Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington and we’re joined again by Jesse lakes of genius link. He’s in the studio today. How’s it going?
Jesse: It’s going well. It’s fun to be in the studio.
Doug: And for the people that checked out the episode from a week ago or a couple of weeks ago, we recorded a couple episodes all at the same time.
So we’re literally recording this just minutes later, even though through the magic of editing. And YouTube and scheduling and all that stuff is coming out a little bit later. Today, we’re going to talk about mobile deep linking, which sounds like a very boring topic, but trust me, it’s exciting. We’re going to go into some of the details.
Plus some, some news about Amazon associates and a little bit about. The rules, they changed it up, which I didn’t even know this until Jesse told me about it. And I I’m going to read just a short intro for Jesse. If you, if you don’t know him, he’s a native of Montana and he’s the co founder and CEO of genius link, and he’s done various jobs, including whitewater rafting, guiding.
You worked at a sushi restaurant. What’d you do there?
Jesse: A little bit of everything. Yeah, that was actually up in Fort Collins. Not too far from here.
Doug: No way. All right. And you know, the only thing about sushi here in the middle of the country, we’re very far from an ocean and I don’t know, does that make you wonder?
Jesse: I got that question a lot. We would overnight our fish from Hawaii. So it was, yeah, I live in Seattle now and obviously we have some very fresh fish in Seattle. But the fish come in, yeah, from at the sushi restaurant in Fort Collins, like it was, it was really good fish. And we paid a lot to make sure that it was good, fresh fish.
Doug: That’s what everyone always says. They’re like, we overnight it, but I’m like, I know not everybody’s overnighting their fish, but I trust you. And I’m sure it was a nice place. This is not like gas station sushi. Like it was a gas station.
Jesse: It was a sushi by Kevin. For those that remember Fort Collins 20 years ago.
Doug: Okay. And you’ve done other jobs too. You worked at a skate shop, a snowboard shop. You were a professional student and you worked at Apple for the iTunes affiliate program. And can you tell us really quick what Geniuslink does and who should be interested in it?
Jesse: Yeah, so we are a link management platform.
We’re really kind of at the intersection of product recommendations and monetization. So any, any creator, so whether you’re a blogger, an influencer, a YouTuber, when you’re talking about products we can, we can probably help you boost your boost your revenue. We’ll. Probably talk a bit more about that here in a moment when we dive into a mobile deep linking, which is just one of our.
Yeah. Special sauces that we can add to links.
Doug: Okay. And we will get to the Amazon rules that have changed. We’re going to save that to the end. So let’s get right into mobile deep linking. What is mobile deep linking?
Jesse: Yeah. So let’s start with deep linking, right? Deep linking is the concept of instead of linking to the main page of a website that Link to something deeper inside.
And we’re typically talking about retail sites here. So instead of going to amazon. com, we’re going to amazon. com slash whatever it is for that, that awesome water bottle you’ve got, right? So we’re, we’re deep linking to the specific product. Mobile deep linking is taking that a step further. Instead of the webpage in a browser, we’re going to a specific product inside of the app.
So mobile deep linking. It could be the same product, but it’s inside the app. Deep linking is the product inside of the webpage. So little, little bit of nuance there, but that little bit of nuance goes, goes a long way. Okay. And why should we care about that? It’s a great question. It’s all about conversion rate, right?
You know, the, the better your links convert, the more money ends up in your pocket. So I guess it’s really all about the money in your pocket. Mobile. Deep linking is. Is so important because Amazon, anyone that shops at Amazon, not anyone, most everyone that shops at Amazon has the Amazon app installed that Amazon app makes it really easy to buy because you’re always logged in.
So taking a quick step back when you’re on your phone and you click on an Amazon link, one of three behaviors can happen. One is that you can get taken to the Amazon app, which is the ideal experience. The second is that, especially if you’re coming from social media, you’ll be stuck inside of the social media app inside there’s their sandbox browser, or you can get sent to the default browser.
And the last two of those scenarios, the default browser and the sandbox browser, the odds are you’re likely signed out and just that action of having to sign in creates enough friction that your conversion rate often decreases to a point where it doesn’t even really matter. So from our testing, we’ve seen increase from four to eight X.
And your earnings and your conversion rates by ensuring a consistent experience of getting someone into the Amazon app. Because if you’re in the Amazon app, you’re perma logged in. It’s easy to buy. It’s just that one click. But again, other two experiences, it’s a lot of clicks.
Doug: Okay. And just to be clear, the sandbox browser within an app.
So let’s say I’m scrolling on Instagram, like I do. Someone mentions a product and I like, somehow I’m able to like, click the link in there and then it opens up this kind of shitty browser and like, I, I can’t do anything in there, right?
Jesse: I mean, you can, you can click around, right? But you’re traditionally login is all based off of cookies, right?
So that, you know, you, you, you log into a site, it’s going to set a cookie in your browser and that cookie will tell the site that, okay, he’s logged in, keep, keep allowing to shop. You know, you can use cookies to build your, your shopping cart, et cetera. Due to security and privacy. Cookies are stuck to each cookie jar.
This is a little bit weird here, but each browser has its own cookie jar that these things are stuck in. So if you log in on the default browser, but you end up in the sandbox browser, they don’t share a cookie jar. Therefore it doesn’t know you’re logged in, doesn’t know what’s in your cart, et cetera. So by being kind of stuck in these different silos, they’re not talking to each other.
You have to kind of recreate a lot of the steps inside. Again, the Amazon app, which is the ideal place to buy because it’s optimized for buying on Amazon, you know, you’re logged in those, those cookies are stuck there. We also find that the cookies, your cookie jars will get cleaned out, will disappear every time you do a major update on the app, or there’s a variety of different things that, you know, will log you out essentially of, of the Amazon app and the other experiences.
Doug: Okay. Got it. Then that makes sense. And yeah, I’ve experienced it. Like I said, myself, where I’m like, okay, I’ve, I’ve lost interest. I don’t care. I’m not going to figure out how to like find this product or whatever and get out of the app. And I just go back and keep scrolling.
Jesse: Exactly. And you’ve seen this, like someone sends you a Facebook link via SMS, right?
You click on that. If you go into the default browser for Facebook, you got to log in, whatever. Yeah. But if that SMS link took you into the Facebook. app where you’re already logged in. I’ll take you right to the specific, you know, joke, video, cat video, whatever it may be that you’re, you’re perusing at the moment.
Doug: Okay, cool. So that all makes sense. Any other details before we get in to like how to do this?
Jesse: So yeah, mobile, mobile deep linking is, um, There’s a lot of different variables and factors that go into it. Again, you know, the, the goal, 100 percent consistency in the world of mobile deep linking, um, is, is, is pretty hard because different things change, right?
We see a lot of behavior is from a social media app to, to Amazon and these social media apps. A lot of the time they want to keep you inside the app because then they can watch you as you’re browsing the web so they can build that profile so they can get better targeted ads to you. So sometimes you’ll notice like TikTok in particular this is ebbs and flows, but they won’t allow anything.
Out the won’t allow you to jump out of the tick tock app. They want you really want to watch what you’re doing inside of that. So whether you’re in your link tree or interacting with another website but sometimes they do because the conversion rates higher. And if they’ve got some deal with Amazon at the time being, they want to show that conversion rates higher.
You know, getting people to link out is important. So there’s, again, these different factors, these different variables that go into it. You know, Chrome didn’t update an iOS at the end of the last year that made the mobile deep link a little bit more complicated as well. So there’s, there’s different factors.
Again, consistency is, is important. And you try as hard as you can, but sometimes it does work. Sometimes it doesn’t. And there’s again, lots of different variables going on. So when I mentioned this as, as, you know, a feature that’s important, it’s a feature that works as much as it can. That’s important.
You know, that 100 percent it just, it’s we have yet to see us or our peers do it 100 percent of the time.
Doug: Okay. So I’m guessing Geniuslink somehow makes this a little bit easier. Oh, yeah,
Jesse: Oh, yeah, exactly. We do this.
Doug: Okay. So, yeah, tell us what people would expect if they were using Geniuslink and the experience.
Jesse: Yeah. So. Geniuslink, yeah, if you’re a user of Geniuslink, you, you know, you expect your links to work, right? So we do this localization thing, we do the auto affiliation thing, we’ve been doing that for years. The mobile deep linking is a relatively new piece of it. And the experience should be either going directly into the Amazon app, or possibly a little pop up that comes up and asks you if you want to open the app, or a landing page that says, you know, open app or open browser.
But some sort of prompt that will get you into the Amazon app. And again, those experiences will be slightly different. If you’re coming from social media, you typically have the little pop up. If you’re coming from a webpage that pops up a new window that, uh, target equals blank is for those that write actual HTML.
That will force a slightly different experience than if it’s just a regular link where the href doesn’t include that, that piece. So again, slightly different pieces there, but the goal is again, to maybe have one minor extra step, but ultimately end up inside of the app or that, that, you know, free.
That friction is significantly reduced but the goal is that we just do it all automatically for you. It’s kind of like most everything with genius link where we try hard to just make it as easy as possible for you and is, you know, the best possible conversion route for, for the shopper.
Doug: Okay.
Makes sense. And from The technical standpoint, it sounds like you guys are checking to see if it’s like a mobile device and then you’re like, what browser I, or what OS is it using, what browser, and then you try to figure out like, Hey, is the app on here or whatever is available to you? So is that kind of the logic?
Jesse: So with genius link for a long time, for those power users, you know, you can click that little advanced thing and you have control over exactly those things. You can make, you can write your own. Kind of link logical rules of, Hey, if it’s this OS go here. If it’s this, device go here, et cetera.
So we’re doing, again, that automatically for you and you’re, you’re absolutely right. The gist of what mobile deep linking does is that it, you know, pauses for a second, fire some JavaScript to fire a link. That’s not an HTTPS link and a normal web link. It’ll be, you know, there’s based off of the different operating systems.
There’s a different format but it’s like an intent URL. So com. amazon. url. whatever slash whatever. Well, we’ll force it in Android and on, you know, I at iOS, it’s, you know, slightly different and those will change over time, but don’t worry about that. Cause that’s what we worry about. But it’s, yeah, this different format that JavaScript will try to fire it.
If it, if it works, it works. If not, then we default and load it up. But the gist is, yeah, we’re trying to determine if the app is available and if so, we’ll send you there with the right tracking information. If not, we’ll give that user the best possible experience without the app.
Doug: The developer, developers out there are really.
Excited about you saying code on a podcast. It’s just one of the most fun things to listen to.
Jesse: We nerd out. Yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, it is, it’s a heavy code sort of thing. A lot of, you know, logic is, is involved here because of all the different nuances we talked about.
Doug: Okay. And you know, Geniuslink handles it.
So if someone. If a user clicks the link, then it routes them wherever they should go, depending on all the details you just talked about. Is there any setup for the creator that’s using Geniuslink?
Jesse: No, from our testing, we’ve seen that it just, it optimizes the link experience. So by default, it’s turned on for you.
For some reason, it’s not. What you want. And there are certain nuances where it’s not what you want. We’ve actually fixed those as well. Turns out certain digital products, Amazon doesn’t sell certain digital products from their app, because if they did, they’d have to pay a 30 percent fee to the app store.
So, you know, Kindle books or video on demand. So we will do that detection. So long story short, you’re back to your question. It’s all done for you. If you don’t like it, let us know. We can turn it off. But yeah, we’ve. Really tried hard to optimize it. And yeah, the goal is to help boost your, boost your earnings.
Doug: Right. And at the end of the day, it’s like the best user experience for the end user. Anyway. Exactly. Okay. And I think this question goes nowhere, but if someone wanted to do this on their own, they would have to code all the logic that you just described, right?
Jesse: Yeah. And it’s, so. Mobile deep linking at its face is actually fairly simple and stack overflow.
There’s a couple other resource. Amazon has a page on it. It’s, it’s pretty easy to do. And in fact, you know, for those that are interested in a link management platform like ours and have some coding chops, yeah, go check it out. Like the, the very basics of it are, are, are pretty good. The nuance comes again, you know, there, there are a growing set of nuances and it has gotten significantly complicated.
It’s significantly more complicated that kind of the further you go, yeah, we’re, we’re shooting for, you know, 99. 99 percent effectiveness. So therefore we have to handle all the different contingencies, but if you’re only doing it for your site and you know what your site’s behavior is, then yeah, I seriously encourage you to give it a shot and you’ll probably, you know, classic 80, 20 rule, you’ll probably get some pretty good lift from only 20 percent of the work.
Doug: Cool. Yeah, it could be a fun assignment if someone has like a coding background or something. But if you’re already using Geniuslink, then it’s much easier. Or, yeah, I mean,
Jesse: if you’re a YouTuber and your links are in the description, or if you’re, yeah, wherever it may be, you don’t have direct access to write code to influence the behavior.
So, the coding really only works because of that. Best when you’re influencing your own website.
Doug: Right. I didn’t even think about that. Yeah. So if you’re on YouTube, like you have to use genius link or some other solution, right?
Jesse: Or yeah, you send them to your own landing page on your website where you do it.
So yeah, it’s, there are a million different ways around, but yeah, we, we try to make it easy and cost effective of course.
Doug: All right, cool. Anything else with mobile deep linking before we talk about some of the recent changes with Amazon’s, I guess, operating agreement.
Jesse: Yeah. So, we talked a lot about Amazon’s ecosystem with mobile deep link, and that’s where I definitely have the most expertise but mobile deep linking is, is not specific to just Amazon, right?
We talked about that Facebook example real quick. There are lots of other retailers that have lots of different apps. The year is 2024 and we’re recording this and it’s been kind of surprising to see how many. How many retailers with apps don’t actually support a mobile attribution. You can get someone into the app, but your affiliate tracking may not work.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing some of our peers that are kind of just diving headlong into this kind of promising the world and realizing that it’s not actually technically possible because so and so brand doesn’t have the SDK necessary in the app to actually do the attribution, report it back to the affiliate network, et cetera.
So hopefully, you know, More and more apps will see this and, you know, see, see the value of doing it. The second piece of it is that Amazon, again, massive market share has a lot of app installs. The upside you see from this is directly proportional to the amount of people that have the app installed.
You know, if you’re promoting some fringe retailer, they may be amazing and they may have an app. But if only, you know, 0. 1 percent of the population has that app installed, you’re not going to see a lot of lift from doing the mobile deep linking with it. So there’s some definite pros and cons around where it’s at.
So yeah, it’s, it’s for Amazon in particular, we’ve seen some amazing results. We’re super excited about it. Continue to continue excited to continue to innovate and improve on it. But yeah, it’s it needs to be taken one step at a time from our opinion.
Doug: All right. Let’s hear about some of these recent changes from Amazon and their operating agreement.
So like I said, you told me about it, I didn’t even realize it. So I’ll let you share it.
Jesse: So pop quiz, right? Is it okay to put a link in an email?
Doug: Up until now. Uh, I would have said, no, it’s not okay.
Jesse: And you would have been right up until March 1st of 2024, you know, for a long, long, long time. Amazon had a part of their policy from the operating agreement explicitly said you can’t use links in offline manners and offline they defined as PDFs or QR codes or email.
Or attachments to email. And that was, that was a bit of a bummer, right? You know? And you would definitely see people that did it, you know, um, yeah, the, the, was it Tim Ferriss’s, uh, newsletter, I think was really guilty of that. But unfortunately we saw a number of clients. Lose their associates account because they put affiliate links in email.
So that was, that was a big bummer up until again. Yeah. Just about a month and a half ago where Amazon did a massive update to their operating agreement. And there was a handful of different things. Again, for those that are Amazon associates, I really, really encourage you to read the operating agreement.
Yeah. Give yourself a big reward afterwards, but it is. It tells you the rules of how to play the game. And if you have money on this game, you want to know what the rules are. So you don’t lose. But yeah, this, this recent change included allowing links in newsletters, as long as the recipients of the newsletters have opted in.
So don’t go spamming. This isn’t, Amazon is not telling you it’s okay to spam, but yeah, if they’ve opted into your newsletter, please start sending affiliate links because we’re seeing that, especially with, you know, Google’s shenanigans lately newsletters are a great source of, of traffic.
Doug: If I was emailing my aunt, could I put the link in that email?
Cause you mentioned newsletters specifically. My aunt didn’t opt in to a newsletter if I would just send her a one off newsletter, right? Do you know the answer to that?
Jesse: I would, I would sidestep that question and say, that’s probably not a scalable business model just emailing your aunt affiliate links.
Doug: It’s not, but a lot of people have aunts out there. So if I just hit all the aunts. that I know
Jesse: as long as they opt in, I’m going to stick with that, you know, just I it’s probably, uh, probably not an issue, but for the letter of the law, you know, having some sort of opt in is probably a good, a good way to keep everyone, everyone clean.
I think there’s a second part of this as well that we’re talking about a little bit before you hit record, I think is really interesting. And that part of this is not only email, but also DMS, right? Social media DMS were also not okay. Amazon wanted a public place for those affiliate links to be so that they could validate you were, you were staying above the line, but yeah social media DMS are now also allowed as of March 1st, 2024.
Doug: Okay. Interesting. And was this out of nowhere? Like, did you know this was coming in any capacity or anything?
Jesse: No comment on that.
Doug: Okay. So all my letters to Jeff paid off.
Jesse: Yes. Thank you for, we really appreciate your, your efforts. Yeah, I, I think this is a big change for, for how people play the associates game, because again, yeah, newsletters are pretty powerful and we’re seeing more and more value in recommending products, you know, kind of a push versus pull instead of writing blog posts.
Yeah. Write a great article about a product and get it out to your audience.
Doug: Yeah. And I mean, it does make me, you know, see where the industry has gone. And like we were talking about, Google has really, you know, somewhat killed affiliate marketing, blogging. Like people are not eager to start blogs like they were.
I think, you know, there’s going to be. I think there’s going to be like a bit of a change and then there’s going to be a resurgence and I don’t know, a couple of years.
Jesse: It all ebbs and flows. Yeah, for sure.
Doug: People get excited again and they’ll start blogs for fun and then people will start earning money because there’s less.
Competition and then more people are going to be like, I’m going to start blogs again. And right now it’s shifted back to, to newsletters, which for a long, I mean, people were like, build a list, build a list, but I mean, not that many people were doing it, but now there’s like a huge popularity in it. All that to say, I wonder if Amazon like saw that there were more eyes on newsletters than blogs or at least enough where they realized, Hey, we should maybe open this up a little bit.
So it’s kind of cool to see some maybe slow adaptation. Yeah.
Jesse: I mean, Amazon kind of has a little bit of a reputation of being pretty rigid, right? They, you know, not the first affiliate program, but I think they rolled out their program in 1996. And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s changed a bit over the years, but for the most part, it’s been a little bit rigid.
So I completely agree. It’s exciting to see that Amazon appears to be trying to maintain their, their market share in the affiliate space, which is pretty significant from my understanding,
Doug: any other changes in the operating agreement? I didn’t read it recently.
Jesse: Shame on you. Yeah, there was a couple and I’m not going to, um, there was, uh, specifically in regards to using their product advertising API, the main API for getting, uh, you can’t use that as learning data for AI which seems to make sense.
Yeah, they don’t want, they don’t want to be the training data for, for your AI which is unfortunate because there’s a lot of good data out of the Amazon advertising. Yeah. Product advertising, Amazon API. Pappy is what they call it.
Doug: Okay. Yeah. Rolls off the tongue. Great name. Okay. Many other things.
Cool. Well, that, that’s good to know about the, the email rules. So as Jesse mentioned, you got to make sure like people opted in, which is like the standard for email newsletters anyway. So exactly. Don’t be a spammer.
Jesse: No one likes a spammer. Yeah.
Doug: And yeah, I think that’s about it. I mean, I’ll, I’ll probably test it out and we were chatting, I think before we recorded, I have a couple, you know, occasionally I run across a product that I, I do like use and,
Jesse: Let’s throw this back real quick.
You have a great newsletter. Don’t, don’t downplay that newsletter.
Doug: So yeah. People, people read it. Thank you. Yeah. If you’re not signed up, you could, uh, follow the link in the description and sign up for it.
Jesse: Absolutely. But yeah, I think, yeah, you’ve got some great services you regularly link to. And that, and yeah, if there’s some products as well that fit, fit around that, yeah, it might be fun to see what your conversion rate is from email versus what you’ve seen traditionally from some of your websites.
Doug: Yeah, and like one thing I do with my email list, maybe not often enough these days, but I’m trying to do more of it is like throw in the random personal story and I used to be a little bit more engaged in doing that nowadays. I think a lot of times I’m like, I’m just like getting to the facts because a lot of people are like, I don’t want to hear your fucking stories, but I want to hear your stories.
People do want to hear the stories. Yeah. So, yeah, recently I put in, I don’t know if you saw this one yet, Jesse, but We saw the eclipse.
Jesse: And you you is it an Etsy storefront with Prints? Did I?
Doug: Yeah. So it’s, it’s actually a Redbubble storefront, but I have put a couple of my photos up and I have this great picture of the total eclipse.
Yeah. That was cool. Thank you. Yeah. Worked pretty hard on it. And yeah, so amazing. Did you see the total eclipse a couple of years ago?
Jesse: A couple of years. Yes. In 2017. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It was more than a couple of years ago. Now I missed this last one. It got, um, yeah, we didn’t see much in Seattle.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah. But really amazing.
Anyway, the point is I do try to throw in some more personal stuff in that, like, Certain products would fit in. There’s a, I’m like looking around the room, but like whatever, like certain microphones or headphones or like little things that I’m using around the office could be relevant to like a very small group of people.
But if it’s something where I’m like, I have like three of these, sure. Mike’s like, I really like them. Oh, they sound great. Yeah. And, and there’s a couple other products like the, the lighting or whatever in the studio and blah, blah, blah. So I may throw them in occasionally and, you know, not expect to earn a huge amount of money because they’re kind of obscure and they’re not necessarily products that people were interested in.
But anyway, thanks about the email list.
Jesse: Absolutely. Hopefully it earns you some beer money.
Doug: Yeah. So I think that that’s a good place to end it. We’re going to go get a beer now, Jesse. So where could people find you?
Jesse: They can find me yeah, again, love your newsletter. Love your audience. They’re welcome to email me directly J L for Jesse lakes, J L at genius G and I.
Dot us is my, my email. Yeah. Feel free to hit me up there directly there. I’m on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it at Jesse lakes or at genius link. And then LinkedIn is the other place that I, I spend, spend some time scrolling. So hit me up there as well.
Doug: All right, cool. We’ll link up all that stuff and do check out genius link.
It is a great tool. I’m a, I’m a paying paying user. You haven’t hooked me up with like a free, no, I’m just kidding. No, I don’t want, I don’t want it. I don’t want the free thing. I’ll pay for it. All right. Thanks a lot, Jesse. And like I said, we’ll link up to all this stuff for you.
Jesse: Awesome. Cheers.