How SoundCloud decreased CPI by 39%

Challenge

The SoundCloud team was looking for new ways to lower their cost-per-install (CPI) and increase conversion rates to improve the efficiency of their ongoing Apple Search Ads campaigns.

The team at SoundCloud was aware that in order to solve challenges to their paid marketing efforts and maximize Apple Search Ads’ impact they needed to play on the existing synergies between ASO and Apple Search Ads.

Soundcloud turned to AppTweak to identify any “low hanging fruits” opportunities that would help them score a first win and demonstrate the impact of custom product pages before scaling from there.

Solution

1. Mining SoundCloud’s customer reviews to identify opportunities 

To start, AppTweak’s App Growth Consultants mined SoundCloud’s customer reviews and carried out a sentiment analysis.

App reviews and ratings do play a significant role in conversion and could work against ad efforts if negative. While in the case of SoundCloud reviews were mostly positive and could not be attributed to negative effects on their paid marketing efforts, other interesting insights emerged.

By digging into customers’ reviews, AppTweak’s team identified that users were particularly enjoying the possibility of having unlimited skips, as well as the presence of fewer ads compared to key competitors in the app stores.

These reviews proved that SoundCloud had a major competitive advantage, which could be used to power its future campaigns for success. 

2. Optimizing creatives to increase conversion rates 

Upon identifying this competitive advantage from users’ reviews, the AppTweak team thought of designing a new set of app store screenshots that would clearly highlight the benefits of SoundCloud’s more generous free-tier service.

To do so, AppTweak’s designers reflected on how to visually capture the action of skipping from track to track while keeping the focus on SoundCloud’s large music catalog. The AppTweak team eventually opted to use a carousel view of playlist covers split across two screens. Small adjustments were made to the screenshots to improve the readability of captions in the assets.

3. Implementing custom product pages to increase relevancy 

This new creative was then used to create custom product pages to increase the performance of SoundCloud’s Apple Search Ads campaigns.

Custom product pages require a unique URL, which can be integrated into Apple Search Ads and used to direct traffic from a particular group of keywords to a specific custom product page.

As a first test, AppTweak recommended that SoundCloud update an Apple Search Ads campaign targeting competitors’ brand names with the new custom product page. Since the new custom product page highlights a benefit of SoundCloud over the competition, AppTweak identified the SoundCloud team could see the impact of custom product pages the quickest in this area.

Results

With the help of AppTweak’s guidance and support, SoundCloud was able to successfully launch the new custom product pages on the App Store.

Consequently, SoundCloud saw a significant improvement in the campaign’s conversion rate which increased by 58% (1.58X). Moreover, their Apple Search Ads campaigns cost-per-install lowered significantly, thus helping SoundCloud to save on their budget.

In comparison, with the previous conversion rate, SoundCloud would have spent 39% more budget to reach the same number of installs.

Having reaped the benefits of using custom product pages in their Apple Search Ads campaigns, the SoundCloud team is now excited to use more of this promotional tool with AppTweak.