In our most recent episode of AdBites, we invited creative consultant Miray Karaduman to discuss the core reasons why brands should be embracing the opportunity of custom product pages in Apple Search Ads. Here she outlines her thoughts about custom product pages as a way to deliver consistent messages across your paid traffic source (your advert) and your App Store landing page and how the new Redbox innovation, Astra Experiments can put your strategy on a path towards better conversion rates.
Why develop and test alternative creatives at all?
To maximise your potential audience reach, we recommend removing audience targeting parameters in Apple Search Ads, and instead focus on a strategy that combines keywords and ad variations via custom product pages to appeal to specific target audiences. But to thoroughly sweat this opportunity, app brands should be proving their targeting and communication hypotheses by testing creative to ensure that what their audience sees is aligned with their expectations.
Testing can be a detailed and time consuming process, which is why we’ve created Astra Experiments: an automated way to manage your creative testing via our Apple Search Ads platform.
What are the benefits of testing?
The ultimate benefits are an improved conversion rate and reduced acquisition costs. Test your custom product pages with these goals in your sights; optimise your creative communication towards your audience, offers, product features or seasonality and you’ll optimise towards performance too.
How do Astra Experiments make testing easier?
When it comes to Apple Search Ads, running two campaigns with near-identical settings simultaneously can often lead to less-than-ideal outcomes. Why? Because you end up competing against yourself for a share of ad impressions, which impacts the keyword auction.
Redbox Mobile's Astra Experiments offer a ground breaking solution to this A/B testing challenge. Instead of running parallel campaigns, Astra Experiments run sequentially, ensuring you avoid competing with yourself and simultaneously optimising the performance of your ad campaigns.
Astra Experiments allows you to test all Apple Search Ads ad placements. If your custom product pages are approved on App Store Connect, you can test the Today tab and search result ads with ad variations using custom product pages. Astra’s dashboard helps you easily compare your Control and Experiment results side-by-side and for even faster analysis, we’ve included ChatGPT to summarise the results.
How to easily run Astra Experiments
- Configure Your Control Campaign: Choose your ad format, custom product page set (if required), keywords, region, timeframe, and budget - it’s as easy as setting up a standard Apple Search Ads campaign.
- Define Your Experiment campaign: Specify the differences between your Control and Experiment campaigns, such as adjustments to keywords, bid amounts, ad copy, or any other variables you might wish to test the performance of.
- Set your Experiment dates: Once live, Astra takes care of the deployment, budgeting and switch-over between Control and Experiment phases, and will end the Experiment as scheduled.
- Compare results: Test insights are easily established via Astra’s side-by-side reporting and ChatGPT analysis button. All graphs and data available for export if needed.
Why is this a game changer?
Astra Experiments is a game-changer for Apple Search Ads managers who want the best of both worlds: optimised campaign testing without the manual work.
Importantly, Astra creates a level playing field for your Control and Experiment campaigns, ensuring that the external factors that influence App Store bidding and search are muted. This guarantees your Experiments are statistically comparable with your Control campaigns. This level of control is not something that can be easily manually achieved time and again.
Want to get started? Here are the five key steps for approaching your creative testing strategy:
- Analysis and Audit: critique of current creatives, competitor analysis, alignment with target audience groups and performant keywords.
- Strategy build: determine what hypothesis you’re testing (target audience, offers or messages; determine the creative variations you need to test and set your benchmarking for the KPIs that determine success.
- Production: Campaign set up, design brief finalisation, production of custom product page creatives.
- Set the parameters: determine the moment, duration and budget for your test phases; agree the KPIs that will prove success or not.
- Results analysis: compare engagement metrics of your test versus your control (or default) custom product pages. Use the insights to influence subsequent creative or message adjustments, or selection of keywords.
Questions for us?
If this gets a little technical for you, or you’d like us to manage your Apple Search Ads campaigns and test their variations, our team of expert consultants is just a call away. Get in touch.