Customer story · Retail · E-commerce
Northwind tripled promo-link conversion and proved out paid social ROI.
How Northwind moved off IP-only attribution and used deferred deep links to triple promo-link conversion.
- Promo-link install conversion
- 3.2×
- Attributed installs from paid social
- +48%
- Time spent reconciling reports
- −72%
The challenge
Northwind ran weekly drops with influencer partners, but the team couldn't tell which campaign drove which install. Their existing stack matched on IP alone, deep links pointed to the home screen, and the marketing team was rebuilding the same spreadsheet every Monday morning.
The approach
01One smart link per drop
Each campaign got a single Link Trail URL with platform-specific store URLs, a deep link path into the product detail screen, and a promo-code payload — shareable across Instagram, TikTok, and email.
02Deferred deep linking on first open
New users installed from the App Store, opened the app, and landed directly on the product page with the promo code pre-applied — no homepage detour.
03Linear attribution for influencers
Northwind switched to a linear model for influencer-tagged links so credit was split fairly across creators who touched the same user — and exported the breakdown straight to BigQuery.
The results
Within a quarter, Northwind tripled conversion on promo links and saw a 48% lift in attributed installs from paid social. The marketing ops team retired three weekly spreadsheets and rebuilt the weekly performance review on top of the Link Trail dashboard.
We were paying for attribution before. Link Trail is the first product where we stopped second-guessing the numbers in the deck.
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