Branch Metrics lets businesses generate deep links they can use to track conversions and user engagement on web and mobile transactions. It provides a business analytics dashboard to surface user behavior data.

Amazon QuickSight is the AWS business intelligence tool for creating dashboards and visualizations. Users are charged per session only for the time when they access dashboards or reports. QuickSight supports a variety of data sources, such as individual databases (Amazon Aurora, MariaDB, and Microsoft SQL Server), data warehouses (Amazon Redshift and Snowflake), and SaaS sources (Adobe Analytics, GitHub, and Salesforce), along with several common standard file formats.

Branch exposes data for things like install, open, clicks, and web session start through webhooks to user-defined HTTP POST callbacks. You can add a webhook through the Branch dashboard.

Branch exchanges data in JSON format. Here’s an example of the data returned for a clicks endpoint:

POST
User-agent: Branch Metrics API
Content-Type: application/json
{
    click_id: a unique identifier,
    event: 'click',
    event_timestamp: 'link click timestamp',
    os: 'iOS' | 'Android',
    os_version: 'the OS version',
    metadata: {
        ip: 'click IP',
        userAgent: 'click UA',
        browser: 'browser',
        browser_version: 'browser version',
        brand: 'phone brand',
        model: 'phone model',
        os: 'browser OS',
        os_version: 'OS version'
    },
    query: { any query parameters appended to the link },
    link_data: { link data dictionary - see below }
}

// link data dictionary example
{
    branch_id: 'unique identifier for unique link',
    date_ms: 'link creation date with millisecond',
    date_sec: 'link creation date with second',
    date: 'link creation date',
    domain: 'domain label',
    data: {
        +url: the Branch link,
        ... other deep link data
    },
    campaign: 'campaign label',
    feature: 'feature label',
    channel: 'channel label'
    tags: [tags array],
    stage: 'stage label',
}

If you don’t already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you’ll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you’ll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Branch's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. This means you’ll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

You must replicate data from your SaaS applications to a data warehouse (such as Redshift) before you can report on it using QuickSight. Once you specify a data source you want to connect to, you must specify a host name and port, database name, and username and password to get access to the data. You then choose the schema you want to work with, and a table within that schema. You can add additional tables by specifying them as new datasets from the main QuickSight page.

QuickSights provides both a visual report builder and the ability to use SQL to select, join, and sort data. QuickSight lets you combine visualizations into dashboards that you can share with others, and automatically generate and send reports via email.

Once you’ve set up the webhooks you want and have begun collecting data, you can relax – as long as everything continues to work correctly. You’ll have to keep an eye out for any changes to Branch’s webhooks implementation.