Web-to-app funnels for mobile games

A web-to-app funnel adds a landing page between the ad and the app store listing. That extra step either improves what a UA team can measure or costs conversion for nothing, depending entirely on what happens on the page.

What the page is actually for

The simplest web-to-app funnels exist purely as a measurement layer. A user taps an ad and lands on a page the studio controls rather than the app store, and that page fires its own pixel events, which capture click IDs and campaign parameters along with device signals before redirecting to the store listing or, increasingly, straight to a web shop checkout. None of that reaches the ad platform once the user leaves for the store. So the page is the only place a studio can attach first-party tracking to that specific click before attribution falls back on probabilistic matching or platform-reported conversions.

More ambitious versions do real work on the page itself: a short explainer of the game's hook, a pre-registration form, a preview video, or, since app stores began allowing external purchase links, a direct route into a web shop rather than the app store at all. Web Shop Attribution Basics as Link-Outs Go Live in the EU covered the regulatory backdrop that made this possible. The discipline described here builds on that access.

Deferred deep links carry the weight

The mechanism that makes any of this useful is a deferred deep link. It remembers, when a new user without the app installed taps it, where they came from: the campaign and the creative, plus the click ID to attach once the app finishes installing and opens for the first time. Without a working one, the funnel adds a page and a redirect and nothing else, because the join between the web click and the app open breaks the moment the user leaves for the store.

Getting this right means the web page, the MMP's SDK inside the app and the app's own first-run logic all agree on a shared identifier, typically a combination of device signals and a short-lived click ID. They also have to route a user who already has the app installed straight in rather than through an install flow. Studios running this well test the full loop regularly rather than trusting it silently. Broken deferred links fail invisibly. Installs still happen; they simply arrive unattributed, or misattributed to whichever fallback source the MMP defaults to.

Why the conversion rate hit is often worth it

Every additional step between an ad and an app install costs some conversion rate. A user who would have tapped straight through to a store listing and installed on the spot now has to load a web page, wait for a redirect, and in some flows make a second decision.

Measured purely on installs per click, the funnel looks worse than a direct store link.

The trade a studio is making is signal richness for volume. A web page under first-party control can capture consented data the store listing never exposes, run its own tests on messaging before a user ever reaches the store, and, where the funnel routes to a web shop, capture a purchase together with its full value without the payment touching platform billing or its associated fee. For studios with meaningful purchase volume, that value capture alone often outweighs a modest conversion rate loss, particularly once someone has optimised the funnel past its first, roughest version.

Where platform rules intervene

Both major platforms have opened routes for developers to link out to external purchase flows, following regulatory pressure on both sides. The rules attached to those routes are specific: disclosure, the exact wording allowed on any button or link that leaves the app, and what a studio can and cannot claim about pricing differences. A funnel that routes to a web shop needs its own compliance review against current store guidelines before launch. Not a one-time check from whenever it first went live, since both platforms have adjusted these terms more than once since link-outs first became available.

The studios getting the most from this pattern treat the funnel as product infrastructure worth maintaining, with its own uptime monitoring and its own conversion tracking, rather than a one-off landing page built for a single campaign and left to decay.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• Web Shop Attribution Basics as Link-Outs Go Live in the EU
• External Purchase Links on iOS: What to Build First