Picsart’s Success Story: Leveraging Custom Product Pages for Growth

How Picsart Is Leveraging Custom Product Pages as Part of the Growth Playbook

Interview with Skylar Grabecz, ASO Team Lead at Picsart

Apple introduced custom product pages in 2021, revolutionizing the way developers promote their apps on the App Store. However, it is only recently that the custom product page functionality has started gaining the attention it truly deserves from the mobile app marketing community. Recognizing the immense potential of custom product pages in enhancing user acquisition journeys, we have embarked on a mission to explore their effectiveness and inspire marketers with real-life success stories.

During the App Growth Week digital conference, we had the privilege of sitting down with Skylar Grabecz, a seasoned mobile marketer and ASO Team Lead at Picsart. In this blog post, we are delighted to provide you with a detailed transcript of the interview, where Skylar shares invaluable insights and strategies that will help you embrace the power of Apple Search Ads through personalization and automation solutions.

About Picsart

Picsart is the world’s largest digital creation platform. Its AI-powered tools allow creators of all levels to design, edit, draw and share photo and video content. Picsart has amassed one of the largest open-source content collections in the world, including photos, stickers, backgrounds, templates, and more.

• 150M+ active monthly users of Picsart’s digital creation platform
• A top 20 most downloaded app worldwide for 2021
• 1B+ edits per month
• Over 30 languages
• 180 countries with active Picsart creators

About Skylar Grabecz

Skylar is an ASO Team Lead at Picsart, the world’s largest digital creation platform. He has a proven track record of growing and optimizing apps in the Apple App Store & Google Play Store. At Picsart, Skylar is focused on creating and driving Picsart’s ASO strategy with the aim of exceeding the company growth targets. He really enjoys learning about user behavior and how people interact with brands, products, and platforms.

Q: Picsart was an early adopter of custom product pages. How do you leverage them as part of your growth playbook?

Skylar: Having the option to create custom product pages has been great! I’m sure the other ASO and Apple Search Ads practitioners out there would probably unanimously agree with that statement.

Picsart has a lot of different functionalities, and it can cater to a whole slew of different usages. But in return, we get a diverse target audience because of that. Targeting specific segments of that target audience has historically been a challenge just because there was no way to segment it. When Apple announced the availability of custom product pages, it seemed like we’d finally be able to address this challenge.

With custom product pages, we’ve been able to segment audiences and more accurately target them with different creative assets based on their needs or their intentions. A direct example of this is with our AI Image Generation feature, which is also known as “text-to-image”. In addition to targeting users searching for “AI image generator” related keywords, we can now serve them creatives based on that search criteria as ad variations in our Apple Search Ads campaigns, which has been a game changer.

The area that we’ve seen the most success with custom product pages until now has mainly been in conjunction with Apple Search Ads. However, we’ve also seen a lot of success in markets like Japan with Yahoo Ads, as Yahoo is much more popular in Japan than it is in Western countries and allows deep linking to custom product pages in their ads. It was pretty interesting for us to see that we gained some traction there.

We’ve also been rolling custom product pages out to other touch points as well. Some examples include:

• Featuring Opportunities in collaboration with Apple’s editorial team
• Today Tab ads, which actually require a custom product page to even run them
• Ads on other networks

In addition, we’re also actively using custom product pages to test organic screenshots and to find out how we can increase our organic keyword rankings for the app. I’m trying to make sure we’re taking advantage of custom product pages in any way we can to help improve performance.

Q: What role does mobile marketing technology play in Picsart’s app growth, and how does SplitMetrics assist in achieving your goals?

Skylar: To me, mobile marketing technology is like the navigation system in your car. You know where you need to go, but the navigation system keeps you on the right track and will alert you about things happening along the way. Needless to say, marketing technology is an integral part of my day-to-day workflow – I would feel like I was flying blind if I didn’t have access to these types of tools.

With regard to SplitMetrics in particular, the team that we work with is really top notch. I personally find that the reporting and insights the team pulls together for us to be very helpful and insightful. As for the SplitMetrics Acquire platform, that has been a very important piece of the puzzle for us in terms of managing and optimizing our Apple Search Ads campaigns. SplitMetrics Acquire helps us efficiently manage any Apple Search Ads strategy at scale and save a lot of time. On the platform level, the SplitMetrics Acquire features that help me out the most are bulk bid editing and smart bit automation rules.

Q: What results has Picsart been able to achieve with the use of custom product pages?

Skylar: An example that comes to mind is from one of the first custom product pages we rolled out and began testing with. We created a few different iterations based on different hypotheses and tested them for the specific custom product page and were able to achieve the following improvements when all was said and done:

• Conversion rate improved by 52%
• Users entering free trials rate increased by 153%
• Cost per trial decreased by 50%

So, a pretty nice set of results for that one. That being said, I don’t expect to see results as drastic as these for every custom product page we create, but in general, we do see improvements by leveraging this functionality.

Q: Can you elaborate on testing organic screenshots of the custom product pages? Are they more effective than the general product page optimization?

Skylar: I like to use custom product pages and product page optimization in conjunction with each other, reason being product page optimization is very limited. On top of that, anytime there’s a new app update, it stops any product page optimization currently running. This means there are times we aren’t able to get the desired test duration or confidence level we would like to get to. In addition, there are limitations in terms of testing different hypotheses in different markets at the same time. To counter this, I like to use custom product pages to conduct testing and to get a baseline idea of what might have potential to perform well organically, then take those to product page testing to see if the results match. This way, I’m able to run tests for different markets simultaneously, which helps me make informed and data-driven decisions faster. Another thing I like to do is to target custom product pages at our most important keywords and test different assets to try to find ways to rank better for those keywords in the App Store.

Q: Picsart has a big focus on holiday campaigns. How do you build your work in the high season and how the role of custom product pages affects you during this time of year?

Skylar: First, we’re basically strategically reshuffling paid UA budget to optimize our spend around times of the year that we’ve historically been able to get more bang for our buck. What I mean by that is we’d prefer avoiding times of the year when it has historically been more expensive to acquire users with the end goal of being a bit more calculated with our ad spend in general.

On the custom product pages side of things, we’ve been creating different custom product pages based on specific use cases that gain traction every year around the holidays. We’ve also got custom product page templates at the ready in case we have any surprises that crop up around the holidays. Holiday season tends to be busy for us.

Q: Based on your experience, what are the best practices and Do’s and Don’ts of custom product pages?

Skylar: For the Do’s, number one, I would say would be to really understand how custom product pages can benefit you. Custom product pages are most impactful in conjunction with paid UA. So, you need to have a good understanding of what your paid UA team’s campaigns look like and sync with them to understand what types of custom product pages would make sense to create. During this stage, you should aim to get some clarity on the following questions:

1. Why do you want to create a custom product page?
2. Will we be improving the user experience by creating a custom product page?
3. Where will the main source of traffic to the custom product page come from?

I know this one kind of seems self-explanatory, however, I have heard of organizations building out custom product pages just because it was a hot topic. It isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s not the best use of company resources in the end.

Number two, I would say to prioritize. If you’re in a position where it would be beneficial to create custom product pages for different use cases, value propositions, markets and so on, you’ll need to prioritize and decide how to best manage your resources. One trick you can use to do this is figuring out which ones will have the most impact and creating those first, then moving on from there.

Q: What are Picsart’s growth plans for 2023?

Skylar: At the moment, we’re really focusing on AI powered tools and integrating those into the Picsart app. There’s a sort of strong sentiment in the organization that AI-powered editing will be beneficial for Picsart users, who, of course, are at the core of everything we do within the app. As for my team, our goals will be to really communicate just how powerful these tools can be and what benefits our users can derive from them. We’ve also got some improvements coming up that will appeal more to professional users, like small and medium business owners, social media managers, and the like. My team will be focusing on communicating Picsart ‘s values to these users as well.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to Skylar Grabecz for sharing his valuable insights and expertise in this interview. Picsart’s success story and their strategic use of custom product pages offer valuable lessons for app marketers. As we look ahead to the future, it is evident that personalization in the privacy-first world won’t disappear, it’ll just become more user-friendly.

The Bottom Line

Picsart’s experience highlights the tremendous benefits of custom product pages in personalizing the user acquisition journey and elevating brand awareness. Based on the interview with Skylar Grabecz, here are top tips for creating top-performing custom product pages:

1. Understand the benefits: Identify the key purposes and understand your goals before diving into custom product page development.
2. Prioritize: If you have multiple custom product page ideas, prioritize their development and testing based on their potential impact.
3. Create templates: Having custom product page templates ready for various use cases can help you respond to unexpected opportunities faster.
4. Segment your target audience: Categorize and group your target keywords to leverage ad variations based on custom product pages for serving different creative assets that match user intentions and needs.
5. Test and iterate: Take advantage of custom product pages to conduct tests and experiments with product page assets on different markets and audience segments.
6. Align paid UA and ASO: Use the insights gained from ad variations based on custom product pages to enhance your ASO strategy.
7. Boost seasonal & holiday campaigns: Create custom product page tailored to specific use cases or value propositions that gain traction during those periods.
8. Communicate benefits and values: Highlight unique features, benefits, and value propositions to expand your audience reach and boost your presence on the App Store.
9. Leverage automation solutions: Make use of mobile marketing technology, such as SplitMetrics Acquire, to manage and optimize your Apple Search Ads campaigns at scale.

Embrace these expert tips to harness the potential of custom product pages and take your marketing efforts to new heights.