. So for me, as a leader in the company, it's more about having confidence and knowing that there's a solution here. that the team is working through.”

Why would you recommend Mobot to another mobile growth team?

Eddie Benedito: “I definitely recommend Mobot. I think for me, the experience has been one in which I think it can really scale in understanding what users are experiencing. Because the mobile app experience in general, it's not just like an upside thing. To me, it's like industry-wide. Being able to understand how a user's experience evolves with a specific app and which version and which platform and which mail client is very hard to keep up with. And if not, you're always going to have these conversations with product and engineering that are not as fruitful as having video and image proof.”