Practitioner pattern · Marcus Burke (Marcus Burke consulting, InnoGames, Blinkist)
Say 'app' or show a demo so the App Store isn't a surprise
Most winning app ads do this; installs suffer otherwise
What they did
What happened
In their words
Marcus Burke - How to Build a $2M/Month App (Copy Me)
… because they think hey this looks cool let's do it for our app but it doesn't really make sense and that happens between industries so everyone was very inspired by the d2c e-com industry for the longest time for all the kind of talking head content they were doing and it's always like people showing a product and oh my god and like a like a strong hook and then just kind of walking people through pain points and positioning the product as the
solution, which I feel isn't the best format for apps. And I don't see it working a lot. And the same applies to whether someone is sending people to the web or the app. Like that's those ads tend to look inherently different. One thing on the app side of things is that you want to prepare people for that they are going to land on the app store. Otherwise your install rate tends to suffer. So don't try not to be an app, make it very clear so that the funnel holds up. So a lot of the very successful ads I see out there they either mention app in the copy they show an app demo of some form
just so to set the right context already that's an interesting insight already just like prepare people that they're going to land on the app store I guess that's like just from my perspective when I'm scrolling ads or Instagram or whatever and I see an ad it seems interesting I click the call to action and then the interstitial thing pops up or like pushes me to the app store it's like super super jarring actually like sometimes I don't want to …
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More from this episode
- Remake one winning ad ~400 times with new hooks and use casesWell over $1M spent on the concept
- Run short videos with a wall of text in the audience's own pain wordsOne of the main working formats; no numbers
- Feed 10-20 Reddit threads to Claude to write ads in your audience's wordsHis standard process; no numbers
- Make ad variants with AI: create an image first, then turn it into videoUsed for clients; not compared with creator videos
- Mix app demo clips into everyday videos, like a chore list for ADHD
- Run ads that look like normal posts; let a web page do the selling
- Send Meta ad clicks to your blog instead of the App StoreClaims to be one of the first to scale this way; no numbers
- Compare cost per trial with trial-to-paid rate for each age groupAges 25-34 cost the most; older users looked under-served
- Give ads that deliver differently, like mostly Facebook feed, their own ad set
- Split ads into groups by format and message, each with its own budget
- On a small budget, put all ads in one group and pick winners weekly
- Have every ad team member interview one user a weekTaught the team most of how to write ad copy; no numbers
- Post on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week
- Fix the store page, onboarding and paywall alongside paid ads
Tags: meta, creative, app-install, install-rate, cta