Case Study: The Athletic achieves 19% subscription growth and 23% higher install conversions with Kochava SmartLinks

Driving Growth Through Personalized User Experience

The Athletic, a subscription-driven sports publisher with more than 600,000 subscribers and an 80% retention rate, needed to trace activity back to a single user and deliver personalized, friction-free experiences from social posts to in-app content. To solve this, The Athletic partnered with Kochava and implemented Kochava SmartLinks to capture the dynamic article ID, detect platform, and route readers to the correct app store while retaining article context.

Kochava’s deferred deep linking attributed installs back to the originating article click and passed that context into the app so The Athletic could resume the reader’s journey and personalize content recommendations. Kochava’s SmartLinks boosted install conversions by 23%, reduced bounce rates on first app opens, and helped drive a 19% increase in subscriptions.

The Athletic