Apple’s App Store Product Page Optimization Is Out!

For much of the past year, Apple had been teasing their A/B testing tool, namely Product Page Optimization (PPO), leaving so many app marketers and ASO professionals wondering, worrying and anticipating its arrival. Last night, just over 2 weeks before Christmas, the tease was over and everyone’s new ASO journey began when Apple finally released this seemingly all-time fan-favorite feature on App Store Connect. For the first time since the App Store came into existence 13 years ago, we are able to conduct true A/B tests for iOS apps.

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Why is this a big deal?

A/B testing is one of the most essential requirements of any successful app growth strategy, and ASO is no exception. It offers a scientific, data-driven approach to measuring the impact of a change in the app store, based on which informed decisions are made to drive positive growth. That’s why it’s the heart of all modern ASO conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies.

Here’s the catch: Up until last night, A/B testing had never been possible on the Apple App Store. Unlike its Android-centric counterpart, the Play Store, CRO for the App Store used to depend on at least one of the following:

• Third-party solutions with fake landing pages, which are non-native, expensive and more relevant to paid UA conversions than ASO;
• Apple Search Ads Creative Sets testing, which only allows screenshot and preview video experiments, and only on the search results page, where users are biased by the keywords they use. Plus, it requires a leap of faith as you test on ads but generate learnings for organic search;
• Pre-post incrementality, which is risky as each variant is exposed to 100% of the traffic generated by real users in real-time, so there’s no damage control because there’s basically no “Control group”. It also offers no isolation of external factors that may alter the results, such as seasonality and K-factors from paid UA

All of these limitations have been lifted with PPO, and our ASO team at Lumos Apps is excited to lead a new chapter of organic app growth with it.

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How is Kovalee's ASO team using this opportunity?

Almost immediately after the release of the new tool, we started an A/B test for our flagship lifestyle app, Plaw, to explore different presentations of our seasonal, Christmas-themed screenshots. Here’s a preview of our setup:

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This setup is meant to help us solve the age-old question: How important is the preview video for this app compared to the screenshots, precisely?

Not only that, it also helps us deal with certain challenges that the missing preview video would present:

• How do we make sure that the first 3 screenshots (critical for Search optimization) contain both the seasonal messaging (“Christmas”) and the app’s most popular content type (“Live wallpapers”)?
• How do we make sure the flow of messaging remains coherent for both the whole set and the set of the first 3 (even when auto-rotations happen when Search Ads are active)?
• How do we make sure the sequence of “live wallpapers, app icons then custom widgets” isn’t broken?

In sum, it helps us validate the hypothesis below, in an A/B test, and without delay:

If the preview video is removed without compromising either the set of the first 3 screenshots and the full set of all screenshots, then CVR will improve, due to the enhanced visibility of the seasonally relevant content and designs on the screenshots.

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