💎 Growth Gems #73 - Product, Paid UA and Creatives

Sylvain Gauchet

Aug 23, 2022

Hey,

This week I’m sharing gems on:

These insights come from Akseli Virtanen, Samuel Hulick, Yohann Kunders and Jakub Chour.

Enjoy!

🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK

Creatives: creative modularity

Decreasing the cost of production while scaling creative testing?

Sounds pretty good, but it’s easier said than done.

I featured some insights from Akseli Virtanen (UA lead at Traplight Games) in Growth Gems #56, where he mentioned creative modularity.

At the last MAU Vegas, he presented in more details how they approach Modularity in UA Creative Production.

💎 Perfection is a waste of time. A modular approach to creatives is a compromise and aims to cut down on production time and cost. It allows for rapid content testing and to keep up with trend changes. Use the short videos below to create longer videos:

Beginning blocks
Content blocks
End card blocks

Akseli Virtanen (UA lead at Traplight Games)
at 01:15

💎 When doing modular creative production, compiling blocks to create ads can be done by anyone (e.g. student, freelancers, fiverr) and allows your team to focus on higher-value efforts.

Akseli Virtanen (UA lead at Traplight Games)
at 05:54

💎 Make sure you have a consistent naming convention, for each block AND for the video (with the order of the blocks). Example: 1080x1080_84_3_34_176_E5, where each number is a block. If you use standard block durations, you even simplify video analytics because you know around which timing is each block in the video.

Akseli Virtanen (UA lead at Traplight Games)
at 06:20

Product: healthy growth

This podcast episode goes beyond just product: there is a lot of strategy and multiple disciplines involved…but it seems to be the best category to put it in.

It’s been in the mining queue for a while.

I don’t know why I wasn’t getting to it ⛏️

I should have known that having worked on onboarding for a decade gives you insightful perspectives.

Anyway, here are insights on The 3 Pillars of Healthy Growth by Samuel Hulick (UX & Strategy Consultant) and Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths).

You’ll probably see more gems from these 2 in the future!

💎 Healthy growth is growth without the hacks. You’re not trying to come up with engagement hacks, trying to get people addicted, creating habit loops without delivering on value proposition, etc.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 0:50

💎 The 3 pillars of healthy growth:

Path design
Performance valuation
Super outcomes

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 06:04

💎 Path design starts with thinking about why users are finding your product relevant, and the process they’re bringing your product into. This leads you to design for the whole path, the whole process that makes your product relevant.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 06:44

💎 Once you have designed the path or are analyzing it, you conduct performance evaluation:

Measure how many people are making it from one stage/step to the next (and where they drop off)
Assign a dollar value to the whole process

Combining these two things allows you to make very accurate guesses about how the path is performing and how you expect it to perform in the future (including when you make changes).

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 08:25

💎 “Super outcomes” is when you get users to the milestone(s) that they’re seeking. You need to look at a bigger context: the outcomes take place outside of your product and bring your product inside someone’s life.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 10:05

💎 You want to work with the resulting points: the outcomes. When you’re designing the path:

You’re working backwards from the outcomes to figure out how you can make them happen more reliably
You’re working forward from the starting points, defined by conditions that users have at the moment

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 17:32

💎 Before thinking about things in terms of screens or experience, look at it like a process with a number of actions that lead to an outcome and desired change. Given the user’s current state, how do you create a sequence of smaller outcomes that compound together so you can get the user to the end outcome?

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 21:35

⛏️ Going Deeper:

2 things that Samuel shared when thinking about this process:

Have a general idea of what the user’ current state is, so your system can “guess“ what the user's desired state is and form a path to it.
Be very specific about the smaller changes that need to happen throughout the process

💎 If you’re organizing the path to contain changes that don’t progress the user towards the resulting state, then those changes are just deadweight for the path’s benefit.

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 25:40

💎 Look at all your past weekly cohorts and track what the drop-off rates look like from month 1 to month 16 (as an example of payback period). This allows you to draw patterns for the most recent cohorts, and figure out if the changes you make today impact the revenue you expect to get in the future.

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 35:43

⛏️ Going Deeper: this is fairly standard in the app industry, but still a good reminder. AppsFlyer recently published a guide on cohort analysis if you’re not that familiar.

💎 Stop thinking about your product as an object so you can think about the outcome better. It’s not about personas and personas’ goals: it’s about you making one outcome happen more reliably, then catering to the set of situations across personas that care about that outcome.

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 1:00:25

💎 You want to have a general idea of what people are looking for when they show up. It’s the process of desired triangulation, where you try to get a sense of what a person is trying to do by:

Paying attention to ambient information
Asking some strategically placed questions

Then you need to provide them with the preferable path to the outcome that they have. If you provide that path, they will be loyal. If you don’t, they will churn.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 1:02:35

💎 If you combine the idea of super outcomes, the idea of identifying what brings people to your product, and how you can choose to design a path to better fulfill those desires then you can also identify which of those desires are worth more from a value standpoint by using performance valuation.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 1:03:53

💎 Instead of blending everybody together, identify who are the people becoming really successful with your product: the commonalities that they have, the desires/intents that bring them to you. Own the heck out of the whole path forward that connects from where these people are when they arrive, to where you’ve figured out where they’re trying to get to.

Samuel Hulick (User Onboarding Champion at UserOnBoard)
at 1:06:35

💎 Think about creating systems that make growth a natural occurrence of pursuing a path rather than having to manufacture a path and stress over aspects of the path in order to make growth happen.

Yohann Kunders (Co-founder at Value Paths)
at 1:08:40

Paid Acquisition: UA tips

Another one from MAU.

Jakub Chour (Head of Growth at HER) shared his Lessons and Failures from Scaling Advertising Budget 10x.

I’m a fan of Jakub’s content on pricing and monetization so it’s one of the first talks I mined.

Gems below! The last 2 are not technically about acquisition but bring good UA unlocks.

💎 Spend Now. There will never be a better time for spending than now: it’s clear when you look at the normalized graph of CPA (for registrations) between 2019 and 2022. It will never get better.

Jakub Chour (Head of Growth at HER)
at 02:22

💎 Diversify. As growth marketers, we need to be prepared to diversify and add more people in our teams that handle scaling of the traffic.

Jakub Chour (Head of Growth at HER)
at 04:10

💎 Embrace organic. SEO is still scalable if you do it right, and it might work better than influencers, partners, referrals or ASO.

Jakub Chour (Head of Growth at HER)
at 06:14

⛏️ Going Deeper: SEO is very often disregarded when you work in mobile. But Google is still where most people search! Check out this post: How HeadSpace Gets a Million Visitors from this Zen SEO Strategy.

Jakub advised to make a web version of your app because it will make Google think you matter and you will get more links.

If creating a web version of your app is not possible, consider publishing your content on your website (including if it’s UGC). HER doesn’t have a lot of content but they have a community and they export the most successful stories (anonymized). This helps the long-tail searches.

Similarly, Blinkist/Uptime/Headway all created web pages for their in-app content (see examples here, here and here). Audible has been doing the same too (and even runs ads to it). What’s important is to have a clear hierarchy for all this content (cf. Headspace link above).

💎 When/where you show your paywall, segmenting users and having tiers are more important than how your paywall looks and its content. Leverage purchase prediction.

Jakub Chour (Head of Growth at HER)
at 12:00

⛏️ Going Deeper: If you want more info on this, check out the insights from Jake Mor’s presentation in Growth Gems #65 🥇💎👇