A sumptuous breakfast of smashed avocado on toast, mountains of crispy golden hash browns and all the coffee and orange juice you could drink preceded Redbox and AppTweak ASO breakfast presentation at the Hoxton Hotel Holborn last Friday, March 25th.
Under discussion was how to adapt your app creatives and strategy for iOS15, we brought together a panel to share their thoughts and real life learnings on the subject.
Our Panelists
Hannah Parvaz is Head of Marketing at Uptime, launched in January 2021, Uptime offers its users the big ideas from the world's greatest minds, all packed into 5-minute Knowledge Hacks.
Presenting the world's best information on self-help, Uptime has already earned recognition by being named amongst Google’s Best Apps of 2021 and FastCompany’s Best Apps of 2021 as well as also being an Apple’s Editor’s Choice.
Jane Welsh is Global Marketing & Audience Lead at Supersolid, an award-winning independent game developer based in central London, creating engaging, genre-leading games for mobile and tablet devices.
With over 90 million downloads, Supersolid’s games range from infinite runners to resource management and arcade PVP.
They are currently working on a broad variety of titles in production and have partnered with Universal Music (Shania Twain's album launch, 2017), Paramount Pictures (Clueless, 2018) and World Animal Protection (World Oceans Day 2018).
Simon Thillay is Head of ASO at AppTweak, the leading ASO tool driven by data science. AppTweak empowers +1,500 mobile leaders - such as Amazon, Jam City, Yelp and Adobe - to grow their apps and games with actionable insights in a simple interface.
AppTweak’s all-in-one platform offers ASO Intelligence, Ad Intelligence, App Intelligence and Market Intelligence. Launched in 2014, AppTweak serves customers from all corners of the world, with offices in Brussels, San Francisco, Tokyo and Bengaluru.
Custom Product Pages:
Primarily, the focus of the discussion was on Custom Product Pages (CPP) and creatives A/B testing for the Apple App Store.
With the recent introduction of iOS15, marketers, UA, and ASO managers have the opportunity to improve the performance of key metrics and ASO via contextualised user journeys. This is made possible by Apple’s new custom product pages, marketers and product managers can now:
Create up to 35 different versions of an App Store product page with different promotional text, icons, clips, screenshots, and app previews to better showcase particular features or content within an app.
Target different customer segments with specific in-store visual assets and copy to increase conversion rates.
Jane felt that CPP was an exceptionally useful new tool, with new game launches imminent, it is now possible to create locally relevant pages aimed at specific audiences. You can really target potential users despite their many and varied interests, with CPP you can target everyone. There’s a lot of room to test the effect of different keywords and content to see what works best.
Hannah echoed these sentiments, commenting that there were so many ways to customise CPP but mentioned that Uptime weren’t live with any CPP’s as yet although it was imminent, and they were expecting great results.
Creative Sets:
Reflecting on Apple Search Ads Creative Sets (which can now be considered as less agile predecessors to CPPs), Hannah shared her experience had shown patience was important, as some changes may have led to an initial traffic drop before outperforming default creatives.
Simon also shared that Creative Sets had been utilised in the past for A/B testing, though results tended to be relevant to only certain users, but the feature had overall made the case for segmenting in ASA and beyond.
A/B Testing:
Reflecting further at A/B testing options for iOS, Simon shared that Product Page Optimisation (PPO) has been disappointing until now due to a complex submission & test management system, as well as lack of details and statistical reliability in results made available in Apple's console. As a consequence, his recommendation was to test creative concepts using Google Play first and adapt positive results to better match the App Store's user interface.
Segment Your Audience:
Where segmenting your audience to create CPP’s, Hannah was keen to suggest that looking at existing data and talking to your audience was vital.
It’s important to know just how your product is being used, understanding user behaviour is vital. Supersolid is all about new games and so talking to people, understanding their motivators and their behaviour as gamers is essential so collect as much data as you possibly can.
The Value of App Store Data:
Simon was keen to point out the value of App Store data, for example, ratings and keyword results. Consult your ratings regularly, listen to what people are telling you and take a long hard look at your keywords. Monitor these results on a regular basis as 2 words can achieve vastly opposed results.
CPP is the answer to contextual advertising and good creatives are essential in targeting broader audiences. Within the gaming world, compelling creatives are vital, it’s critical to be showing potential users the very best imagery. As Simon pointed out, a good creative strategy is a great opportunity to be better than your competitors. But, don’t run everything at once, talk to your team and see what works best.
In Summary:
With App Store CPPs, app marketers and product managers can create up to 35 different versions of an App Store product page. These multiple pages can offer different promotional text, icons, clips, screenshots and app previews, all spotlighting specific features or content within an app.
You can increase conversion rates by targeting different customer segments with specific in-store visual assets and copy and redirect users from anywhere to the right product page.
The bottom line is that marketers and product managers can now create and measure full contextualized journeys for iOS 15 users – from an ad, through the correct custom product page in the App Store, to the right in-app content.