Case Study: Driving Growth Through Personalized User Experience

Announcing more than 600,000 subscribers through the first half of 2019 with an 80% retention rate, The Athletic is mastering the personalized user experience for their customers.

THE CHALLENGE
Every day the talented writers at The Athletic post their vibrant stories across owned social channels, prompting eager fans to dive in and experience the sports coverage as only The Athletic delivers it. However, ensuring every user gets a personalized, friction-free experience from their first story to becoming a subscriber can be challenging.

THE SOLUTION

When a reader clicks on a story’s post, they are taken to a web page where they read the opening of the story, and are invited to click a link to continue reading in the app for free.

Kochava SmartLinks^™ provide the marketing team with a single link to place behind the call-to-action “INSTALL” button. When clicked, the link captures the dynamic ID of the article being read, intelligently detects the platform the user is on, and directs them to the correct app store to download the app.

As the user opens the app for the first time, Kochava attributes the install back to the article click and passes that context to the app. Known as deferred deep linking, this delivers a personalized experience by bringing the reader right back to the article they started with. Knowing the article that led to the install, the marketing team can further customize suggested content for the user and drive personalization at scale, giving their readers exactly what they are interested in.

IMPACT
Kochava SmartLinks^™ seamlessly routing readers to the appropriate app store boosted install conversions by 23%. The dynamic, deferred deep linking powered by Kochava resulted in lower bounce rates on first opens of the app and increased subscriptions by 19% overall.