What is The Smart Banner?

When a user clicks on a link to a Pugpig App, we do our best to make sure they end up in the right place. If the user has the native app installed, they should go directly into the app. If they do not, we provide banners at the top of the pages to direct them to the iTunes or Google Play Store if they are on a mobile device. This is achieved using our "Smart Banner".

Note that this assumes you are sharing to the vanity domain you've supplied to Pugpig. If you are sharing links directly to your website and wish for this to open in the apps, please see this document.

The Smart Banner has logic that takes the users to the correct place when they follow a deep link to an app page. It can do the following:

It can show the native iOS and Android smart banners if they user doesn’t have the app installed and we want to promote the apps
It can automatically redirect you into the Bolt Web or Publish Web app if you don’t want to show the native SmartBanner
It can show a custom header or footer to the pages if you want to show users the content but top/tail it with adverts/upsell
It can redirect to the web site using the canonical URL if we would rather the landed there than see the page in isolation

Server Side/Distribution Redirects

Why turn on Strong Security?

Stops people getting content they shouldn’t if they know what they’re doing
Kills sharing
Strong Security - this will cause a 403 Forbidden error if you don’t have access
You can choose to redirect this to any page (like the Join Us page) on a 403

Native Smart Banners on iOS and Android

These allow the operating system to show a link to Get or Open the native app in the correct place.

Pugpig Apps

The distribution service will automatically add the correct link, for example:

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=34534534245, app-argument=https://app.vanity.com/2021/07/07/my-story/content.html">

Pugpig Site

The Pugpig Site plugin will add the correct ones, but only for pages or posts that have a timeline/edition tag (which means they’ve been in the app before). All other pages will deep link to the Home Page of the app. For example, we can’t try to deep link to a page that has never been in the app.

Smartbanner Your Site

If you want to include this on your site, you can simply include the meta tag, using the domain of the app. If you want to have deep links, you’ll need to know the path to the content in the Pugpig CMS

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=34534534245, app-argument=https://app.vanity.com/">