Marcus Burke on web2app, Meta, SKAN, and why free trials suck so freakishly hard

Are free trials for subscription products the worst possible idea ever? Does Meta have so much diversity in ad placements you pretty much have to spend as much time choosing which to target as which ad partners to use? And is web2app hitting the sweet spot right now? All this and more in the latest Growth Masterminds with none other than Marcus Burke.

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(Unless you want to see our pretty faces.)

Who is Marcus Burke?

Welcome to the potpourri episode of Growth Masterminds where we talk about everything. Or at least everything we can think on the spur of the moment.

If you don’t know Marcus Burke, you’ve missed out. He’s a long-time growth marketer who started in web browser gaming (!!!), did UA for the big German game publisher InnoGames, switched to subscription apps like Blinkist, the book-summarizing startup with over 24 million subscribers, and helped grow Rapchat, the music creation platform with over 10 million artists. 

In 2022 he hung up a shingle as a UA and monetization consultant, and ever since he’s been helping apps grow while sharing a wealth of free insights on LinkedIn.

Why free trials suck so much

Look, your mileage may vary and they may work in your app, but free trials can be a massive problem for growth marketers who want to scale fast and have the cash to throw at it.

The reason: bad data back to ad platforms’ optimization algorithms.

Marcus Burke explains why:

“Especially for apps that are driven heavily by paid user acquisition, if you want to spend on Meta or Google, then you will be running campaigns that are targeted and optimized based on a machine learning algorithm. So in the end, if you want these campaigns to succeed for you and to make good business decisions, they need to be fed with signals that allow them to get a good understanding of your business. 

And a trial for many, many businesses is not that signal because as you start out, your trial conversion might be as low as like 30%. Everyone working in subscription apps knows there is this cohort which will kind of start a trial and then switch it off right away because they don’t want it to renew into a paid subscription, so they never really have the intent of even paying, they just want to check out the paid version of the app.

“We did some testing with that when I was at Blinkist and we saw that that cohort … we couldn’t convert them: if we sent them discounts, if we sent them anything they didn’t want to pay. They’re not payers. 

So in the end, that’s the signal you’re sending to Meta when you’re optimizing for that trial.”

Again, your mileage may vary — Burke concedes that this is a bit of a “hot take” — but for many apps, especially new apps and just-starting-to-grow apps, this is the experience. Bigger, more established apps from massive brands might (repeat: might) operate differently.

This challenge is, of course, exacerbated by SKAN: partial, late, slow data for ad optimization. It’s partially solved by platform probabilistic tools like Advanced AEM on Meta and Advanced SAN on TikTok, but not as completely or as well as the pre-ATT world of endless IDFAs.

The lesson: help ad partners optimize ad campaigns for payers by building for that immediate outcome … AKA a sale. Especially when you’re small and don’t want to waste all your ad budget optimizing for people who don’t convert.

Meta is so meta, it’s multiple ad partners all in 1

Everyone knows Meta is Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger (and don’t forget Threads, although Meta is so rich it doesn’t need to monetize this 200-million-user platform yet).

And everyone knows Reels is very different than in-feed static or video ads on Facebook.

But Meta has at least 23 different ad placements across its owned properties as well as the Meta Audience Network. So you have to treat Meta as multiple opportunities, not just 1. And it’s not just about the ad type or the creative style: you’re literally targeting different audiences and demographics based on which creative you select.

Again, let’s hear it from Marcus:

“Meta will take decisions on where your money is spent based on the signals that you’re sending them, but also based on the creative that you’re using.

So different placements for Meta do in the end lent themselves more heavily to a certain creative type, for example. Reels or stories are made for a short form video UGC style … so … anything that is close to like a TikTok while something like the Facebook feed is much more reliant on static creatives: they’re like 1×1, 4×5, you can even try 16×9. 

So you can see how in the end, uploading a different creative to an ad set will result in a different placement mix, and with that placement mix then comes a different demographic.”

(You gotta love how Americans and Canadians say MAKE decisions while Europeans say TAKE decisions. I still haven’t figured out why, but I blame England.)

That matters, because older people are more likely to be payers. And because some apps or services just appeal to different demographics of younger or older people. Focus on Reels, you’re gonna get a younger demographic. Focus on in-feed ads, and your audience will be older. (And, likely, richer.)

But there’s a key factor here for you to pay attention to when you look at your ad campaign performance.

“When you look at campaign performance, don’t just look at the blended numbers and see, okay, my cost per trial was 15 bucks,” Burke says. “You really want to know where did that money go so that you get a better understanding of the audience behind this.”

Static image ads for retargeting? Yep …

You can’t do retargeting on iOS anymore, right? 

Sort of wrong.

You can actually do pretty cheap static image ads that, Burke says, work pretty well for retargeting despite having none of the technological bells and whistles — OK, data sharing — that made retargeting what it was, pre-ATT.

Especially when you tailor the ad creative to different stages of the customer/player/user journey. And in a static image, you can control exactly how it will appear to the audience who sees it.

From Marcus Burke:

“I never set up retargeting campaigns like you used to back in the days where you had retargeting audiences and try to kind of narrow down who’s been in your app and hasn’t purchased, or who’s been on your website and hasn’t done anything.”

The way I think about it is just using creative for targeting and then if you create an ad that talks about a common objection that people have who have interacted with your product before but then didn’t purchase and you make it branded, then you can be sure whoever interacts with that will be someone who has basically had that objection and seen your brand before.”

This might be more expensive, but of course your static ads will also be original first-contact advertising for those who have not engaged at all with your brand.

So it’s a sort of dual-purpose campaign.

Marcus Burke: web2app is getting BIG

Web2app does a lot of good things for you:

• Lets you tell a bigger story than you can in an app listing
• Allows you to connect with a customer 1:1, instead of via Apple or Google
• Lets you use web retargeting capabilities
• Expands your list of potential customers
• Puts your conversion funnel into your own control: you can edit it instantly if you wish, unlike a custom product page or app store listing
• Helps you capture more revenue by avoiding app store fees
• And much more …

At Singular, we’ve been seeing more and more apps turn to web2app flows recently, and Burke says that aligns with his experience too.

“I’m actually not sure when or how it exploded,” he says. “It was really, really big when SKAN first came out and … now, a few years later, it feels like everyone is hyped up again.”

One of the biggest benefits, says Burke, is full control over the onboarding experience: much more freedom to play around with different options.

Another benefit: they work for industries that are restricted on the App Store and Google Play, like fintech or medical apps, or apps for kids that have very strict guidelines around what you can or cannot do.

So much more Marcus in the full episode

If you haven’t subscribed to Growth Masterminds yet, today is a good day to fix that. (Check out your main options here, but we’re on basically every major podcasting platform, including YouTube.)

In this episode, Marcus Burke and I chat about:

• 00:00 Introduction to Growth Masterminds
• 00:43 Meet Marcus Burke
• 04:49 The Impact of Free Trials on Business
• 10:03 Understanding Meta’s Multiple Channels
• 15:09 The Role of Static Images in Advertising
• 17:19 The Rise of Web Apps
• 18:47 Innovative MarTech Solutions
• 19:33 Web vs. App Onboarding
• 20:11 Effective Web Funnel Strategies
• 24:18 Challenges in Attribution and Measurement
• 30:03 The Future of Attribution
• 37:31 Optimizing Signal for Better Performance
• 40:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts