Manually Creating Marketing Links

Objective

In this exercise, we'll learn how to manually create marketing links. This is useful when you need to create bulk links or have external resources create links for you.

Pre-requisites

In this exercise, it will be useful to open some sort of text editor (like notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac).

For this exercise, it is assumed that you have enabled acquisition in Adobe Mobile Services and linked iOS and Android apps. To learn more about Marketing Links, complete the lab exercise on creating an acquisition link in Adobe Mobile Services.

Implementation steps

Getting Started

We are going to be working with the following url:

http://c00.adobe.com/v3/c76645a7-7fb6-4c54-847c-b1a7dbedcc29/start?a_g_id=com.omniture.beardcoms&a_i_id=835196493&a_dd=i&ctxmy.custom.key=test

1. Copy and paste it into your text editor.
2. Now paste it into a new tab your browser. It should direct you to the Bea[rd]cons Apple Store page.

Under the Covers

So what's going on behind the scenes here? The following diagram illustrates the components of the link you copied:

Mobile Services Identifier

1. The Mobile Services Identifier can be found in the Mobile Services UI. Login to Mobile Services and select your app from the dropdown in the top-right corner.

   

2. Now click Manage App Settings in the left pane and scroll down to the SDK Acquisition Options. If you've already enabled Acquisition, you may click the More Details link.

   

3. In the resulting menu you will be provided with a Manual URL Path. Let's copy that value. In your text editor, let's delete everything before /start? and paste the copied path in that spot.

4. Copy and paste the link into your browser to make sure it still works. Now, you have told the link to report acquisition data to your app's report suite.

App Identifiers

1. Scroll up to the App Store Apps section of the settings. You should already have an iOS and an Android app present.

   

2. Next to the Android app is a blue link. Click this link and the app should open up in a new tab. You want to copy all the text after id= in the resulting url.

   

3. In your text editor, replace the text between a_g_id= and the &a_i_id= with the copied value.

4. Back in the browser, next to the iOS app is another blue link. Click it and the app should appear in an iTunes preview window. The id is in the url prefixed by id. Copy the id (not the text id).

   

5. In your text editor, replace the text between the &a_i_id= and the &a_dd=i with the copied value.

6. Copy and paste the link into your browser to make sure it still works. It should now be linking with your app instead of the Bea[rd]cons app.

Default Store

Your app is currently linking to the iOS store by default. It is often useful to have Android be the default.

1. In your text editor, change the a_dd=i to a_dd=g.

2. Copy and paste the link into your browser. It should now pull up the GooglePlay store by default.

Append Data

You can add additional parameters to your url to add data to your tracking links. In the example link, we have ctxmy.custom.key=test. This will send the value of test for my.custom.key to analytics for Acquisitions with this link.

Here is a list of parameters available out of the box:

ctxa.referrer.campaign.name
ctxa.referrer.campaign.trackingcode
ctxa.referrer.campaign.source
ctxa.referrer.campaign.medium
ctxa.referrer.campaign.content
ctxa.referrer.campaign.term

1. Let's use on of these. Add the following to the end of your link in the text editor: ctxa.referrer.campaign.term=hiking+boots

2. Copy and paste the url into the browser. Now, your link will record the term as hiking boots.

More Info

For more information and details on creating manual acquisition links, check out the Acquisition Documentation.