Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Judge ads by how many trials pay, not by how cheap the trials are
Clickbait ads brought cheap trials but a huge drop in trial-to-paid
Mixedpaid-social
What they did
Kept Meta in-house so someone passionate about the product writes ads that don't over-promise. Tested click-baity ads that cheaply drive clicks and trial starts, but judged them on trial-to-paid; those showed a big drop. Ads built around a specific person's pain points and how the app uniquely solves them brought higher-quality trials.
What happened
Clickbait creatives had a huge drop in trial-to-paid; pain-point creatives brought much higher-quality traffic.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science“We've tested a lot of ads that are more like, I guess, click baity-style or encourage a click and encourage someone to start a trial, but we can quickly see from the trial to paid that this is not the user that resonates the best with the app.”
“That's a big reason why we decided to actually do Meta in-house rather than choose an agency”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- Built With Science: Mention the app softly mid-video, and tell user transformation storiesStory videos bring more trials than broad educational ones; old videos give steady monthly trials
- Built With Science: Hire clippers to post long-video clips on Reels and TikTok, then reuse winning hooksSome clips go viral; their hooks now shape new long videos
- Built With Science: Scale Meta ads without the famous founder: B-roll, testimonials and AI image adsScaled from zero to ~$100K/month (host figure); 25% trial-to-paid
- Built With Science: Spend the first month of ads just learning your paid trial-to-paid rateTook about a month to get a baseline to set the allowed cost per customer
- Built With Science: Build a dashboard that confirms which trials came from Meta, and send Meta your best users
- Built With Science: Send ad clicks to a long personal quiz on your website, not the App StoreQuiz beat direct-to-store; now gets ~90% of traffic; same quiz in the iOS app did worse
- Built With Science: Sell the app as a trainer in your pocket, not a tracker, at $189 a yearKept $189/year since launch; 35-40% organic and ~25% Meta trial-to-paid
- Built With Science: Offer 15% off each if users add a workout buddy to their plan15% of trial starts add a buddy; higher order value and better retention
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- Built With Science: List every reason a page fails before brainstorming fixes, and write each test down~70% of tests fail first time; written notes turn failures into later winners
- Built With Science: Release new features quietly, and announce only once usage proves themFounder says it gives cleaner reads than email-hyped launches; no numbers
- Built With Science: Build an AI coach trained on the creator's videos that reads each user's own dataOne of customers' favorite features, founder says; no numbers
- Built With Science: Team up with researchers and run studies with your own app usersFounder says it adds credibility; no numbers
- Built With Science: Show only the yearly plan first, with a day-by-day trial timeline and reminder promiseAnnual picks rose from ~60% to 75-80%, with no price change
- Built With Science: Add more explanation to the pricing page to make the value clearerHurt conversion; extra text overwhelmed buyers who were ready to start
- Built With Science: Offer 20% off to pay now, with a toggle back to the 14-day free trialQuite negative, even with a 30-day money-back guarantee
- Built With Science: Make both the free trial and the pay-now discount sound goodVery strong lift after a few weeks, vs the version that shamed the trial
- Built With Science: Film a months-long science experiment video with real people in a rented studioOne of the year's top videos; decent but not major app conversion