Mastering Apple’s Custom Product Pages to level-up your ASA and ASO performance

As part of a slew of updates that came with iOS 15 back in 2021, Apple released its Custom Product Pages (CPPs) and Product Page Optimization (PPO) features. This brought about huge new potential for brands and user acquisition managers to engage and convert users with much more precision than was formerly possible on the App Store.

Whether you’re new to the world of Custom Product Pages or are looking to refine your approach, we’re here to help you define the most strategic way to leverage their full capabilities. Meet your audiences with the most relevant and engaging representation of your app possible, boost your Apple Search Ads (ASA) and App Store Optimization (ASO) performance, and drive up conversion rates.

Every app on Apple’s App Store has a product page, which is the landing page users are directed to either via organic discovery or paid advertising. Custom Product Pages enable developers to create similar but distinct versions of these product pages so that different app features and elements can be highlighted according to the needs and preferences of the intended audiences.

The idea is to match the specifics of the product page to either the user’s search intent, or to the expectations of the user arriving via a paid campaign. By tailoring all customizable aspects of the content included on the page, users are given a crystal clear understanding of how they benefit from the app in relation to the creative (or keyword) that drove them to the page. And high relevance equals high conversion.

It’s currently possible to make 35 Custom Product Pages, with each page able to have different app screenshots, preview videos, promotional text, and more. Anything you’re able to edit when creating the default product page can be changed for each of these 35 versions, and you can edit any of them at any given time.

In an environment where it was historically difficult to link specific messages to specific audiences, this functionality is invaluable in terms of user acquisition (UA) and campaign optimization.

Both iOS 15 features, Custom Product Pages and Product Page Optimization, are similar but distinct. PPO is a feature that allows you to test the performance of your default product page creatives, and should be a fundamental part of your ASO strategy. CPPs, on the other hand, are versions (customizations) of the default product page, where the focus is shifted to highlight different app features or experiences. CPPs are accessible via the unique URLs assigned to them and are attached to paid keywords/ad groups. PPOs are available organically and are used for A/B testing to determine the most effective standard, parent version of your product page.

PPO focuses on perfecting and optimizing your product page, and you can select how much traffic you want to send to a specific version/treatment, but can’t specifically link them to targeted audiences. The idea is to optimize for the best possible catch-all, high conversion, default product page. CPPs are indeed versions of the default page, but are not designed for A/B testing, per se–at least not directly.

You can create three additional variations to your standard product page for PPO testing and optimization, and you can create 35 additional CPPs with unique URLs to reach and target specific audiences. In short, think about PPO as an organic, ASO feature, and CPPs as a paid, ASA feature.

Custom Product Pages are a fundamental way to improve your Apple Search Ads performance, because you’re able to assign the specific pages to ad groups (this is the level at which the integration takes place in Search Ads) and create ad variations and creatives that match to the CPPs or vice versa. This means that when a specific ad is run, traffic flowing from that ad will be sent to the CPP you assigned instead of to the default product page.

In practice, the functionality can be understood like this: If you’re running a campaign focused, for example, on a specific element of your fitness app such as a wellness and meditation feature, it will be significantly more effective to send users to a CPP with videos, text, and images that focus on those features within your app, instead of a more generic, catch-all page that covers everything from A-Z. In the example pictured below, you can see three CPPs for the app Mountain Climber.

Custom Product Pages are not indexed organically on the App Store, meaning if a user searches for a keyword that a CPP was specifically designed for, they’ll only be able to see it as a paid ad result. This means there isn’t any direct impact on your ASO efforts, but the uplift can be significant.

In general, successful paid efforts on the App Store/ASA front positively impact ASO, as the conversion rate of a page will influence the likelihood of Apple’s algorithm to push the app’s rankings up. And because CPPs should fundamentally improve conversion rates, et voilà, organic/ASO results should benefit greatly.

A great way to measure this is by leveraging incrementality, which makes it possible to see any incremental impact served to your organic results by your paid efforts. Any move toward privacy-centric measurement and analytics in general is also a smart one, making implementation of incrementality a win-win.

Learn more about incrementality and Adjust’s solution and our vision and technologies for the post-ID era.

Running an ASA campaign where you’re bidding on specific keywords that drive traffic to CPPs and yield improved conversion rates should, in turn, result in significantly increased impressions, downloads, and better organic performance. Regardless of whether the traffic comes from paid or organic, converting higher on a keyword should result in an improved position for that keyword. These efforts can also be directly linked to your app’s category rankings, which will bring in further traffic.

While we generally think about the ways that paid efforts can help boost organic results, you can also use the analytics gained from ASA and CPP results to inform your ASO. For example, specific keywords and CPPs that perform well will give you insight into strategic optimization that can be made on the PPO side.

CPPs are an extremely useful tool for marketers and app developers on the App Store, allowing granular capacity to highlight features and functionalities relevant to target audiences, tailor content preferences, showcase deals, promotions, and seasonality, and meet traffic sources and mediums with the most accurate representation of your app offering and USP possible.

Once you have your set up in place and are ready to go live, test, and optimize, you need analytics and measurement capabilities you can rely on. This way, you’ll know where to allocate your budgets, the right moments to pause or scale a campaign, and when to dedicate your team’s time to rethinking a CPP and its intention.

Adjust fully supports CPP functionality via redirect parameters, campaign-level parameters, and dynamic callback parameters. The former allows you to send users to a specific App Store page, and the latter two enable measurement of performance from the different pages. When running an ASA campaign specifically, you can also use the iAD parameter to share the AdId from the Apple Ads API response. All of this data can then be plugged into our attribution and analytics suite to allow full, privacy-compliant measurement and insight into performance.

For more information on how to tackle your Custom Product Page strategy to bolster your Apple Search Ads and App Store Optimization performance on the App Store, and how Adjust can support in the measurement and optimization of your efforts, get in touch with your contact person today or request a demo to get started.