Leveraging custom product pages (CPPs) for mobile growth in iOS

This post was written in collaboration with Userbase, a mobile growth marketing agency based in the US that specializes in venture-backed, early-to-mid-stage mobile startups across all app categories looking to scale their mobile user growth. Visit their website for more information.

It’s been about 1.5 years since Apple released Custom Product Pages (CPPs), but we still don’t see enough mobile growth marketing teams implementing this powerful capability.

Apple’s CPPs represent an immense opportunity in improving the relevance of the user journey, maximizing the alignment of traffic source or audience to the App Store experience. In terms of marketing efforts, CPPs’ power resides in enabling marketers to better contextualize and homogenize the user journey of the target audiences through more testing opportunities.

For user acquisition specifically, this feature bridges the gap between ad creative and app store page, allowing for a more consistent experience from start to end, thus resulting in lower CPAs as well as higher conversion rates and ROAS on paid media campaigns. A must-use feature, right?

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Before moving any further, it’s important to note that CPPs are not the same as Product Page Optimization, which is a different App Store product page testing feature. CPPs are not accessible to users when they search organically; CPP access is only through the unique URL or ID that can be embedded in specific marketing initiatives such as performance marketing campaigns. For this occasion, we’ll leave Product Page Optimization out of the scope.

6 steps to designing Custom Product Pages 

Follow the below steps to start your creative design process on CPPs in a strategic way.

Step 1: Identify different user personas based on different value propositions

The goal here is to internally review your app value propositions linked to your different user personas. Users discover the app through different channels and the jobs-to-be-done tend to vary.

Let’s think about the case of a running app.

Persona 1: Users who runs frequently with a high-performance athletic mindset

• They are the marathon-running type.
• Running and sports are a major aspect of their life.
• They care about advanced running metrics and data to support training.

Persona 2: Users who wants to begin running casually and needs basic support

• They are beginners who take running not too seriously.
• They want to have fun and get interesting insights about their running.
• They think running apps are mainly for distance and time tracking. 

In this case, you’ll create one CPP that highlights the advanced app features that high-performance runners care about, with tailored messaging and visual elements that are relevant to this user persona. Then implement the same approach on the casual runner persona.

Step 2: Predict where the people seeing your CPP are going to come from

In order to implement CPP strategy most effectively, identifying the sources of traffic that will be directed to the CPP is a vital initial step. Based on the type of audiences that engage with your particular sources of traffic, you can build a CPP that best resonates with them.

In the paid media scenario, the audience will expect similar value proposition elements in the app product page to what caught their attention from the ad in the first place.

Step 3: Pick specific app features, offerings or releases to showcase

The goal of specific app offerings spins around choosing the one or two offerings that might impact best on a particular audience. This is also useful when intending to split tests against the default set of screenshots.

In this case, you could create a CPP on a recent feature you might want to present to your audience.

💡 PRO TIP

Let’s take the example of a finance app that has three product offerings: mobile banking, investing and budgeting. Marketers for this app can ask themselves: “If my app did solely budget tracking, how would I design my screenshots and messaging?” They’d answer this question by building and showing a CPP for audiences that resonate with this particular offering, or certain keywords that specifically relate to it in the case of Apple Search Ads.

Step 4: Add seasonal elements to tap into heightened excitement

Leverage seasonal elements to build a cohesive campaign that backs up a special promotion.

For some apps, Thanksgiving is a very strong seasonality, or seasonal promotions around Christmas could make sense. Maybe you have a dating app that can leverage a Valentines Day CPP with special mid-February promotions or messaging. If it’s an education app we’re talking about, the back to school period of time can dictate specific CPPs that leverage this twice-a-year seasonality.

Step 5: Gather design elements to create multiple Custom Product Pages 

Having prepared user personas, messaging strategy, etc., you should put visual elements and images that you believe will impact your target audience most. Set the tone according to who will be seeing the CPP.

After assembling the CPP, step out of your marketer’s shoes and do a 5-second test with your team in order to simulate how the CPP will be seen by users. Receive feedback and go back to the design board to finalize any last important detail.

Step 6: Set your Custom Product Pages up

Once you’re done with the design of a particular CPP, set it up on App Store Connect. The good news is that developers do not need to submit a new app to upload their CPPs since set up is independent of app submission. This does not exempt CPPs from Apple’s review, so it’s important to take a couple days of review time into consideration on your CPP timeline.

A step-by-step guide:

1. Go to the Apps section on your App Store Connect
2. Select the app where you’ll be building the CPP
3. Go to the Features menu and look for Custom Product Pages towards the bottom
4. Create a Custom Product Page and add a reference name
5. Follow the process until the full CPP is uploaded and ready for submission.

Example: health & wellness app

Consider a health & wellness app that has two core offerings: meditation and yoga.

The app’s default product page showcases both offerings and illustrates its benefits as a whole. On its paid media efforts, it would be greatly beneficial to create a specific Custom Product Page for each of the two offerings. This way, the marketers will be able to facilitate a contextualized and homogenous user journey when people interested in meditation click on its meditation-specific ads (and vice versa). Each CPP will exclusively highlight the app’s value offering around either meditation OR yoga, laser focusing on each user profile and providing a more relevant app store experience for high-intent app users.

Utilizing each particular CPP on its meditation-specific and yoga-specific marketing efforts will most likely result in more installs, higher CPIs, and possibly higher in-app conversion rates.

Every time you create a CPP and roll it out, a new product page ID parameter is added to the default product page URL to auto-generate a unique URL. All you have to do is to copy and paste it wherever and whenever.

Remember that the unique URL remains consistent throughout all future versions of the page and that there is no way to change or reuse the URL for a different page. In case you need to pause a campaign, disable the URL to make a page unavailable to the public. If someone taps the disabled link, they will be redirected to your default product page.

Performance measurement for perfect optimization  

Performance measurement helps you assess where you currently are and create an action plan to reach your goal. Of course, this principle applies to CPPs as well; only by evaluating how each of your pages is doing can you understand whether using CPPs actually gets you more users.

The easiest option for tracking your CPP effectiveness is App Analytics in App Store Connect. Under the Acquisition tab, you can see page impressions, installs, reinstalls, and conversion rates, along with retention data and average proceeds per paying user. If users acquired from a custom page stick around your app longer and spend more than users from the default page, you can say that your CPP is well attracting high-profile users.

However, App Analytics cannot provide any deeper insights about your CPP performance. This is why we recommend integrating with a mobile measurement partner (MMP) like Airbridge for advanced tracking and analysis as well as efficient CPP link management.

There are innumerable paid, earned, and owned media channels where you can share the links to your CPP, and an MMP interacts with these channels independently to attribute app installs and monitor post-install events

How Airbridge can help you with CPP measurement

With Airbridge, an MMP that provides unparalleled measurement insights, you can perform a granular analysis of how users are acquired. This ultimately allows you to drive more qualified traffic and achieve a higher in-app conversion rate.

To elaborate, while App Analytics in App Store Connect only tracks the most basic metrics, Airbridge tells you exactly which search keyword users entered to be shown a particular CPP. This information would give a hint at the user’s intent and how you should modify the page content to be more relevant, boosting both your organic and paid marketing efforts.

Another benefit of using Airbridge in conjunction with your CPPs is one-stop link creation and management. First, go to App Store Connect and create as many CPPs as you need. Then, copy and paste the CPP links to Airbridge to conveniently generate trackable deep links and manage or modify them as an organized list.

The best part about Airbridge’s deep linking feature is that it provides seamless cross-platform redirections that boost conversions. For users who don’t have the app yet, our deep links smoothly connect users to the App Store through deferred deep linking. All of these contribute to driving better user journeys and delivering high and measurable results.

Moreover, you can brand and customize your links to enhance brand awareness and establish credibility. This means that you can utilize unique URLs for a specific campaign, adding the finishing touch of personalization that would bring you the most loyal users to your app.

Leverage the power of collaboration between MMP and CPP

CPP is in itself a powerful tool. However, when an MMP like Airbridge comes in, it becomes invincible because the collaboration of CPP and MMP enables you to measure not just on the creative level but even on the channel and campaign level. 

Track the impact on CPI, IPM, and other key metrics and measure the true value of your CPPs using an MMP. Provide awesome experiences to your potential users. This is how you will be able to drive a high conversion rate at low costs and win the iOS user acquisition battle. 

End-of-the-day takeaways

Taking a stab to experiment with Custom Product Pages enables you to narrow your focus by properly contextualizing the end-to-end user journey. Not embracing this very valuable tool results in opportunity losses in the form of untapped conversion rate lifts for your app and in competitors from your niche taking the CPP advantage to get ahead on their user journey relevance.

You should see CPP opportunities whenever any particular relevant source of traffic allows you to add a custom URL. That’s a chance for a CPP to boost performance, whatever performance means within that context.

Moreover, even though CPPs are not indexed in the App Store, they do have the possibility of improving ASO, organic rankings specifically, since they help increase install velocity and install conversion rates across the overall app listing.

In order to prevent this article from being dreadfully lengthy, we omitted a few pro tips and CPP implementation tactics. Don’t hesitate to ask us questions and we’ll be happy to chat about your iOS app growth. Get in touch!