If you haven’t noticed, Google’s App Indexing has been receiving an enormous amount of attention in the last year. Now, with the recent launch of the Firebase development platform, Google has rolled the App Indexing component into their documentation into Firebase for iOS and Android. What does that mean for your mobile app? Unfortunately, if you had done any work with the SDK prior to the change, you’re going to have to add an entirely new SDK to reimplement it.
App Indexing with Branch
At Branch, we’re excited about the concept of App Indexing, as it means that app content finally has a pathway to be discovered in traditional search. That’s why we’ve continually done things to drive more awareness and adoption of the mechanism. We created App Indexing integration guides to get your app listed on search. We built an App Indexing validator to help you confirm whether or not your website is setup to support App Indexing. And every single Branch link that gets created will automatically support the Google App Indexing standard.
We’ve also included App Indexing integration information in our developer portal. If you’re new to Branch, this is your place to get started.
Once you are successfully creating Branch Universal Objects, and have enabled Google App Indexing on your dashboard, Branch will create an app content sitemap and list it for Google’s robot.
Now that you’ve got your Branch tracking links out in the wild and Google has indexed them:
- You’re already set up to track the amount of traffic that originates from Google search
- All of the links that we give to Google will attribute the clicks, re-opens, and down-funnel events to the channel “google_search”
Additionally, if you visit the Branch Source Analytics dashboard page, you can segment all of your Branch traffic by channel, campaign, operating system, and much more. Select channel from the segmentation drop down. If you’ve had any traffic from Google App Indexing, you’ll see the ‘google_search’ channel on this list. If you’re tracking custom events with Branch you’ll see the conversion rate from clicks:
That’s it! You’re a few clicks away from listing your content on Google and measuring the effectiveness of this channel.
