UA marketing set for shakeup on iOS 15 with launch of custom product pages

Among the series of updates to come as iOS 15 rolls out later this year, there are two that represent a change for user acquisition (UA) marketing — product page optimization (PPO) and custom product pages. As explained by Apple, marketers and developers will be able to create more relevant, custom pages on the App Store that can be tailored to specific target audiences and linked to individual campaigns. This represents an increased opportunity to reach targeted audiences with a more personalized approach, and gives marketers new tools to develop their paid UA strategy on iOS.

PPO is a new feature for iOS 15, where you’ll be able to test your product page creatives on the App Store with three different treatments (variations). Once you’ve created your treatments, you can then allocate traffic amongst them by sending, for example, 90% of your traffic to the control page and 10% to the test treatment pages. Once testing is complete, you can set the top-performing treatment as the control page, and continue testing new treatments over the next 90 day period.

Once tests are live, you can use App Analytics in App Store Connect to view impressions, conversion rates, and improvements. Remember to limit the number of elements you test at any one given time to enable you to link specific changes to results. If you change both the screenshot and the app preview in one treatment, it will be difficult to determine what has impacted the results you see.

UA marketers have traditionally struggled to link specific messages to specific audiences when driving them to their App Store pages. With the iOS 15 update and custom product pages, however, you’ll be able to make unique pages and tailor individual messaging for up to 35 audiences — a strategy that could give conversion rates a huge boost.

These App Store pages can highlight and showcase specific features of your app, which you can leverage to target user segments that are more likely to respond to specific creatives or features. These pages can feature promotional texts, screenshots and app previews that are different from those that appear on the default, organic product page. Through the creation of unique URLs for each page, you can direct specific audiences to the page you determine to be most relevant to them. For example, a sporting app might promote to a specific audience by highlighting a certain team, or a gaming app could preview a specific in-app sequence.

You’ll be able to create new pages continuously, keeping a total of 35 live at a time, and can monitor their performance in App Analytics at impression, download and conversion rate level. Apple has also stated that it will be possible to measure retention data and average revenue generated per user for each custom product page, enabling you to track its performance over time.

Adjust fully supports this functionality, and clients can can redirect users from different ads to different types of App Store pages while tracking, measuring, and attributing the traffic to each of these product pages using Adjust tracker URLs.

What this might look like:

• Creating different pages based on user locations: A food delivery app operating in various locations, for example, might want to show a user from a specific city or country a product page.
• Highlighting different features: A health and fitness app could benefit from highlighting individual programs or courses they offer depending on the demographic of the user being targeted.
• Push different in-app options: Gaming apps that offer different story modes or character options could promote to different users based on personas. For games that offer character choices for example, different game assets could be pushed to spotlight different gameplay options.

These updates open up options for UA marketers, but the question on which data Apple will provide developers with and in which format is open. Apple has stated that the success of each custom product page can be monitored in App Analytics and that retention data and average revenue can be measured for each product page, but it isn’t clear what data they will provide, as it could be aggregated data. The implication that cohort data and performance can be tracked is helpful for marketers, but is not in line with what the privacy threshold has represented or enforced so far.

Either way, custom product pages are an exciting development for marketers and developers publishing apps in the App Store, and we’re happy to support the functionality for our clients. We’ll be staying at the forefront of developments to keep you up to date and to provide you with tips and best practices for success.

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