How to Build a Web-to-App Funnel Without Torching $20K

Come to our webinar, you know, from traffic to revenue, how big acquisition plans designed about that for the click, we're going to give folks a minute or two to roll in and then we will kick us off right away. Yeah, a couple of folks joining and again, if you're coming in please feed feed drop any questions in the chat for our guests and we'll get the ball rolling very, very soon. Excellent, we are at 601, so let's get this show on the road. Hello and welcome and welcome again to our webinar from traffic to revenue. Our paid acquisition plans designed about after the click. I'm excited to be joined by our fabulous, fabulous guests just to go quickly around our virtual room. We have Jacob Rashpin from Botsie. We have Andre Shakton from Funnel Fox, Patrick Stewart constant, social, Mike Gad from Singular, Elisari from Lingo Kids. We have an all star panel today that I'm excited to host and click thanks off it. So on, of course, before we get the ball rolling, this is hosted by our stock issue HQ and Funnel Fox. So Andre, if you want to take a moment to tell us about Funnel Fox, that for making this webinar possible, please go for it. Take it away. Yeah, sure. Just like a brief overview of Funnel Fox, Funnel Fox is a platform for building launching funnels. It's includes funnel builder, agentic funnel builder and payments infrastructure that helps update our first to scale on the web without any hassle, busy web payments. And you know, your co-hosts are us and Shaman, CEO of RocketShift HQ. We are a creator driven performance agency making hundreds of ads per month for a number of our customers. So hit us up if you are looking to scale your creative production. But for now, let's put this spotlight on our fabulous guests. You know, let's love to hear from you all what's one shift that you've seen in the last 12 months or so that you feel most teams haven't priced in yet. Mike, would you like to get us going? Yeah, sure. I think the big thing we're seeing is, most teams are still optimizing for sort of install cost or trial or volume or looking at how many free trials we've been able to sort of turn into paid subscription. But actually, the real bottleneck is kind of keeping users through that first paid cycle. So actually, it's the first renewal that is the interesting gap people are trying to generate. It's getting harder because we see users are actively reducing total subscription spend across all the categories. And so they're not adding more their consolidating canceling. So that sort of actually first instance is really important. The first payment instance is what we're seeing people track more. Hey, sure. Patrick, what do you know the same? I'm noticing that the falling costs of creative production continues to produce an incredible opportunity. We started being full AI creatives two years ago and they were still pretty bad. And we started getting good 18 months ago and we started taking off and then nervous since the last year, it's been great. I'm just getting better each month. And honestly, I hear you drive a 20 app studio. Yeah, and I still keep hearing that, oh, AI created a subterrible. I think bad AI created a subterrible. The good ones aren't yet priced in. So yeah, Andre, what do you know the same? Yeah, for sure. It's like my shift to web basement organization that includes both like a web to app where you like run traffic on the web, web funnel and a source of digital web or app to web that you can integrate web payments inside your app for the US market. Both trends looks very strong, especially web club where we recently published a report about these trends and see that it's adoption is increasing more and more over the year. Yeah, and I've seen some apps that basically have stopped using the app flow that they're basically using only the web to app just now. How about you, Seth? Yeah, most of my focus is post acquisition. I really see that personalization making a huge difference. This is used to be all fake personalization, pretend personalization. Now you can actually create real personalized experiences in the funnel, post paywall, Gen AI to create real unique experiences. And of course, offers to the right users. So showing this right offer can be pretty meaningful difference in monetization and I think like, I've seen the largest apps figure this out. We see Tinder, creating dynamic paywalls, different paywalls for different users. And so this personalization from first touch point all the way kind of deeper experiences makes a big difference. Yeah, and we always had the data. It sounds like it's become a lot easier to use that data to personalize journeys, especially with the help of AI. At least, how about yourself? What are you noticing? I would say in the last year web funnels and web to apps have been a big focus. And it went from being a site experiment to a big acquisition engine. It only works if you treat it like one and not just a site project. You're doing an hour a week. I think it's one where the barrier of entry has never been, you know, lower. It's easier and easier to do web to app, but you still need dedicated ownership. You still need to run strong experiments and not just try it once and then discard it. So I think that's been something I've observed across different teams on subscription apps. Yeah, and it seems easy and it's actually hard. Yeah, and for those of you who are curious, at least and Patrick, you're both on my podcast, intelligent artifice. So please check out everything what they just said, but in a lot more details. So please tell me if you've finished that. Now, you know, Andre, you guys had a report recently basically saying, you know, about 82% of top closing apps now route the payments outside the store, which is a message wrote over the pre last year. What's driving that and what sort of apps do you see might just be moving too late? Yeah, so we did research. The market in terms of web finance and web basementization found that the first thing is that like drives that grows is a contribution because there is no like a defile institution that Apple introduced like five years ago and you can use pixel based and conversion API based attribution, which means that you can get immediately signals about the purchase and optimize your campaigns with quickly and with less budget. You can literally understand what the creative converts by the worst. So there is a conversion rates also is higher because of flexibility of the flow and its flow to the whole funnel from ad creative to purchases more holistic because there is no like generic step with an up and style and user just can continue engaging with the quiz right after the click on ad creative which you can increase the conversion rates. And also there is a less commission so you pay 25% payment commission for payment providers instead of 30% scale to up store. So yeah, this is about the most main factors to drive this. For sure, lots of different factors in the work of opportunity for customization and certainly all make sense. And Mike, from a measurement perspective, what has changed as more teams have gone off stores? I think with more teams going off stores, you've got a big challenge around like definitely different platforms. So the fact that you were previously looking maybe at just like app information and everything's on one platform but you know you're looking at like web and app as well. What we've worked with customers is like making sure that you have everything going through for like as if it looks like an app purchase for example. So it means you're able to better optimize your campaigns, you'd be able to look at all your revenue in one place and that really enables people to be able to optimize more effectively and also helps to give you accurate ROI and LTV calculations as well. One of the biggest challenges people get here is they like see their like their spend and what they're spending on their ads on different platforms and they can't reconcile that at all to like where the payments are coming in, what the revenue's coming in as. So having a sort of strong way of sort of decoding that being able to sort of that is really important and then finally is like just we see that like a lot of customers don't have a they're all sort of the start maybe don't have a strong user ID implementation. So if you have a strong user ID that means you can knit all these things together and you can measure everything in a sort of total view. Whereas if you don't have that then you'll see a device on a web, a device on an app etc and you can't match them together. So it tells you there's lots of rich measurement that you can see but there's lots of sort of pitfalls that you can fall down where where you sort of lose that measurement and lose that insight. Yeah so if I understand correctly there's one paradigm on the web, one on mobile, you really need to put in the effort to marry them because otherwise you're just going to have two really different systems surf from polling that will be a massive feedback. Yeah. Exactly. We call it platform help that word singular. So basically you get stuck in that phone and you can't make sense of what's going on and it's key to try to find out where to get out of that. Fischer, Fischer, Fischer. Yeah, the switch gears a bit. I know we've talked briefly about creative at least to lob the ball with you for a lot of products right now that's just like an infinite number of creative directions they can go in. So what's your typical approach for figuring out what's the kind of bet that you want to stop it? What's the kind of bet that you want to take it up front? I would say I really like this question because there's a kind of like a classic answer which I will share but I think this year I've been seeing a lot of new approaches for creative that are not the classic route. So to me the classic route I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. I would look at what competitors do creatively in your vertical. I would look at top-grossing apps that are doing really well even if they're not exactly your vertical and then we try to lift and shift their winning formats to your app to get started. So what that means is taking top creatives in yet library on meta for example and see how you can adapt them to your specific messaging. Your audience will kind of like dictate the kind of creatives you're picking and the placement. So for example if you have an older audience it will skew towards aesthetics. If you have a younger audience it will skew towards reels, quick videos without much added very organic looking because you can't really convert someone who's 50 plus with some Gen Z you know like type creatives and the opposite is also true. Something a bit harsh I would say is chances are when you first get started no one will care about all the benefits of your product even if you're very proud of it and even if you want to share them with the world I think it works better at least in the beginning when you focus on a specific persona a specific problem that your app comes as a solution and solves rather than just talking about all the benefits and once you get some momentum it orates usually splits your creatives with brand new fresh concepts and iterations so this is kind of like the classic approach and what I've been seeing in this last year is people sourcing more organic creatives from TikTok directly and from creators directly and they kind of let creators dictate ideas and come up with creative directions themselves and then they take those creative direction and use it in paid and use it in their marketing. So it's a bit it's something that's a bit newer it doesn't work for every single vertical but I find it quite interesting because it just adds a lot more variety to ideas and it's it's fresher when the audience themselves imagine how to sell your app than your creative team. Yeah yeah and I think what I find I think that's find interesting what you said is there very different perspectives but one you said hey look at TikTok creators and see what you mean borrow but on the other hand you're like look at what's working and what's what your competitors are doing and see you if you can leap up is that it's very interesting because one way you're mitigating the risk by thinking something that's proven now the way with TikTok you're also taking something that's driven really you're not reinventing the wheel and that's what I'm hearing from you. Yeah and I think as you scale I would really encourage to be more adventurous with your creatives and push the envelope more but when you first start you don't want to be making hundreds of creatives that will flop you want to get something that will work from your first rounds of creative testing which is why I wouldn't necessarily win then the wheel when you first start. For sure for sure and Patrick used both briefly about how you guys have scaled creative quite dramatically and talk to us about how you decide about which bets to take when you can basically make infinite numbers of creators. Yeah the way I see it is I see creators as a search space and the old fashioned way of you know making a few creators a month, few dozen creators a month you'd only like search tiny bits of a search space and the idea is you want to cover as much of a search space as possible and then like two implications of this one is you really want creative diversity so you don't want endless variations of the same creative I was you always in the same little spot with you know hundred attempts but in the same part of a search space and as we scale up you want to be trying lots of different areas and when one looks promising that's when you want to do like lots of variations I created really explore that part of a search space fully and I think that's sort of how we navigate scaling up our creative production. I've a moment we had four thousand video ads a month scaling up to ten thousand ruin the next couple hopefully. Yeah yeah that's a huge number and but what I'm hearing you say is you're not making four thousand that look mostly similar you want to have those back very different parts of the search space as you said right yeah you know as a full after that right so if something's working how much I use it rating on what's working it's just to say hey can we make different visual hooks can add different hooks versus let's just go to a completely different area of the search space. So we're constantly doing both in parallel and we continue doing variations of one ad uh trying to change it as much as but for the fundamental doing variations of it's until it stops until it stops working and in the meantime we've been exploring other parts of a search space and we have been like you know so basically stoppiding all these different basically brand new marketing angles or brand new concepts and then we start doing more variations of the next one once one has run out. Yeah yeah and you said you're at four thousand you're on your way to ten thousand uh what does that mean in terms of how your team has changed a grown. Yeah I think that's you know classic jabbins paradox it's you know the cheaper something is the more you consume it and so you know our creative team is actually our fastest it's one of the teams where we use AI the most and it's also the fastest growing team you know we've sort of doubled the size of a company over the last few months and we've tripled the size of a creative team and and that's because there's a lot of things you can automate with AI but fundamentally ads which are like truly creative original with like fresh ideas those are like you know these new concepts of a search space which will perform really nicely and so yeah we've needed much more human creativity as we've scaled up the number of ads. Yeah and you and I have talked about this uh and also that's been our experience too our creative team's grown 2x just because has we have more throughput we need more humans to manage the creative process uh at least what are you seeing in terms of how AI is impacting the staffing of the teams. So I think it is an amazing help for like repetitive tasks like resizing localizing generating B-roll drafting copy like all the the things that are not necessarily the concept itself but are for example the small iterations and the adaptation that's one side of it where it's been extremely helpful and the other side uh which I love is the creative analysis aspect because when you have a huge creative volume, you want to understand what's working, what's not working, where do you have blind spots? And I have done it manually before I, it's super time consuming. So just being able to do it with a tool has been amazing because you can just speed up your creative cycles where you can make it with creative strategist and designers. Where I think we need the human eye is for taste, judgment and quality control. It's very easy to produce a high number of AI, not slop, but things are not super tasteful, things are uncanny valley, everyone can make a static with AI now, everyone can make a thousand static with AI. But what is human, what feels good, what will convert and sell your app? I think this is where you need the human eyes. So I think it doesn't mean a smaller creative team, it just means that it shifts the workload to more of that creative direction aspect, rather than the execution. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I also like that you emphasize so sing of the assets, the B-roll, the raw assets, because yeah, I can do a great job of that, but that's not a finished ad. And I've seen a lot of people talk about, oh, this makes ads completely, autonomously. And the results are not great. Even the models looking very, very realistic, you still need a lot of human eyes. And Elise, as you said, you need the taste to really understand what to run. I think that's very, very true. Again, to switch gears a bit to the funnel side of tanks. Elise, I'm just staying with you for now. With web funnel, so a lot of themes, private funnel, maybe they are like, oh, you know, this is not great. Let's just kill this. So what are some of the things that separate the teams that really make it work versus the ones that I like? All right, I'm just going to give up now. I think Emma is very cheesy to say, but it's ownership and troubleshooting. With web funnels, you have so many more things that can go wrong. It's not just like your creative, your app store, your app. You have different pages, you have the payment, you have the sign up, you have even the setup of the campaign if you're running it through meta, for example. So I think teams that will kind of give up early will run into a problem, won't see the data populating, won't see it working, and then they won't necessarily try to investigate every single part. So this is why to back to my first point, it's easier to run web funnels now, but you still need that dedication and you still need people that will dig into what's wrong and not float it to other teams when it gets a bit like a crazier technical. And it is, I mean, it's easier say than done for sure, but I think winning teams or people that make it work are people that troubleshoot and constantly try to improve small parts of the funnel and small parts of the flow to improve numbers. Yeah, and that's kind of like what you said about AI creative because it seems easy if you would read link then you're like, yes, this is easy, that funnels, yeah, creative, but ultimately there's just so many parts to this that you need to get right. Yeah, and Mike, what are you noticing as you work with a lot of your customers? So I think one thing is you've got so many different user flows that you can go down, whether it's what source you're coming from, are you going to go hit a landing page or are you going straight from a web ad to the store or something like that. So that's like there's these initial sort of questions that are marked as a bit of awesome self to terms of how they want to sort of funnel users towards actually downloading an app and then signing up for subscription etc. And then also like how are you going to measure that whole thing? We get a lot of people who are like, oh, we've got we've got web to app from a landing page like then it's going down and someone's downloading me out. But like we have no idea how someone's getting to the landing page because Google Analytics isn't telling us that and we can't bring the two together. So actually thinking about that full funnel measurement of how do you go to each stage, measure each step, know where someone originally came from. And then again, as I said earlier, like get out of platform hell so you know actually where that revenue came from and they have to type all of that back. It's not a completely straightforward flow. And so it does need probably an expert to talk you through it. If you're just going straight off on your own, it's not the easiest thing to implement straight away. And then also making sure that you can measure all the way along before you suddenly scale up. You don't want to start with spending loads of money on web ads if you haven't got all your measurement in place and you're very confident that it's working well. Yeah, yeah, 100 percent you need the conviction that your money is invested. And you know, I would also add you know, you even need an expert or like Elise said, you need to invest a lot of time and effort into understanding the different pieces and what's changing. Yeah, I would also add that we saw the strong correlation between number of iterations and pace of the iterations. The quicker iterations the team does and the more iterations they do, the more provisions they will grow in terms of a craving. Yeah, I recollect this was a graph. I noticed that your team put out Andre. I don't know if you want to talk about that and what you guys learned from that. Yeah, yeah, it's so like it's like dependency of like number of finals that they launch and the volume of revenue. So we do very, very direct relationship and if I might ask for a follow-up, what do you see are the most important types of tests that are run by teams that test a lot or the most important types like you notice. So basically you need to optimize the whole funnel and to find the right combination between your audience. It's mostly at creatives. Your storytelling is organ flow and monetization. So there's three parameters you need to find the right combination for all right segments. And so you need to iterate with these three parameters simultaneously, basically. The shelf for shelf for shelf for shelf. Yeah, I'm staying with you. Are there teams that should try to wrap the funnels? Are there teams of situations where it is a bad idea? I think that like the most underestimated thing is the payments because the payments part is it's a completely different thing that you have in an up store. You need to take care of like reference, chart breaks and payment optimizations to get the highest payments accepted rate. And it's it's stuff. It's like the tri-bit hole that would be missed at the very beginning. Yeah, and I think it's it's it has a like a big sum back on on conversion rate and the final performance and it's a complex thing to build you the whole the whole thing. So my suggestion here is like not try to do the good payment stack on your own. So it's a completely different. Right. Right. So you try to DIY everything. You might just find yourself in a rabbit hole. Yeah, especially the payment things that you know that could be a problem. Yeah. And uh yeah, Jacob, what are you noticing in terms of folks that maybe shouldn't be trying their funnels? Yeah, I think that one it really starts to make a lot more sense once you're above a million in revenue and your past the 15% commission on Apple. This is when uh kind of the proceeds can kind of start to pay off a lot more. That's usually also a good bar in terms of scale in terms of like paid marketing scale because you probably need to be okay losing like 10k or 20k a month on paid ads while you're testing and optimizing first like to their points like you need to iterate and you have to assume you know maybe the first few months you're you're not going to get it right and you're not going to be profitable. Uh and so this means that you have to have some type of larger margin. You have to have a growing business at a minimum level of scale before you can invest that learning period. And so I think that a lot of it because it's all driven by paid traffic, right. If you're having organic growth like you're probably not investing in paid marketing, you're probably doing fine. You don't have kind of the the row as constraints and so it's really okay. Are we above the 15% commission at 30%, we have the decent enough level of paid scale to kind of lose money while we're in that learning phase. Yeah yeah yeah and I tell people this is a lot like DSP in some sense that there is going to be their learning phase. Out of curiosity in that learning phase what would you see are some of the more comments. mistakes you see people make and are there ways that apps could accelerate that learning face in your experience? Yeah, so there's the two, well I think there's probably three elements of the learning face. There's the acquisition side like are your campaigns different in kind of what's successful to driving towards a web funnel. I can't speak to the different kind of setup on the paid side as much. I think everybody else can probably speak to that better than me, but then there's the actual funnel of the onboarding flow. Like does, can you sell the product successfully? Like a lot of times you're moving from app to web. Like in your app, you can easily show the value in the aha moment in your product because it's the product. We're on web. It's like you're still often directing people into the app. So how do you sell the product well? Probably to start like look at other competitors and like I think we all hate saying just copy somebody else to start, but oftentimes this is really what you need to do. And then try to differentiate and iterate beyond just copying to kind of build your own value. And then there's the paywall and kind of monetization tactics. Again, figure out the paywall monetization tactics that's working decently for other similar apps. And so looking at what's working well in the market is usually the fastest place to start. If you have a long onboarding funnel, you can have your health and wellness education category in your app today. You probably do. A lot of times taking that as the one into web or work all right, you've already proven that. That this kind of converts decently. And then a lot of times it's how do we improve and iterate faster on web with this funnel to kind of convert and motivate and sell the product better. And then you often iterate on kind of the monetization, the different lengths of products, the value of the products, usually is different on web. Yeah. And this basically echoes what Elise said earlier in that there's just so many moving parts. And that's what's contributing to the learning phase. You can shock, so I killed it.