RTLZWEI Partners With Branch To Optimize the Cross-channel User Experience in the Love Island App

About RTLZWEI

Surprising, unconventional, optimistic, up close and personal: That is what RTLZWEI is all about. The Munich-based TV station’s programming features television shows about life in all its many facets, making it the number one German-speaking reality channel. After bringing the Love Island franchise to Germany in 2017, RTLZWEI now has one of the world’s most successful dating show formats in its lineup: via the self-developed app, viewers are involved in the show on a daily basis through voting, exclusive news and videos, as well as interactive postings like polls and quizzes.

Challenge

During the broadcast period of Love Island, the TV show is accompanied by content on numerous digital channels such as Instagram, Facebook, the website RTLZWEI.de and YouTube. This makes it possible to take the different usage habits of the users into account. The challenge with this extensive 360-degree communication is providing users with a consistent point of contact where they can make sure they are up to date.

Therefore, the Love Island app plays a special role as a central content hub for the most important content about the TV show. With voting available in the app (through which the show can be directly influenced), exclusive insights into the lives of the “Islander”, and various interactive functions, the app has several unique selling points. But compared to their social media content and the website, RTLZWEI had a challenging time extending the in-app user base and user engagement over the various seasons due to difficulty of discovering the app within app stores.

Solution

With a goal of redirecting users from various touchpoints into the Love Island app, RTLZWEI started leveraging Branch’s mobile linking platform (MLP) across all channels. Branch deep links were implemented in push notifications, organic posts on Instagram, the YouTube Community Feed, paid search ads, and web-to-app Journeys banners displayed on mobile web pages.

Image showing the flow of traffic from paid channels like Google Ads and organic channels like Instagram, Facebook, SMS, or mobile web to the Love Island apps. When a user clicks on a Branch link on any of these channels, they are taken directly to love Island app content.

Branch Journeys

Upon clicking the Journeys banner the user is redirected via deep link to the news in the Love Island app

YouTube

Results

During the last season of Love Island show, broadcast in German-speaking countries in September 2021, more than 20% of all app installs and 52% of all app opens were sourced through Branch links used in organic and paid channels. Due to seamless cross-platform experiences, users acquired via Branch links turned out to be more likely to convert and return to the app than users installing the Love Island app directly.

Ultimately, the RTLZWEI team used Branch data as a source of truth for their cross-channel and cross-platform analytics. Going forward, the team plans to take the same approach for upcoming seasons of Love Island and other RTLZWEI shows where the app serves as an audience engagement tool.

“By using Branch, we were able to not only diversify and increase our traffic by using Branch Quick Links and Web-to-App-Banners to link directly to the desired content in the app, but also improve our user behavior analytics to increase installations, engagement and retention in the app. Meanwhile, more than half of the app sessions are generated via Branch Quick Links, which shows that our strategy of placing the Love Island app as a central content hub is working.”