Facebook Starts Using App Links To Get You Back Into Apps

App Links, Facebook’s initiative to make it easier for developers to link to specific content within an app, is about to become a lot more useful for developers who rely on Facebook to direct users to their apps. In a blog post, Facebook announced that developers will now be able to utilize App Links to send people straight from ads in the Facebook mobile app to specific points within their apps. There’s a catch though: for now, they’ll only be able to deploy these ads if they’re working with one of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developers.

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote in his summary of this year’s F8 developer conference, it’s pretty clear that Facebook launched App Links as a way to sell more re-engagement ads. Developers have already found that Facebook’s mobile app install ads can drive a massive number of installs — 350 million as of April — so the company is looking to take advantage of their newfound mindshare to become a major source of user engagement as well.

While many dislike targeted advertisements, the advantage for users in this case is that ads will now be able to point to something specific that you might be interested in rather than sending you to an app that you then have to search through to find something appealing.