Prequel is a world-famous photo and video editing app with multiple presets used by hundreds of thousands of users, including celebrities.
When the app was just launched and the Prequel team had the first user base, they realized that they needed to move on and run mobile A/B tests to check various concepts. Prequel started working with ad traffic, validating different hypotheses and approaches to the app store product page design. It quickly became clear that it is rather tough to conduct tests and analyze the results without additional tools.
“The Prequel app is closely related to photo and video editing, where nothing stands still and we do our utmost to always be at the forefront of the latest trends. Through mobile A/B testing of visual assets, we validate our hypotheses about potential user reactions to our ideas and values. We discovered that the SplitMetrics platform is the best possible option. This is an important tool for out-of-store A/B testing experiments that helps us optimize our app listing on the App Store and Google Play without risking to drop the conversion rate.”
Conversion rate increase is by far the most important indicator the Prequel team look at in terms of A/B testing. But apart from that, the smallest detail and cause-and-effect relationships are also important. For example, has conversion increased because Prequel balanced the product and the marketing, or this is because the team chose the right visuals or delivered value? SplitMetrics, with in-depth analytics it provides, helps Prequel find answers to these and many other questions.
Prequel mainly works on the optimization of screenshots and video previews, since the app itself is inextricably linked with the visuals. Prequel provides users with a large number of effects and filters, as well as internal tools that the team can market in different ways and thus find valuable insights.
Once the Client had a hypothesis that video may not always have a good effect on conversion, and that it should be replaced with screenshots. Prequel ran a test on SplitMetrics and found out that without a video, the product page performance decreases: users are more reluctant to stay on the app’s listing page, scroll through screenshots less and interact with the app after viewing them. So it became obvious that video is an essential element for the Prequel’s product page, and the company turned to SplitMetrics Customer Success Team for further advice.
In addition to the insight about the importance of video in our case, the Prequel team had another idea for A/B testing: they noticed that users do not watch the video for too long, they spend literally 5-7 seconds on watching, and also do not scroll through screenshots much. And since the first position on the app store product page is taken by a freeze frame from the video, the team decided to optimize it.
Before running an experiment, Prequel used just a screenshot from the app without any additional captions, so as not to cover the content and in order to better showcase the interface. But then the Client decided to add a caption to this still frame, explaining that Prequel is a photo & video editing app. In subsequent iterations, the team again conducted an experiment, which unambiguously confirmed the need to replace the old video cover with a new one. It hasn’t been very long since the team updated the format, but the first results are already encouraging – improvement is around 75%.
We, as a photo and video editing app, often release many new effects and filters for processing the content of our users. Advertising of new features and top retouched photos in terms of frequency does not lag behind the releases. We test different positioning of all of this with SplitMetrics. Sometimes there are situations for the product and the marketing, different things perform well. That’s why for us a page in the app store becomes an important point of contact between the product and marketing, where we try to keep the user in a kind of averaged compromise context. SplitMetrics helps us to find the points of convergence between product and marketing parts.
