Blinkist · B2C · book summary app
Send Taboola and Outbrain ads to a page that reads like an article
Blinkist cracked this channel; Facebook traffic gets a different flow; no numbers
Workedweb-to-apppaid-sociallanding-page
What they did
Blinkist buys paid content placements on Taboola and Outbrain (ads next to news content) and sends them to a web page that looks like an article, matching what the reader expects after clicking, rather than its full web onboarding. Traffic from Facebook gets a completely different web experience. The guest copied these tactics in 2016.
What happened
Blinkist 'particularly cracked' Taboola/Outbrain with this.
- Stage
- Scale (scaling)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Understanding When to Use Web2App and How to Do It Well — Thomas Petit, Independent App Consultant“they particularly cracked uh presence on Taboola and Outbrain, what I call paid content marketing”
“they drive to a page that looks like an article and brings like it's a completely different way of doing web to app”
“And then when the traffic is coming from Facebook, uh the experience that you have in the website of of Blinkist is completely different from the one if you click on an Outbrain ad.”
Related topics
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More from Blinkist
All 4 Blinkist tacticsMore from this episode
- Noom: Run a 50-screen onboarding quiz on the web for a high-intent productStill works for Noom; the guest doubts it would for a quick-use app
- Photoroom: Put 10+ of the app's features on your website as free tools, no loginGuest thinks it pays off long term; no internal numbers
- Ladder: Send ad clicks to a web survey and flag likely payers to TikTok and InstagramWorking really well, host says, even with fuzzy web-to-install tracking
- Open with a fun web quiz or mini-game before pitching a serious appChosen over building a second app; no results given
- Run 'What's your IQ?' ads into an easy web quiz, then send people to the appA success, guest says; asking for payment on the web would have hurt
- Let small teams pay on the web with invoices in the company's nameTeams wanted to pay regardless of price; no results given
- When web subscribers cancel, offer half their money back to stay subscribedMany cancellers took it; profitable, good feedback and decent retention
- 8fit: Send Taboola and Outbrain ads straight to the App StoreStore install rate stayed very low; web funnels worked better
- Run web and app-install ads side by side on Meta to reach more peopleTotal reach significantly higher than either alone; app-only can plateau at 2M of 20M
- Buy Google Search and YouTube ads to your website to control keywords and channelsReaches a different audience than App campaigns; no numbers
- Bid more for new high-end Android phones, less for older devicesPremium Android converts close to iPhone; older versions convert worse
- Sell on the Amazon Appstore to reach Amazon tablet ownersNot as big as the App Store but a significant revenue source
- Put a simple landing page between the ad and the storeWorked for one game; the same setup failed for several of the guest's apps
- Change the first-day experience so it shows within 24 hours who will payGame companies did this to survive the 24-hour SKAdNetwork window; no numbers
- Charge some users on the web and send others to in-app purchaseFinds new revenue highs per segment; no numbers