For the winter term of 2017, I was an intern on the Growth team at Yelp. As part of the Acquisition portion of the team, I was helping to develop features that could help drive app installs, with most of my work focusing around utilities that allowed users to send deeplinks for pages directly to their phone.

The links were sent via SMS to the user’s phone and when clicked, would check if the user had the Yelp app installed, and if so, it would deeplink them directly into the app. Otherwise, they would be redirected to the app store for their device, and after installing and opening the app, would be immediately taken to the page they had requested. This send to phone feature is used hundreds of thousands of times per month, directly driving thousands of app installs per month.

These send to phone widgets were implemented in many places, such as in the mapbox, as a call to action under a check-in offer on a business page, the collections page, and would open after a user bookmark’s a business. To optimize usage of these widgets, they underwent rigorous A/B testing, with different copy, positioning, and styling.