Pray.com · Christian prayer and devotional app
Test lots of ad ideas borrowed from games and dating apps, not just your category
Guest says it produces a diversified creative mix that scales campaigns
Workedpaid-social
What they did
Built an in-house creative playbook first, then hired an agency to run it; Pray.com is among the agency's most aggressive clients on creative testing. Inspiration comes from other industries (gaming, dating) rather than their own category. Targeting is left broad so Meta's algorithm finds the audience, from the curious to weekly churchgoers; Meta stays the core channel after testing Google, TikTok and others because it is the most consistent post-IDFA.
What happened
Guest says this leads to a well-diversified creative mix that is helping scale campaigns; Meta delivers the most consistent results of the channels tried.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Building Trust with Users to Drive Revenue and Retention – Ryan Beck, Pray.com“Now we work with a great a agency. They run it, and we've developed kind of a playbook prior to working with them that we we like to run. And so we are probably one of their most aggressive clients when it comes to creative testing.”
“We look across industries. We aren't looking at, "Oh, how does a media companies?" We're looking at gaming. We're looking at dating, all these different apps.”
“And we're on, you know, Google platforms and and TikTok, and things like that, but we find that the consistency is with the Meta platform.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Pray.com: Visit each church in person, often more than once, to sign up its membersFacebook-level retention, but too slow to grow; dropped for consumer subscriptions
- Pray.com: Turn pastors' popular daily prayer posts into morning, noon and night prayersGreat engagement; became the main feature and the path into subscriptions
- Pray.com: Make faith versions of Calm-style content: bedtime Bible stories and sleep psalmsGuest says it made monetizing easy; no numbers
- Pray.com: Rebuild the app so paywalls and onboarding can be tested without app updatesEnabled rapid test cycles that showed what could be monetized; no numbers
- Pray.com: Stop asking for a phone number at signupPhone field hurt subscription conversion; removing it helped monetization (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Put most of a big Meta budget behind one winning adFailed: Meta pulled the ad in peak season and CAC became untenable
- Pray.com: Move ads from Facebook image posts to Reels video earlyVideo ads didn't land at first; Reels is now where most spend runs
- Pray.com: Run TV and radio ads to reach older people who trust TV more than online adsWorked well pre- and during the pandemic; TV agencies were blown away (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Measure TV and online ads together with a statistical model, not click trackingComfortable running on statistical models since before ATT; no numbers
- Pray.com: Reply to every piece of feedback, and have founders call upset usersHow they handle 'faith should be free' pushback; no numbers
- Pray.com: Keep one shared roadmap for product, engineering and marketingGuest's key lesson; keeps a lean team aligned (no numbers)
- Pray.com: Ask a few quiz questions at signup to tailor the prayer planGuest says quiz onboarding has worked well; theirs is still light
- Pray.com: Add ads and one-time purchases like books on top of the subscription