Ride Apple’s new custom product pages and boost your return on experience
During WWDC 2021, Apple’s developer conference, the company revealed two intriguing features that will change how we marketers acquire users and increase lifetime value (LTV) by driving them through the most contextualized journey they’ve ever experienced.
- Product page optimization: The first feature, called “product page optimization,” is an A/B testing tool that will allow you to experiment with your app’s product page and run 90-day tests to find out which product page version performs the best in organic scenarios. With this feature, you’ll be able to create and test variants with your app’s icon style, screenshots, app previews, and copy.
- Custom product pages: The second feature teed up by Apple is a contextualization mechanism that will allow you to create up to 35 different versions of your App Store product page to target different customer segments with specific in-store content to increase conversion rate. You will be able to customize each product page by changing promotional texts, screenshots, and app previews.
I’d like to focus here on the custom product pages feature and invite you to imagine a world of contextualized, personalized, and audience-driven user acquisition journeys.
Why is contextualized customer experience so important?
I like to think about marketers as taxi drivers.
Picture this for a moment: Our job is to drive people from their current location to their desired destination. In other words, we drive traffic from anywhere (an ad, email, social post, SMS, etc.) to the right spot, whether it’s in the App Store or in the app. As taxi drivers, if we bring passengers to the wrong destination or to the right one via detours, they’d be peeved, may not pay, will rate you poorly, and won’t patronize you again.
Now we can all agree that if we drive users through a journey in which all touchpoints are aligned in terms of messaging, copy, and look and feel, and in which the user arrives where they wanted to go, they will be more likely to convert.
It’s all about return on experience
So good journeys lead to good conversion. But does excellent customer experience really drive better business outcomes? Let’s look at the numbers and at a concept called Return on Experience, or ROX, to find out.
ROX is a measurement framework that provides an accurate gauge to assess the success of your campaigns, especially as they impact business performance and KPIs.
The TL;DR on ROX is that better journeys and experiences – ones that are contextualized – deliver high and measurable results in conversions, LTV, ARPU, and more.
Custom product pages meet AppsFlyer’s customer experience suite
So how can you create and drive better journeys and boost your ROX with Apple’s new feature?
We have a simple way for you to conjure contextual experience magic by combining custom product pages with AppsFlyer’s customer experience suite, OneLink.
Our CX suite is powered by a robust deep linking engine that allows marketers to redirect users to a specific spot in the app regardless of their device, operating system, or whether the app is installed or not. And here is where it gets interesting.
For years AppsFlyer has been leveraging OneLink, its deep linking engine, to empower marketers to create user acquisition and remarketing journeys to achieve up to five times higher conversion rates compared to non-contextualized experiences.
Contextualization today
Let’s say you’re driving users to your sports apparel app through a web-to-app journey. You create an ad for your new running shoe and drive users to your website so they can learn about this specific product. As we all know, people are more likely to make a purchase on the app than on the website, so you will display a banner on your web page encouraging them to download your app.
Banners like this one, powered by OneLink and called Smart Banners, will redirect the user to the right app store, and once they download your app and launch it they will arrive directly in the app’s running shoe product page to make the purchase.
Remember that taxi driver analogy? You got your fare and are ready for the next ride!
Future contextualization
Now let’s spice things up. The only non-contextualized touchpoint in the example above is the App Store’s product page.
Now, you see where I’m going, right?
Thanks to Apple’s new custom product pages, you now have a compelling opportunity to add context to your App Store presence as well. In fact, you’d be missing out if you wouldn’t take advantage of this new feature. In the case of your running shoe promotion and journey, you can create a product page variant showcasing running people and shoe images.
This same journey can be achieved with all of AppsFlyer’s x-to-app experiences, such as email-to-app, app-to-app, ad-to-app, text-to-app, social-to-app, referral-to-app, and offline-to-app.
In other words, you can provide a contextual journey from your various channels – whether owned or paid media – to the right product page in the App Store and from there to the right content in your app.
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No measurement, no return on experience
As a marketer/taxi driver, you know that providing awesome experiences is a must.
At the same time, you need to be able to measure “awesome” as well as the incremental return you’re getting for your investments in providing better experiences.
And that’s where ROX and AppsFlyer come in, specifically by allowing you to measure the success of each custom product page and to monitor impressions, downloads, conversion rate, and in-app events.
What makes Apple’s custom product pages so powerful is the ability to test variants. Combining the product pages with accurate measurement of events, both pre-install and post-install, enables marketers to measure metrics such as retention data and average revenue per user (ARPU) for each page and optimize performance over time.
When will this feature be available?
Our teams are now working hard to add custom product page support to our product, and we will be launching this feature later this year when Apple makes it available.
Stay tuned for more updates on this fantastic opportunity.
