Branch (Branch Metrics)

Branch, built by the company Branch Metrics, is a mobile linking and measurement platform. Its core job is deep linking: making a single link open the exact right place inside a mobile app, and handling the awkward case where the app is not yet installed. Tap a normal web link and, if the app is missing, you land on a website or a blank app home screen; tap a Branch link and the platform can send you to the app store, wait for the install, and then drop you onto the specific product, article, or offer you meant to reach. The second half of Branch is attribution — recording which ad, email, referral, or channel produced each install and in-app action, so marketers can see what their spend actually bought. Branch was founded in 2014 and is used across app-driven businesses in retail, media, and beyond.

Branch matters because mobile links are surprisingly broken. The web and native apps were not designed to hand users smoothly between them, so without a tool like Branch, a campaign that sends people to an app often loses them at the door — wrong screen, lost context, abandoned install. Branch fixes that handoff and, in doing so, closes a measurement gap: because its links carry data through the install, it can attribute a new user back to the campaign that earned them, even across the break between clicking an ad and opening the app for the first time. That makes it a mobile measurement partner as well as a linking tool. Retailers, marketplaces, and content apps use it to power referral programs, paid-acquisition tracking, email deep links, and shareable content that survives the jump from web to app.

The word branch carries two unrelated meanings in technology, and it is worth separating them cleanly. This page is about Branch, the company Branch Metrics and its mobile deep linking and attribution product — a marketing and measurement platform. The other, far older meaning is a Git branch: in version control, a branch is a parallel line of development, a movable pointer that lets a programmer work on a feature or a fix in isolation without disturbing the main codebase, then merge the changes back later. A Git branch lives inside a code repository on services like Bitbucket or GitHub; Branch the platform lives inside marketing and mobile-growth stacks. They share a name and nothing else — one routes and measures app users, the other organizes source code, and a team should be clear which it means.

Within its own category, Branch is best understood against neighboring tools. Mobile measurement partners such as AppsFlyer and Adjust also attribute app installs, and Branch competes and overlaps with them, but its heritage and reputation are strongest in deep linking — the routing of users to precise in-app destinations across the web-to-app gap. That is the capability marketers most associate with the name. If you are comparing options, the question is less about whether a tool can count installs and more about how gracefully it carries a user, and their context, from a tapped link into the right screen of an app that may or may not already be on the phone. Branch built its identity on solving that specific, stubborn problem, and layered attribution on top of it rather than the other way around.

Using Branch well means treating deep linking and attribution as one system, not two afterthoughts. Instrument your links so that every important path — a shared product, a referral invite, an email offer, a paid ad — routes to the exact in-app destination and survives the install if the app is absent. Pass the context through, so a user who taps an ad for a specific item lands on that item, not a generic home screen. On the measurement side, define your channels and events clearly, so the attribution data tells you which campaigns produce installs and, more importantly, downstream actions like purchases. And respect the current privacy landscape: with device identifiers restricted on iOS and Android, deterministic attribution has narrowed, so configure Branch alongside privacy-safe measurement rather than assuming old-style tracking still works everywhere it once did.

The traps are real. Teams add Branch links but never pass context, so users still land on the app's front door and the smoothness is lost. Others treat attribution numbers as absolute truth, ignoring that platform privacy rules — Apple's App Tracking Transparency, Google's Privacy Sandbox — have made device-level tracking partial and consent-dependent, so some installs cannot be attributed the old way. A few confuse Branch the marketing platform with a code branch and wire it into the wrong conversation entirely. And some rely on a single mobile measurement partner without sanity-checking its numbers against store analytics or incrementality tests. Used well, Branch removes friction from mobile journeys and shows which channels earn users; used carelessly, it becomes another dashboard nobody trusts and links that go nowhere in particular.

Branch, launched in 2014 by Branch Metrics, takes its name from the everyday sense of a branch as a path that splits off — here, a link that routes a user to a specific in-app destination.

Etymology: source.

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