iOS 15 – Custom Product Pages Guide

What are Apple's Custom Product Pages for iOS 15, how do they impact your ASO/UA strategies, & what actions should you take to prepare? Kickstart your iOS 15 understanding with this guide.
iOS 15 Custom Product Pages Guide | Storemaven

In their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), held on June 7th, Apple revealed two iOS 15 new features arriving in the fall of 2021 with the rollout of their new operating system – iOS 15.

The first feature was discussed in our guide for Product Page Optimization for iOS 15. This guide will introduce the second feature – Custom Product Pages (CPP). We’ll discuss what it means, what the main challenges are for mobile practitioners, and where it falls in your mobile marketing strategies.

Apple launched Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization on December 8th, 2021.

All the official details about iOS 15’s Custom Product Pages 

Apple’s new iOS 15 Custom Product Pages are product pages in the App Store in which you can personalize your app preview videos, screenshots, and promotional text, based on segmented audiences.

Below are a list of the features for iOS 15 Custom Product Pages:

  1. You can create up to 35 CPPs for every app published on the App Store at any given time.

Apple now allows you to create up to 35 custom product pages, each with different creatives based on your target audience (in custom product pages you won’t be able to create a custom icon). 

These 35 custom product pages are accessible through a unique Apple App Store URL that you can use to drive specific audiences to.

iOS 15 Custom Product Pages examples
Apple’s Custom Product Pages visualization. Source: Apple

For example, you’re running a certain paid UA campaign with ad creatives highlighting a specific feature of your app/game. You can drive that traffic to an App Store custom product page with custom messaging around the feature which fits the state of mind these campaign driven-users are coming with, since they’ve been exposed to that ad creative. 

iOS 15's Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization are Officially Launched. What Should You Do Now? - 1

The same goes for any other source of traffic such as influencer campaigns, website traffic and more. 

Let’s drill down more in this new feature: 

  1. You can customize your Custom Product Page screenshots, promotional text, and app preview for any of your page’s localizations 

For each CPP, you can customize the above assets for any localization you have. This will mean that users landing on your Custom Product Page (when they tap on its unique URL or view a Storekit Rendered ad on an ad network) will view the localized Custom Product Page variant with the custom assets you created. 

  1. Once you’ve created a CPP you can use its unique URL 

You will receive a unique URL that you can use everywhere you use links, to drive traffic to your landing page. That could be email marketing, cross-promotion, your mobile website, and paid UA campaigns that have a configurable URL destination. 

iOS 15's Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization are Officially Launched. What Should You Do Now? - 2
Source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/custom-product-pages/

  1. Ad Networks will support Custom Product Pages through Store-kit rendered ads 

This is pretty huge. Many ad networks don’t support configurable URL destinations in their paid campaigns setup, as they use a Storekit rendered product page (an overlay of a product page that appears within the app that presented the ad instead of sending the user to the full App Store app). 

This announcement means that you’ll be able to use Custom Product Pages in every ad network by specifying a unique CPP identifier in the campaign setup. 

iOS 15's Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization are Officially Launched. What Should You Do Now? - 3
Source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/custom-product-pages/

  1. Early next year, Apple Search Ads will support Custom Product Pages so you can use them to create tailored ad variants 

As expected, Search Ads will also support CPPs, which will allow you to create variants of your product pages that are the most appealing for different keyword groups. Envision a CPP for your competitor-keyword group, or a certain genre keyword group (match-3, vs. home decoration) that showcases the most relevant messaging and creatives for that audience. 

Truly groundbreaking. 

iOS 15's Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization are Officially Launched. What Should You Do Now? - 4
Source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/custom-product-pages/

  1. Custom Product Page Measurement through new data in App Store Connect

Relevant data for Custom Product Page performance will be surfaced through App Store Connect, such as product page views, first-time downloads, redownloads, retention and average proceedings per paying user. This is going to be crucial to understand the conversion rates of each product page and the performance of the funnel you’re using it for as a whole, including the value that users from that funnel generate in the form of retention and sales. 

 iOS 15's Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization are Officially Launched. What Should You Do Now? - 5
Source: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/custom-product-pages/

Now that we’ve learned more about what Custom Product Pages are, let’s see what this means for ASO.

How do App Store Custom Product Pages affect ASO and UA?

As mentioned, with custom store pages you can create up to 35 unique App Store product pages, each with its own app store preview video, screenshots, and promotional text. 

Custom Messaging Per Audience

The main usage of this feature would be to create an App Store product page that conveys the optimal messaging for a specific audience. The way users will get to these custom store pages would be by directly driving traffic there via a custom and unique App Store URL. 

This will allow you to use this URL with different paid UA campaigns and match the messaging that is conveyed through the ad creatives in that campaign to the messaging on the custom store page. 

Other use cases might be to utilize a custom store page for an influencer campaign, mobile website traffic, or even cross-promotion in other apps/games you own. 

From more than six years of collecting data on users’ behavior in the app store, we saw how big of a difference alternative messaging for different audiences can make. Users from different channels, demographics, gender, interests, all have different preferences and you can significantly influence the install conversion rates of every segment by showing the right messaging for them. Campaigns that target broad audiences vs. narrow and targeted audiences can also be improved by using different messaging for each campaign. 

Finally, you have a way to deploy these different messaging to different audiences through Custom Product Pages. This could significantly boost your paid UA conversion rates and ROAS when done right. 

What are the challenges of iOS 15’s Custom Product Pages?

As it seems from current Apple documentation and messages, you will not be able to run a test on custom store pages. 

While this new powerful tool would allow you to deploy the right messaging to the right audience (mostly paid), it doesn’t provide you with a methodology or a solution to decide which creatives would maximize conversion rates for each audience.

How can you know which custom store pages would convert the most of each segment? Gender? Age? Interests? Channel? Ad creative?

Trying to test ideas on the App Store with iOS 15 Product Page Optimization won’t yield great insights as the traffic reaching that test would only, or mostly, include organic traffic. 

In order to realize the benefits of custom store pages, you would have to answer these questions. It becomes even more important when you understand that a custom store page has not only the potential to improve conversion rates for a specific audience but also to hurt them (as opposed to the alternative of that audience landing on the default App Store Page).

iOS 15 App Image Customization: A new era of ASO 

For years, after only one product page per localization, and no ability to “treat” differently paid and organic traffic, the situation has changed. 

With iOS 15, every ASO team will have the tools to test messaging for organic traffic, and personalize the custom product page for up to 35 audiences.

New iOS 15 capability: testing 35 custom product pages.

The teams that’ll be able to leverage these new tools will, scientifically, enjoy much higher growth rates. Before, all your traffic landed on one App Store product page, and within that traffic existed many segments that were not enticed by your App Store product page messaging, they dropped and never installed. 

By creating the right messaging for organic traffic, and up to 35 paid UA segments, a significant percentage of the traffic that dropped and never installed will be converted and you’ll be able to drive high growth rates (both organic and paid). 

It’s not going to be easy and you’ll have to overcome the two main challenges: 

  1. A decision-making protocol for organic traffic testing on the App Store 
  2. A decision making and testing solution for custom store pages 

The teams that won’t be able to fully leverage these new tools, either because managing all these storefronts and testing is so huge, or because they won’t overcome the challenges we outlined above, will struggle to experience rapid growth over their competitors. They may even experience drops in install rates having made the wrong decisions. 

ASO teams might even get a bigger spotlight shined on them with new questions such as:

  • “Why don’t we have custom store pages for Tiktok traffic?” 
  • “Why didn’t the winner from our last organic traffic test on our default page translate to higher conversion rates?”
  • “Why do we still have a mismatch between ad creatives to product page creatives when you have all of these custom store pages to use?” 
  • “Why are the custom store page for Snapchat converting less than our default product page?”
  • “What’s our data-driven methodology for all our 35 custom store pages to make sure they’re the right ones for each custom audience?” 

With many new native App Store features for ASO the standard will be higher, and there won’t be a reason to avoid using these tools for ASO as they’ll be readily available to all. 

The Storemaven Solution: New Platform to Manage Your iOS 15 Custom Product Pages 

The Storemaven team have been preparing for these changes, and we’ve created a platform for Custom Product Page testing, which allows all ASO and UA teams an easy way to manage creative optimization for iOS on top of the new App Store ASO features. Request a demo with Storemaven to learn more.

We’ll enable you to make the best decisions when testing for organic traffic on your default Product Page, as well as make decisions around the right Custom Product Pages for every paid UA segment. 

As we learned in the past six years, A/B testing is a tactical tool. It is part of a strategic solution for creative optimization in the app store. Using technology alone won’t really help you achieve your install growth goals without employing the right decision-making methodologies. 

With iOS 15 and beyond, we will continue our journey to democratize mobile growth and ASO expertise by providing our guidance and App Store Creative Optimization and test management services in this new era.

About Ron Gordon
Ron is Storemaven's Head of Marketing, the one person you would have guessed will know what this mobile growth talk is all about. A misguided law student and journalist, Ron brings to the table some lack of seriousness the Hitech realm is desperately in need of. In his spare time, he's mainly trolling Whatsapp groups.

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