A Step-by-Step Guide to Custom Product Pages (CPPs)
by Simon Thillay
Head of ASO at AppTweak
— 12 min read
Since Apple launched custom product pages (CPPs) in 2021, they’ve become a game-changer for customized audience targeting. This feature has rightly gained a lot of attention.
In this comprehensive guide to custom product pages, we will cover what CPPs are. We’ll further discuss how to use CPPs to boost your app’s visibility and provide some key questions to consider for getting the most out of these custom pages.
What are custom product pages?
With Custom Product Pages, marketers can create different versions of their App Store product page to target specific user groups. This means you can showcase different features, content, or special offers than what’s on your main page.
These pages have their own unique URLs, so they’re not found through regular App Store searches. Instead, you can link them in your email campaigns, social media ads, and other marketing efforts, giving users a more personalized and seamless experience.
Marketers can:
- Create up to 35 customized variants of their default product page per language
- Change their promotional text, screenshots, and/or app preview video with each variant
CPPs allow app marketers to customize their app preview videos, screenshots, and/or promotional text on the App Store. Source: developer.apple.com
Since Apple stopped using its Creative Sets feature in early 2022, app developers can leverage custom product pages to make various ad versions in Apple Search Ads. This means when you use these custom pages with Apple Search Ads, you can create ads to target different types of users and keyword queries.
Why should you use custom product pages?
Creating a custom product page helps make sure what users see in your ads matches what they see in your store. This can lead to better user experience and more app downloads.
- Custom Product Pages allow you to create different versions of your App Store product page tailored to specific user segments and campaigns. For example, a health & fitness app that wants to promote a workout challenge for their female audience on Facebook can send that traffic to a custom product page that shows images with female athletes. This personalization can make the user journey more relevant and engaging.
- By linking CPPs to specific marketing campaigns you ensure that users land on a page that directly reflects the ad they clicked on. This consistency between the ad content and the landing page improves the overall user experience and can significantly boost conversion rates.
- CPPs provide valuable analytics for each custom page, allowing you to track and compare the performance of different pages. This data helps you understand which messages and creatives resonate best with your audience, enabling you to optimize your marketing strategies.
Expert Tip
Always optimize your app’s default page for ASO, even when exploring CPPs. The challenge lies in balancing a default page that appeals to everyone and creating custom product pages for specific groups without missing out on potential conversions. Optimizing both your default page and CPPs is key to tackling this challenge.Impact of Custom Product Pages on Apple Search Ads?
Custom Product Pages are also a great tool to optimize your Apple Search Ads campaigns. By creating different product pages for different keyword groups you can better match the App Store Product page with the user intent.
Data from ASO Trends & Benchmarks report shows that custom product pages can make a big difference:
- Games saw an 8% increase in conversion rates
- Apps experienced 6.6% increase in conversion rates
Learn how to leverage custom product pages for Apple Search Ads
What makes an efficient custom product page?
Custom product pages are designed to segment your audience, so their success depends on – traffic quality and the experience users have on your app page.
- In the current “privacy era” of marketing, great app visuals are often seen as the key to attracting users. However, their real effectiveness comes from aligning well with the visitors to your page. Even the most well-designed CPPe won’t perform well if the users visiting it aren’t interested in what you’re offering.
- It’s important to understand that not just any creatives will succeed on a custom product page. Testing different creatives tailored for CPPs is an important part of finding what works best.
- When creating assets for custom product pages, ensure your visuals align with your audience. The connection between your traffic and creatives is crucial, more so than their individual quality.
When should you use custom product pages?
With CPPs, Apple provides developers with many opportunities to target specific user personas on different channels with unique messaging. Developers can thus implement custom product pages for the following use cases:
1. Optimize app page with campaign messaging
Custom product pages (CPPs) are crucial for promoting features, new content, and special offers. They help align app pages with advertising messages, boosting user engagement and conversions.
Let’s take a look at the following examples to understand this better:
- Highlight features: Bumble can use CPPs to showcase Bumble Bizz benefits specifically for users interested in business networking.
- Content preferences: ESPN can create separate CPPs for football, baseball, and basketball fans, directing relevant users to tailored content.
- Deals & promotions: Deezer can feature a “3-month free” offer on a CPP linked from partner electronics stores.
- Traffic source impact: Dragon City can make a CPP featuring an influencer, matching the promotional channel’s look and message.
- Demographic targeting: Fitness apps can use CPPs to display gender-specific screenshots, catering to different user segments.
2. A/B test different store assets
You can also use custom product pages as an alternative to product page optimization (Apple’s A/B testing feature).
You could create two or more custom product pages for the same campaign and test which page converts better. This is an interesting use case for developers A/B testing on the App Store, despite the challenges of Apple’s new PPO feature.
3. Get detailed insights on reporting & attribution
The Analytics section of App Store Connect allows developers to measure impressions, downloads, conversion rate, as well as proceeds and retention per custom product page. In particular, these metrics aggregated in App Store Connect will not be subject to the same type of user consent required by the App Tracking Transparency framework.
Although Apple asks for user permission to gather data, this is separate from the ATT consent prompt that apps show before they share data with others like ad networks. This means App Store Connect might have more data if users agree more to Apple’s data collection than to being tracked by apps.
Custom product pages are ASO assets
While CPPs are only accessible via a unique URL and are not indexed in the App Store, it’s important to note that CPPs could still impact ASO.
That’s because custom product pages help to boost the download velocity and conversion rates of apps and games that implement them well. This, in turn, can lead to higher organic rankings in the App Store, since Apple may use these factors to decide which apps show up first in search results.
Use ASO data to group your users when planning CPPs
Using ASO data helps find important user groups for your custom product pages. ASO makes apps more visible and appealing in the app stores; but the data it provides, like search behavior and user reviews, is also key for spotting areas where your app can grow.
- Search data to identify different user groups: With search data, looking at how frequently users search for certain keywords and how many people see your app can show you different user interests. For example, a racing game can see which type of racing (like car or bike racing) or game mode (like multiplayer or offline) is more popular. By also looking at which apps come up first for certain searches and what kind of creatives they use, marketers can figure out what most users are looking for. High-ranking apps and games usually have a better match with what users want, so their success can offer clues on what users like.
- User reviews: User reviews can help you understand what users really like or dislike about your app. You can then use these insights to divide users into groups. AppTweak uses machine learning to analyze these reviews on the App Store, focusing on either the good or the bad reviews for an app and/or their competitors to find specific topics. For instance, they found that Netflix users were upset about losing access to shows like The Vampire Diaries. This insight could help other streaming apps attract users by highlighting this show.
How to measure the impact of CPPs?
When companies begin creating CPPs, there’s often a debate about which team should take the lead. This is useful because it considers the different ways CPPs can be used, but it also raises concerns about consistency in design.
For example, Netflix’s marketing team might want a custom product page for a UI update, while the content team wants to showcase new shows.
However, differing goals can lead to varied designs and risk facing compliance issues. Apple, for instance, might reject pages that focus too heavily on one aspect, like a TV show, if it doesn’t fully represent the app.
Expert Tip
At AppTweak, we recommend including someone with ASO expertise in the design process. Ideally, an ASO team would oversee all custom product pages, but in practice it can be simpler to have the ASO team be merely consulted rather than responsible.When designing custom product pages, an ASO team should focus on two main things:
- Make a clear hypothesis on why the newly designed page will boost conversions. It’s important to track the success of the design, so it can be used as a reference for future projects and possibly in other markets.
- Ensure that the creatives and text follow the rules of the App Store, and is compliant with the store’s UI. For example, when creating visuals for your CPPs, remember that not all creatives or text will be immediately seen by everyone. Only the first few portrait screenshots or the first landscape screenshot is shown, without scrolling. So evaluate whether the CPP should still require the creation of more assets than these.
Understand how well a custom page is doing
- Start by setting a clear goal for what you want the page to achieve. This goal helps you decide which numbers (like amount of user sessions, weekly active users, or a specific conversion event) will show if the custom product page is successful.
- Next, you need a starting point, or “baseline,” for these numbers before you make any changes to the CPP. This involves setting up the page without adding new creatives or copy at first. This way, you’re sure that the starting numbers are calculated on only the relevant traffic segment.
- Once the CPP has been live for at least a week (to avoid being misled by weekly ups and downs), you can add your new metadata and/or assets in the store console. After this, measure the uplift before and after the changes, or against what you expected to happen, to see if the custom product page made a difference.
Expert Tip
ASO experts can share tips about design trends in the App Store. For instance, are illustrations or lifestyle pictures better for showing how your app is used? They can also help improve conceptual research by leveraging various data points.
Takeaways
Tailored to target different groups of people by creating different product pages, CPPs are revolutionary in the app marketing world on iOS.
- Custom product pages are the first customizable store landing pages on the App Store. These pages allow developers to showcase different promotional text, screenshots, and/or app preview videos than on their default product page to maximize the performance of specific referrer traffic segments.
- These pages are invaluable when running ads from multiple paid UA channels or other efforts, such as social media contests, influencer campaigns, or email marketing. Messaging can match many different sources by driving traffic directly via a unique App Store URL.
- CPPs can significantly impact ASO by improving download velocity and conversion rates.
- Leveraging ASO data is vital for identifying key user groups for CPPs. Insights gained from search behavior and user reviews help pinpoint growth opportunities and guide the creation of highly tailored CPPs.
- Success with CPPs hinges on the quality of traffic and user experience on the page. Effective visuals that resonate with the audience are key, but alignment between the audience’s interests and the page’s content is critical.
- When developing assets for CPPs, consider how well your visuals connect with the expected visitors. The synergy between your traffic and creatives is vital for success.
- Setting up custom product pages does not require a new app submission but is still subject to Apple’s creatives’ review.
Ready to unlock your app’s full potential with iOS 15? Sign up for a 7-day free trial with AppTweak to take your ASO strategy to the next level.
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