💎 Growth Gems #58 - Creatives, ASO and Revenue Growth
Hi there,
This week I’m sharing gems on creatives post-ATT, Custom Product Pages and subscription revenue growth. These insights come from Lucas Serralta, Charles Boes, Martin Rusev, Felix Cogan and more.
🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
💎 You can frame optimizing subscriptions as leveraging the capital sins:
Desire (to access a product) by making people just irritated enough to trigger a purchase,
Greed by offering discounts for longer subs,
Gluttony by showcasing all the content that could be accessible (e.g. 72 million titles on Deezer),
Laziness by making subscribing easy (e.g. 1-click with Amazon),
Pride by giving users a status,
Anger by not frustrating users to optimize retention.
by Lucas Serralta (VP Design & Product Strategy at Deezer)
at 33:03 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
Creatives: onboarding funnel, paywall optimization
💎 Start by building a structured creative strategy and naming convention that supports ideation, production and optimization.
by Matthew Skurnick (Product Growth Lead at Bidalgo)
at 12:44 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
⛏️ Going Deeper: Matthew shared that a naming convention on the campaign level or even the ad level doesn’t help you at the creative level for AAA campaigns. You need to think through which team (Creative, UA, Product) needs which information to be successful. Examples below.
💎 Post-ATT on iOS, beware of misleading ads and clickbait more than ever because they can significantly mislead creative-based data models & misdirect production processes.
by Matthew Skurnick (Product Growth Lead at Bidalgo)
at 17:25 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
💎 Producing creatives for specific interests and audiences is what significantly improved results for Gigantic. Example: targeting Nintendo interest with Nintendo inventory, then gender, etc.
by Felix Cogan (VP of Marketing at Gigantic)
at 26:04 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
⛏️ Going Deeper: as you target more narrow audiences, watch out for a rise of CPMs (here is some data on CPMs - and advice to decrease them - shared recently by Andre from Admiral Media).
💎 Despite having only 9 campaigns available on iOS, sacrifice one for testing. Especially if you decide on an aggressive creative production.
by Felix Cogan (VP of Marketing at Gigantic)
at 29:35 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
💎 You need to help the ad networks’ algorithm, so match the creative to the audience you’re targeting. Example: Clawee changes the prizes shown in the ad based on the audience (e.g. disney prizes for disney people, nintendo prizes for disney people).
by Felix Cogan (VP of Marketing at Gigantic)
at 36:57 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
💎 Have the UA team isolate the creatives and elements that work for focused feedback sessions with the creative team. It can be based on spend, CTR, IPM, etc. This is better than just sharing a spreadsheet and will help them with ideation.
by Matthew Skurnick (Product Growth Lead at Bidalgo)
at 40:54 in Post-IDFA Survival Guide: Harnessing Creative-Level Data
ASO: Custom Product Pages
💎 We now have the ability to analyze and compare what different UIs, product sets, colors schemes work best from input all the way to adoption. CPP should not only be seen as an upfront conversion enhancement: you also need to consider how this contextual experience is carried through the life of the customer.
by David Flynn (Sr. Marketing Manager at Netspend)
at 11:03 in Session #2: Everything you need to know about CPPs
⛏️ Going Deeper: we can’t know which CPP users come from (yet?), so in the meantime it’s the first-time user experience that becomes the place where you need to triage your users: you need to retrieve the intent and motivation of users (e.g. through adding an activity that is flexible, segmented to eventually serve users the content that they want). This is in line with what Eric Seufert was already predicting last year in the excellent iOS 14, Privacy and the Future of Digital Advertising (Growth Gems #39): post-ATT, products need to segment users into buckets to optimize the experience.
💎 Identify your top funnels by mapping out your traffic sources to the app store (apps, websites). Group them contextually, and for each group, pinpoint the context that these users have. From there, create your hypotheses for your Custom Product Pages. Create only 5 CPP to begin with.
by Martin Rusev (Product Marketing Manager at Gameloft)
at 20:25 in Session #2: Everything you need to know about CPPs
⛏️ Going Deeper: If you’re on the web already, you should already have your web funnel/experiences mapped out. You can most likely apply them to Custom Product Pages.
Revenue Growth: balancing free content, users’ behaviors
💎 Making less content/articles available for free increased subscription volume at Le Monde and also improved retention. Users that have paid are more likely to use the app. However, there is a threshold where you might start losing too many free users as well.
by Lou Grasser (Marketing & Product Director at Le Monde)
at 04:52 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 Pushing users to a yearly subscription with a big discount is great for cashflow, but for “motivation” apps (e.g. nutrition) it can also lead to a high seasonality and low retention rates (e.g. lots of subscriptions in January but users leaving before August). Foodvisor wants to correlate usage and payment.
by Charles Boes (CEO at Foodvisor)
at 14:25 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 The moment when people have the highest purchase intent for a nutrition app is the very beginning. Foodvisor has 60-75% of users that purchase during onboarding.
by Charles Boes (CEO at Foodvisor)
at 15:55 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 You can keep a strong free offering on the core value of the app in order to leverage network effects, while looking for proxies indicating intent to purchase. Example: sharing through the Mojo app is never limited, but a Mojo user repurposing an instagram story into a post might reflect someone that has an e-shop or a small business so that feature is behind a paywall.
by Jean Patry (CEO at Mojo)
at 25:50 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 With mobile subscriptions we are between the machine world and the human world. We try to find logic in what we’re doing, but in reality there are many examples where counterintuitive things perform better.
by Lucas Serralta (VP Design & Product Strategy at Deezer)
at 25:50 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 People’s behavior during a subscription app onboarding is driven by both conscious and unconscious decisions. You need to ask yourself questions about the primary impulse driving users’ reactions.
by Lucas Serralta (VP Design & Product Strategy at Deezer)
at 32:38 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
💎 You can frame optimizing subscriptions as leveraging the capital sins:
Desire (to access a product) by making people just irritated enough to trigger a purchase,
Greed by offering discounts for longer subs,
Gluttony by showcasing all the content that could be accessible (e.g. 72 million titles on Deezer),
Laziness by making subscribing easy (e.g. 1-click with Amazon),
Pride by giving users a status,
Anger by not frustrating users to optimize retention.
by Lucas Serralta (VP Design & Product Strategy at Deezer)
at 33:03 in Roundtable Optimization (in French) at Purchasely’s Subscription League #1
And before I leave, a quote on why looking at the data you have for creatives on Android can also make sense for iOS:
“People are people, and if they react to a creative on Android then iOS is more likely to react as well.” - Felix Cogan (VP of Marketing at Gigantic)
See you next time. Stay savvy!
⛏️ Sylvain