Sub Club Podcast: App Optimization Through Experimentation — Hannah Parvaz, Aperture App

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Hannah parvas founder of aperture a full service growth partner making good companies better with more than a decade of experience in the app industry Hannah has mentored and helped grow hundreds of companies on the podcast I talk with Hannah about how to profitably scale Performance Marketing hard versus soft activation and why you should keep an extra close eye on your marketing spend in November hey Hannah thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today hi it's so nice to be on here thank you for having me well you are one of the most requested guest I've had several people

0:39say we need to get Hannah on and I think the reason is and I've talked about this with Thomas petite that when you work with a lot of different companies over time you just build a lot of experience and get to see a lot of things that the average person who just works with one app for most of their career or for the last five years or whatever they just don't don't get the variety of experience that somebody like you get working with so many different companies so yeah I'm excited to really share some of those learnings that you've had working with so many different companies

1:11over the years how did you get into growth Consulting and product and all these things you do in order to end up working with so many companies over time well it was never my plan you know I didn't growing up I was like a six-year-old going I'm going to be a lawyer and then all of a sudden I found myself in a little basement working with a Lo of people people on a little app was kind of a bit shocking but it it started with me being in the music industry so I was in the music industry and live music artist management record labels and so on and then I got into

1:41music tech and joined a music app and then the rest is history but for me I'm someone that always has been very much a multitasker you know so I learned by being challenged and that's something that's always been the case I was just thinking of this quote that I was talking about last week which is growth and comfort do not coexist which jeie retti who was the CEO of IBM said but I just always wanted to find more challenges and I felt like always I was kind of learning by doing so about 201617 I started doing a lot of bits on the side coaching mentoring and I think

2:17that started when I went through 500 startups for the most part so I learned a lot and I met a lot of really interesting people and then soon after that I got asked to Mentor for Google and then one thing led to another I started doing growth mentor which is this fantastic platform for mentoring Founders or seite or anyone really who needs kind of support and I just caught the bug juggling lots of walls and then how did that turn into aperture in the last I think 18 months or so you founded an app agency a growth partner that you now hired a bunch of people and you're

2:48working with a lot of companies how did you transition from that app to like mentoring and side hustles to running your own agency yeah I was a year old last week actually so really I know happy birthday after for show after I left my last full-time in-house gig which I was at for a year amazing company we got some incredible results of course i' been working with a fair few products on the side and doing freelancing with them or running their ads on the side or doing consulting and product strategy with them and it just felt like the immediate and organic next step like oh well I may as well

3:24formalize this I'm loving so much working on all of these separate challenges and separate projects so why don't I just do that full-time and then it just kind of snowball and snowball so I was working on it on my own pretty much until January when we brought in our first team member and now we're six since January so that's really awesome and we're still growing so it's amazing aperture has been a fantastic year you know even before aperture like you said you've been working with so many different companies and worked on app growth yourself and that's what we wanted to talk about today I hear from a

3:58lot of folks who start dipping their toes in marketing and see some potential there run a few Facebook ads do some app store search ads whatever those kind of First Steps look like for them but then scaling is where it really starts getting challenging I know that's something you spend a lot of time thinking about so what would you say is the first step in scaling Performance Marketing whenever we're thinking about scaling for Performance Marketing let's say we have to have some Targets in place that's the very first thing I think about how are we actually measuring what we're scaling so let's say we're going to be starting working

4:35with a new app the very first thing we'll always do is start running app install campaigns first of all so very top of funnel get people to download figure out what messages are working what creatives are working with that so that people can start to come through the algorithms can start to learn we can start to learn as well like our human intelligence can start to learn which kind of things are performing well and then as we go further and we're able to spend more and more we start moving farther down the funnel so from install to sign up from sign up to trial and then to some custom events and as we

5:08start to unlock more budget by bringing back more money into that with our subscription product we're able to get better results especially since the kind of iOS changes which we're all very familiar with I'm sure you need to have a bit of a different strategy you know you have to get a certain number of installs per day to see post install events so you need to be spending at a certain level to be ble to optimize for that and so on so the very first thing I'd be looking for is what are my targets what are my optimization events I'm aiming for if I'm already optimizing

5:37for trial is there something else that can be a custom event like trial and two content views or trial and something that we can start looking at that will be a really clear indicator for success and for someone going on to purchase and succeed I actually recently downloaded Jo lingo I mentioned to you before and I actually got my ATT popup after I'd completed like a few lessons and I was like that's really interesting that they're giving me an ATT popup at this point like you don't care about anything before that then okay I see I see you know I turned off the ability for apps

6:10to even ask I had thought about that kind of being in the industry I need to allow apps to ask me so I can see it's really fascinating stage yeah cuz we've done a lot of testing around it of course and we were originally going to put the ATT popup at a place that we thought oh this will interfere with sign up or this will interfere with trial fewer people will do those actions but actually the place that it had the least impact on anything including conversion to paying including hard activation rate was on first launch so as soon as someone opens the app for the first time

6:44putting it straight there and just having them press and moving on from there which was shocking but now we're rolling out everywhere the dualingo thing is interesting because in a way it's those users who do finish that second or third lesson that are the ones you most want to find audiences like and so maybe that's the kind of theory behind that is like we don't care about tracking the users who fall off before that second lesson we care about tracking the users who stick around yeah that's fascinating but then it's also fascinating that like on launch wasn't most successful but speaking of tracking that and you've talked already about

7:23custom events that you might want to feed back and like measuring success and all that stuff what are your favorite tools for actually measuring those things and how do you set up those flows to understand what is being successful when should you ask is the ask deterring from sign up and onboarding completion and things like that what do you actually use to do that firstly we'd be thinking about what is our AB testing tool and how we're doing our tests to see how we're implementing that infrastructure so we often build that ourselves with our developers building our own systems and then measure in Firebase or measure in mix panel or

7:59something something like that but there are many other tools and actually tools like mix pannel have their own AB testing Solutions now which is really cool to see that grow over the last few years but then on top of that if we're thinking about where are people coming in from and so on and we're trying to measure all the way up to the top I'm usually using one of three mmps so I'm usually using appsfire adjust or singular and then tracking down into exactly what people are doing how those flows are working with different cohorts as well interestingly you see very different results not surpris of course with different cohorts but

8:32yeah and then we build funnels of course so within any kind of Analytics tool if you're using amplitude or mix panel or something like that you can build funnels so you can build like step funnels so this many people signed up this many people went through Journey a or Journey B and then this is the actions that happened afterwards so that we can see what is the incremental uplift of having or not having this feature so really cool when I talk to individual app operators or people working in bigger apps it's like they have one specific tool but working with so many people I yeah you end up working

9:06with all the tools so you have to rely on like building out the principles and the Frameworks and then just figuring out how to actually make it work in any individual tool so like the ATT prompt you would set that up as just an AB test whether it's Firebase or mix panel or optimizely or in-house testing tool we want to know when is the optimal place to put in the ATT prompt and then just run a bunch of tests and see how it performs exactly yeah run you know ABC tests they don't always need to be like a Ab just a control in one option at a

9:39time as long as you're getting enough traffic through you can run your control against a few different options and it's something that we do in the product and something we also do from an advertising perspective we always like to have a control with multiple options see which ones are getting the best uplift and then start optimizing around that specific one we kind of started talking about scaling at performance and dig R into a lot of different things but specifically on scaling how are you experimenting with creatives and trying different things these days especially in the postat world what's working like spray and prey and are you getting good

10:15measurement and then what kind of volume do you need to really understand what's going on versus just low volume stuff where you can't really understand what's working and what's not I think whenever we're working with companies we say that we only really start with a minimum of like 6K budget at the moment that's the very very minimum based on what an average cost per install would be and this is only to optimize on installs right from the very beginning and so the reason I say that is because to optimize any campaign or any adset you need to get 50 conversions a week in your first seven days of launching so that's your

10:51first hurdle can I get my 50 conversions in a week firstly so am I able to hit that point so if you're going to get 50 conversions in a week divided by seven you have to get seven per day so imagine like to begin with a cost per install is going to cost you around5 $5 whilst you're getting started so that's what we say is the minimum entry point that we then try and come down from so that then allows you for a few different test variants and then one prospecting campaign so the way that we're doing all of our experiments really are having tests with one control and then multiple

11:26variants which are like one element different from each of them so if we're testing a messaging test we will have the exact same design but with four different messages on there against a control which one of these messages will be our control once we then find out which message works best we'll take that one message and put it into four different concepts like four different Design Concepts so that could be like a SMS conversation an iMessage conversation that could be like an iOS notes fake conversation that could be a ugc style that could be many other different things with this one message to see if does this message actually

11:58hold up on its own in different formats we then see which format works best and start exploring that a bit more with different iterations with messaging iterations within that as well so this is really how we get started and as we're starting to scale we're repeating this process over and over and over and over and over again until we start finding a lot of different Creative Concepts that are working and we're upgrading we're putting these into our always on campaigns and then leaving them and trying to touch them as little as possible you know we're trying to keep our hands off those ones and that's half of the job trying to interfere too

12:30much with those so that's really the Baseline and as we start to see success there and we're starting to see success on the app install format optimizing only for app installs then we would think about okay now we've got this portfolio of creatives that's working now we're going to start optimizing for something else so we would duplicate that campaign and then optimize it for registration optimize it for trial optimize it for our custom event that we spoke about earlier see which one of those performs better are we even able to get to the point where we're able to optimize for post install events because you need to be getting a certain amount

13:02of installs per day then so you change from 50 in a week to like 120 in a day that you need to get for your one campaign so it's a big step increase there 50 in a week to 120 in a day so when you're doing that you need to be ready to increase your budgets dramatically without knowing so we try and do this very very gradually with a lot of control with a lot of experimentation and a lot of analysis going into it because we need to make sure that there this budget increas is sustainable as well it's fine to put it up for a test but can we sustain this

13:33budget level because the way it works with the skad network is you might have this one campaign set up in meta and it's just got one campaign ID in meta but actually in the skad network it has like 10 campaign IDs and so inside then the skad network you need each of your campaign IDs to get a certain amount of installs to get the postbacks so then if you are going even underneath that average some of the postbacks backs will be empty then you'll be starting to miss data and so on so even though I'm saying you know you have to reach 120 or so is

14:06actually making sure that that is the very very minimum to be able to get postbacks so unless you're hitting that you know you're not going to be seeing data visibility and so that's when we're starting to make sure that we're also looking in our MMP in our mobile measurement partner so in like appsfire or adjust or singular or something like this because at the moment with some of our companies we're seeing 60% visibility or so in Facebook in mattera versus what we see in our MMP so we actually look at that as our source of Truth are we seeing the results that we need to see in our MMP we're judging our

14:39success there and then scaling based on that too yeah how do you talk to your customers about this scaling process so early on I imagine especially with that $6,000 a month I would imagine a lot of that's pretty investigatory and are they seeing a return on that or are you expecting that to be an investment where they're not seeing much of a return or maybe a 50% return or something but the idea is okay you're going to invest you're going to get some of it back but we're going to learn and we're going to get closer and closer to that return on ad spend that you're looking for how do

15:14you frame that conversation and I guess it's different for each app and different apps have different levels of success during this exploration phase absolutely yeah I mean firstly every app is different as you say like everyone needs different levels of success but also everyone has a slightly different strategy so for some of our companies at the moment we're they're completely free products so we're not running on iOS we're running on Android because we're not trying to make money from our customers it's completely fine to run on Android and since we're still safe there for the time being from sunbox we're still running there we're getting our

15:46learnings there because when you're running on Android at the moment there aren't these kind of rules that I've just been me talking about like we have for iOS so there isn't minimum number of installs that you need to get a day you still need to get 50 a week to optimize if you're on meta or 10 per day if you're on Google for example but you don't have to get this 120 plus installs per day so if you have a lower budget it can actually be good to test on a platform like that but when I'm thinking about how are we talking to our partners about this we definitely see a big part

16:16of what we're doing as education so we spend a lot of time going over and over this with our partners and making sure that they are as clued up as we are on it because we want them to have a full understanding when we're talking about this stuff with them because we're all very technical people for non-developers for us it's really important for them to have an understanding of skad network of all of the idfa changes of what are the rules around this so that then when they're looking at the numbers they are informed we want them to look at this and say okay this number of Trials might

16:45not be accurate in mattera because we actually didn't get enough installs here and so on so it's really important for them to know as well it's their business after all and when you do have a subscription I mean that's what we mainly Focus focus on here on the subclub podcast and so there is some element of hoping to get a return do you see just like wildly different performance and then what would you advise on the lower performance so let's say you start scaling up your install ads so you're optimizing for install because you don't have enough volume yet to optimize for deeper funnel and you

17:23spend that 6,000 that month and you make 3,000 or a couple thousand or something do you immediately jump back into product or do you look for ways to get that cost down or other things well the very first thing that I'd be looking at is everything from a blended perspective so did I get 3,000 from my paid or did I get 3,000 overall so if I'm getting 3,000 overall from a blended perspective I would be first looking at all of my funnel steps so where are my biggest areas for opportunity so this then goes into product so first firstly I'd be looking at everything from cpms to

18:01clicks to how people are installing how are people registering are people actually opening after that install actually are they registering are they taking out the trial and then the trials are paid conversion so I would have kind of internal benchmarks of what these can be what we should be aiming for here for subscription apps with trials and so on so then from there we would look at okay which area is laying us down are our cpms really high is our click-through rate really low if that was the case or even if our click to install was low I'd be looking at our ads definitely where can we improve here which ads are

18:34letting us down has something started to saturate are there any new directions that we should be testing how are people engaging on these ads and so on and if everything's looking fine there then I would be looking into the product so our people whenever we're thinking about installs we have this kind of true install which is actually the number of people that went to the App Store and clicked install but then there is also your first app open install right which is what we track in our most of our business intelligence tools or in our analytics tools so actually I was working with one product and we saw that

19:04only 70% of people were doing the first app open after the true install so we were like okay this is interesting you know obviously then we have to zoom out is there something on the App Store page is there something on the ads is something on like how we're communicating like what can we do here to push people further should we be retargeting people who've installed but not opened and so on so there's a few different things that you can do there but then if people are actually opening your app then I'd be looking at what's our registration rate how are people taking out the trial and going into the

19:31product itself to see where are again our areas for improvement where our biggest opportunities and then focusing there and actually that can mean sometimes pausing your ads till you fix problems it does seem like ultimately to get to profitability as a subscription app you need some paino you're solving you need some core product Market fit and so I guess that's kind of what you're saying it's like if you start scaling up your ads and it's just not working at all then maybe the first place to look is that core value prop and that do you have some level of product Market fit how do you think

20:07about that and how would you measure that and then how would you start improving that so from a product perspective I would be looking at how people are performing in terms of when they're coming in are they doing their first meaningful action so that could be a signup that could be some kind of order every product will be different but a first meaningful action showing that they're interested in the product and then we'll have a core action imagine you're a Content product you've got lots of different stories on there so maybe a core action could be clicking on a story and reading it or listening to a song on Spotify or booking a night

20:40on Airbnb or something like this so that's your core action so there will be this set number of core actions that someone needs to do to go from being soft activated so from being just starting their activation Journey they're still seeing what's what they don't fully trust or they're not fully having the product embedded in their lives so we have to figure out how many of these that we should be doing so imagine I was working at One content product and we knew that someone had to listen to six stories to become hard activated what we did then was we gave everybody 10 free stories to make sure

21:16that they would get to that point so you don't just give six just in case some people might be a bit more or less because six is the average and the average is never the truth so we gave everyone 10 free stories and then waited to see what happened obviously we were offering a trial before that but then we would see that people who completed actually six stories who hadn't taken out a trial would then take out a trial and convert 2x better to paid from that trial than people who hadn't for example so these are the sort of things that we'd be looking at we'd be looking at okay where

21:48is this activation Point think about that six stories how many times does someone need to do that core action okay how many people are getting to that core action is 1% % of people getting to that core action okay then something is blocking them what can we do to remove friction there so that probably isn't going to be removing trial from your onboarding because we know that a lot of these trial events come right in their very first journey but after someone dismisses the trial what are we doing to make people move along that Journey how are we making it simple are we doing autoplay are we getting people to just

22:20tap in are we doing tool tips are we giving people rewards how are we gamifying this initial experience even if we're not a game you know to get people to move along we'd be looking really closely into that area how many people are getting there but then also looking at what are all of the steps between that because let's say for the six stories lots of people listen to one but so getting people to listen to one wasn't the problem it was getting people to listen to the second one so how do we get people to go onto that second one and so on so this is what we'd be doing

22:49I think a lot of subscription app folks too often think of the trial start as the core action but it's interesting how you were so much more focused on that core value prop is that they need to interact with something that's going to give them value starting a free trial is not giving them value so whether they start the free trial and listen to those six stories or whether they listen to the six stories and then start the free trial the goal is to get them to listen to those six stories so they're experiencing the value that you're delivering so then they stick around through the free trial and that was an

23:27interesting stat that in that case it was 2x performance on the free trial by getting them to listen to the stories before they even start the free trial that's fascinating absolutely I would definitely caveat that with we tried experimenting with moving the placement of the trial and there's no way like we would have removed it after the results we saw from the initial onboarding right cuz the number of people that go through it on that initial onboarding even if their counseling is so much higher than waiting beyond that really so we always give the opportunity to take out a trial earlier on We Don't Force It it's not

24:01like a hard hard cell the whole way through but we give the opportunity for trial and then give them more opportunities later after they're a bit warmer once you've gotten folks experiencing that core value and started to understand some level of product Market fit and moving forward with people getting value out of the app how do you then track your Roi and build Financial models around this to actually then profit ably do it because there's one thing to connect people with the value we're all in this to make money to a certain extent I mean even if there's greater purpose in the app you you can't

24:38spend $100,000 on ads and make 20 and continue doing that so yeah how do you build out the ROI and the financial models to actually figure out what's going to work whenever you're starting and you're an early product a lot of what you're going to be doing is just finger in the air until you start getting your initial results in firstly so you're going to be looking at what are the industry benchmarks you're going to be looking at actually in app store connect now you can see what are the benchmarks in your industry which is really cool to see so I'd be looking at those if I'm just building my product

25:10right from the very beginning so here are my benchmarks these are what my expected results will be and then I start seeing what the truth is and when we start seeing what the truth is then we go and we start adjusting and this is also how we prioritize the areas that we need to focus on because we might be seeing that there's this big drop from install to sign up and by having a slight increase here we will have a much bigger increase in our bottom of funnel events than something that's a bit further down the funnel if we increase our clicked install by one percentage point that

25:41will then have a much larger trickle down effect in the later stage funnel than increasing something like trial to paid or something like that because there's going to be so many more people coming in right at the top of the funnel right so that's something to bear in mind but when we're thinking about how our hard active motivation rates and so on are factoring into our larger Financial models people who are hard active and the people who are reaching you know let's say these six tracks or continuing on from that the reason that we are talking about this hard activation rate is that people who get

26:13to the six have a much lower drop off so people who get to six like 98% of people who listen to six listen to seven 98% of people who listen to seven listen to eight and it was like this very small drop offs from event to event and so people who are actually active are going to stick around much much longer you know people who are staying around and when we're thinking about activation everyone has an average there is always this average I worked with one other product where people would go to a bar and then they'd get a free drink that was how the app worked that was it and

26:46it was an average of 21 days between someone going to the bar okay but you David might go to the bar every 35 days and I might go every 18 days so so for me if I haven't been to the bar until my 19th day if I haven't been on day 19 I've started to turn so everyone has their own individual life cycle frequency life cycle and for you if you haven't been on day 29 you're still active because your average is 35 days so when we're thinking about this this is how our hard activation pool grows we're wanting to obviously grow the number of people who are becoming soft

27:21activated so the number of installs the number of true Acquisitions that we're getting but then we also want to grow this hard activ a rate so how keeping people active within their life cycle within their kind of user frequency so this is true of free products as much as it is of subscription products and with subscription products we're looking at when we're thinking about having our Northstar metric for example we want to have obviously some kind of Revenue Associated event in there so our Northstar metric wouldn't just be Revenue but it would be something like weekly active subscribers because we have a Cadence in there that someone is

27:55coming and doing this event that they're coming back and doing it weekly or maybe it's monthly or maybe it's daily or maybe it's fortnightly every two weeks so Cadence action Revenue Cadence action Revenue so weekly active or this could be listening or this could be reading or this could be something like this and then subscribers so that you've got this Revenue event in there so the reason that we do this is so that we're representing our customers as well as ourselves in our company success in our perceived Company Success then once we have got all of our Northstar metric and all of our metrics in place and we know

28:29exactly how we're measuring success then we start thinking about our Roi our roas what is our lifetime value of the people that are coming in so everything that we're always doing should be with these things in mind and this is why you know when we're thinking about what are the areas for the biggest impact these are the areas for the biggest impact on our Northstar metric and therefore on our revenue on our investment for the ads that we're doing so for that we're going to be looking at things again from a blended perspective because your ads are also going to have this Halo effect so once you're running an ad you see my ad

29:00David eventually maybe if you like the product you're going to tell someone and so even though that person didn't see the ad you saw the ad and so they actually came through the ad indirectly so there's this halo effect that we get by running ads or also another example is you've seen an ad a few times and then you've got some kind of message in your head and then something happens externally you saw an ad on Monday and then the following Monday your friend mentioned something and you're like oh I've remembered this product okay then you go to the App Store you search it so there's this halo effect on your ads

29:31which might not necessarily be tracked so this is why it's very important to look at things from a blended perspective and when I say Blended this means looking at the spend that you're doing on all of your paid channels so this is the way to start looking at this so how much are you spending on meta how much you spending on Tik Tok Google add all of that together and then look at how many people have done these kind of actions overall so how many installs have you got overall from every channel including organic how many Tri did you get overall from every channel including organic and then how many of these

30:01converted to paying so we take that total sum of money that we've spent and then divide it by the Blended actions that we've got so total number of Trials total number of purchases so that we can see how these numbers are increasing over time but how our costs are decreasing of course so this will help us measure our halo as well and look at the impact on Blended how do you think about optimizing that performance thing because if you're looking at Blended are you simultaneous VI ly still looking at Tik Tok specifically in the MMP looking at Facebook specifically and are you running like incrementality testing

30:35where okay let's spend less on Facebook this week and see how it impacts all of this the Blended numbers let's spend more on Tik Tok this week and see how those Blended numbers shift is that how you're thinking about it absolutely yeah so we start every channel in isolation really so we're looking out one channel at a time to begin with we wouldn't launch five channels at once we would launch one see how this performs get baselines and then start introducing other channels once we've started to master one of them and we're getting good results with one so we would then with each of the channels as well with

31:07meta with Tik Tok with Google with Pinterest like you can use these as direct response channels or you can use these as awareness channels so we do do incrementality testing with all of the channels on our direct response level and also on our brand awareness level and we don't spend a lot on brand awareness but what we do do is do engagement campaigns so we look at boosting some of the Instagram posts boosting some of the Tik Tok posts and the reason that we do this is because we are getting such cheap cpms cost per impressions for these so a direct response ad I might be paying somewhere

31:43between like 7 and $12 CPM maybe a bit lower and for the same similar people to see my awareness ad I'll be paying maybe $1 to $2 for a th000 people to see them so what we try and do is we hit people with our awareness SI ad hit them with like some of our boosts from our Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok get them to see things a few times as well and then we're hitting them also with our direct response at the same time so our more expensive Impressions but these are the ones that are then converting and getting the results so we are

32:14looking at our spend holistically we're grouping our awareness and our direct response spend and looking at how our overall costs from that perspective have come down and then we're looking at it on a channel by Channel basis and as we start to see some channels costs going up we're constantly rooting money to other channels so at the moment with one of our companies for example our meta costs have gone up dramatically over the summer but we're still more than 2x profitable on Google so just funneling money over there at the moment and then at some point there is just a standard variance throughout the year so we might

32:46then end up putting some money back but ideally what we're going to do is then start reaching an equilibrium with that company across lots of different channels with spend so that we're not just having eggs and one basket we don't want to just have like 95% of budget in one place and 5% somewhere it's good to have like a big percentage everywhere so that then if things are going up and down on one channel at least everything else is balancing out and this has been performing pretty well yeah that's interesting and you talked about seasonality there I was just thinking as we record it's early October this is

33:18going to come out like mid October how do you think about Black Friday the Christmas bubble like it seems like pretty much all advertising starts getting more expensive from say like Halloween through the maybe second week of the year once all the New Year's resolutions have been made and all the fitness apps have gone through their budget how do you think about that seasonality do you sometimes pull back how do you Wade through the more expensive campaigns during that time yeah it's an interesting one to think about at this time of the year because every year is the same I've been advertising in for like 12 years now and

33:59every year it's been the exact same passion which is from literally November 1st until literally November 30th the performance is just terrible and I tell all of our companies every year even when I've been full-time in house November will be very expensive we should be thinking more about brand awareness and just putting a bit more budget into brand awareness in November and then without a doubt everyone always freaks out in November except me because I know it's going to happen that um a psychic but I'm just looking at data that November oh costs are going up so we should be putting more money into these boosts or into awareness campaigns

34:35where we're getting lots of Impressions because we know we're not going to get the sales that month because everyone's really excited to buy their physical presents physical gifts for themselves physical gifts for their family members Partners this is where Ecom explodes and then literally November 30th the cost start to go down again and this has happened every single year and it's crazy like December 1st will always be a really good day for us and December will continue and actually when I've spoken to The Meta teams about this they call this period and we call this period Q5 um so like December 15th until the beginning of January is like

35:10Q5 for spend because especially from December 15th this is around when the post stops your less posting opportunities so Ecom spending reduces dramatically so it's a really good opportunity around them for this digital product advertising and then going into New Year if your product can be beneficial for people in any way you know you go into this like new year messaging see really great results there if you can do a sale that's amazing with Revenue cap you can Implement a sale in your products you can even run these through your website there's many different ways and another thing to leverage at that time of year too is

35:46gifting which a lot of people make a lot of money from I know you're actually working with one of my colleagues on something around gifting so we'll tease that so look for Hannah collaboration I think it's a blog post coming up on gifting but I wanted to get back to something you said there so you've actually seen cost decrease December 1st and then even on the 15th they decrease even more so starting December 15th is when as a digital product because e-commerce spend has dropped dramatically once people can't get it shipped for Christmas that's actually a great opportunity is what you're saying okay absolutely is yeah all the way

36:25until the end of January gotcha I had a little backward in my mind not having spent myself this is why I like talking to people like you you've worked with 250 companies you've been buying ads for 12 years I've talked to a lot of folks over the years and I get certain impressions in my mind and that was one of them but it's good to know that November's the worst December starts improving and then huge opportunity around New Year's it kind of makes sense I mean you have like quarterly budgets that run out you have monthly budgets it was Ariel I was actually having a dinner

36:53with him in New York recently and he saw this one app where they would exhaust their spend by noon they just had a spend cap of every day we're going to spend 10,000 or whatever it was and the keywords would be super expensive on App Store search ads and then by about noon they would have maxed out all their spending and so he was talking about with that company they figured out okay we don't spend until after noon and then after that we ramp up our spend and we'll get way better spend so it's kind of interesting so seasonality wise be really careful in November and don't try and push it and

37:34then in December expect that to recover and then yeah yeah for subscription products of course with different apps it's a different story if you've got an Ecom app it's going to be a bit different but yeah for subscription digital only product this is what I've seen every single year without a doubt it's been the same so well I think it's a great place to wrap up seasonality and coming out in October is perfect timing to have discussed that get ready for November being challenging but as we wrap up anything else you wanted to share I know you're ramping up at aperture and taking on new clients so

38:07anything you want to share there yeah just firstly thank you so much for having me it's been such a pleasure talking to you about this stuff and yeah I mean at aperture just so everyone knows a little bit about it it's a full service growth agency and we work with companies that are making positive change in the world so we're working at the moment with apps that for example help women and non-b people with financial education we're working with apps that help parents build better and secure relationships with their children or deal with postp part and depression we're working with apps that help with food waste reducing food waste not

38:39increasing saving trees around the world all kinds of different things like this therapy products that have been growing dramatically well so we love working with any kind of products like this and we're also growing the team so of course if anyone's interested in working on a selection of products that are helping the world and you're a bit sick of selling your soul to the dark side sometimes then you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or just check us out generally but yeah thank you David yeah awesome thanks so much for joining me this was a fascinating conversation I love being able to go so deep we don't

39:12often go quite so deep on like the techniques and tactics and this is how you actually look at your ad spend and stuff like that so thanks for being willing to go super deep and nerd out on this stuff of course I love it thank you and have a beauti beautiful day thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private [Music] community