Since the dawn of time (…2014) we’ve been bitching about the lack of customization on the App Store. ‘One ring to rule them all’ was a terrible idea and so-to ‘one page to rule all user journeys’ is a marketing flop. Less Orc-filled, but still a flop.
Unless you’ve been ignoring all of our/Apple’s/any mobile person’s content of late, you’ve heard that Custom Product Pages (CPPs) have come to fulfill our wildest dreams and let us customize those journeys. Perhaps you had a gander at our recent article on the release of CPPs for Apple Search Ads? If not, I’ll summarize for you: you should be using CPPs for Search Ads (ASA). Now.
“But how should I be using these CPPs in my Search Ads?” you may ask.
Perhaps you’re in the “Ah, this is child’s play. I’ll match my CPPs to my keywords and go on with my life” party.
Or maybe “CPPs are meaningless to me. I am an Organic beast and Paid is for turnips.”
Well, my co-mobile-growth compatriots, let me respond to each of these statements in my imagining of this conversation:
- Read on, I’m taking you through the journey of CPP creative success.
- Child’s play in theory, complex adult play in practice! Allow me the next 800 or so words to change your mind.
Turnip or no turnip, we can use learnings and these processes to our advantage on the organic side as well, so it is my humble-ish opinion that you should be using this as an opportunity (also – paid and organic are so intrinsically codependent that the one can never ignore the other!).
Design and Intent
The search terms a user types indicate intent. Your CPP goal is to fulfill that intent.
Many advertisers go super literal here – user searches “Free Slots” and we show a page with Free Slots in text, visuals, etc. Makes perfect sense – we are showing the user that we DEFINITELY HAVE what they’re looking for. And sometimes? That’s exactly the right approach.
But often that’s not actually the best way to fulfill the user’s intent. Maybe free slots was just the minimum requirement, and the user still needs to be enticed by the extra features (I mean…there’s definitely more than one app offering free slots…). You might also want to take into account user filtering. Continuing with our slots example, there are a fair amount of “Free Slots” questers you actually don’t want to spend money acquiring. The ones who don’t monetize and are just hopping from free coinage to free coinage aren’t worth your hard-earned UA dollars. Your CPP messaging can actually help you filter for that value.
And then there are brand campaigns – frustrating when less than 100% of your brand searches convert (YOU WERE SEARCHING FOR ME AND I’M RIGHT HERE!) Figuring out why these silly searchers aren’t converting requires a fair amount of hypothesizing and trial and error.
Custom Product Pages and Apple Search Ads – A guide
So how do you go about creating an ASA strategy for setting up CPPs?
Step 1 – Find your top Search terms. Group your terms by intent. Intent, not genre! For example, the name of another app could be either a competitor (intent: I want to download this other app) or a value (intent: I want to play a specific game type). Our aforementioned Slots app might see success in targeting match-3 users, in which case the term “Candy Crush” wouldn’t really be a competitor, but rather a value (match-3 gamer).
Step 2 – Create hypotheses for each intent group on what you think will best convert the right users. This is the same process you’d go through for standard creative optimization, just better since we get to isolate each audience!
Step 3 – Test your CPP hypotheses to find your top converter – this is the same creative testing you know and love, but now at scale (See how to test CPPs in Storemaven).
Step 4 – Implement your CPPs and measure the impact to unlock greater learnings. Did you group your terms correctly? Maybe there is a keyword underperforming because you mislabeled the intent. Are there further groups you can be making that should have their own custom messaging?
In Conclusion
The magic of ASA is we have full visibility into performance and measurement (thank you 1st party Apple data) so we can really cleanly measure the success of your newly released CPPs. And the magic of CPPs is we get a powerful look into the copy and creatives that work best for each given audience – which you can carry over to other areas of the funnel (looking at you, organic and 3rd party ad channels).
So optimize those funnels, my dear friends, optimize and fulfill the nearly decade-old dream of the mobile growth-ers who came before you. Tell your children how you embarked into the new world of custom funnels. And of course, speak to your favorite Maven if you’d like some help doing it like a boss.
