Paywall A/B testing is crucial for unlocking subscription app revenue growth. However, conducting rapid experiments can be challenging, especially when restricted by app release cycles and the workload of the engineering and product teams. In this guide, we discuss the way to avoid these limitations and enable quick and flexible experimentation.
Usually you need to be able to run experiments around several main paywall elements, including the following:
You can expect to experiment with these elements on the ongoing basis. Since you already know what the elements are, there is a way to set up your paywall based on a template to enable quick experimentation without distracting significant resources of your team.
Let’s start with the guide on using the paywall templates for this purpose. And after that, we’ll take a closer look at what tools you can use to launch and accurately measure monetization hypotheses.
Your paywall needs to convey the benefits of the premium plan, be aligned with your users onboarding experience, and persuade users to start a trial or subscription. The main visual element, like an image or video, needs to be highly relevant with the content of the app. The text elements can be as simple as a short description of the premium plan or more complex with the detailed bullet points highlighting premium features.
Below is an example of a paywall demonstrating these points, that is simple yet pretty powerful, and that can be used as a template. This example contains the following key elements:
You can create the template based on this layout. Each of the important elements can be controlled, changed, and tested individually to optimize paywall’s performance in the future.
Paywall Template 1:
It’s okay to start with one paywall template as shown above, but as already mentioned, you are likely to need more freedom in experimentation to address all hypotheses your team can come up with. So, you don’t have to limit yourself with one template. You can think through cases where you need to present several payment options to a user, highlight the details of the premium features, or explain how the free trial works. Then you can create several templates with different UI layouts, keeping in mind the main requirements.
Below we are showing 3 additional popular subscription app paywall layouts. Let’s have a look at them one by one.
Paywall Template 2:
Paywall Template 3:
Paywall Template 4
After creating the templates and adding them to your app, it’s time to decide which template to use, what elements to show, and test any configuration for any of the templates.
By having several paywall templates as shown above and controlling their elements, you can create a virtually unlimited set of variations to test. Here are just a few of the possible variants for each of the template:
From this point onward, you can launch monetization experiments using any tool that you prefer. In the following sections we provide guidance on configuring experiments with these paywalls using Qonversion.
Qonversion’s Experiments gives you a simple tool to control the elements on a paywall variations and run experiments quickly. You can set up key-value pairs for every element:
Qonversion SDK returns the JSON with key-value pairs when you need to show the paywall in the app. For example, below you can see this paywall configured with:
Based on the SDK payload a user in group A can be presented with paywal 1A, and a user in group B can see 1B variant or any other required variant.
To launch a test, make sure that you have Qonversion SDK installed in your app. Then navigate to the Experiments page in your Qonversion account and select “Create a new experiment”.
The first step here is to formulate the hypothesis, write it down for your future reference, and choose the primary metric for optimisation.
Some of the metrics you can set as primary experiment goal:
You will be able to see all of the metrics above in the test results, so don’t stress to much on what metric to pick here.
Next to configure the JSON payload for each experiment variant, follow this experiments documentation.
Qonversion allows you to segment users and allocate traffic share for A/B testing. This enables targeting specific user segments and control the distribution of traffic between different variations of your paywall.
You are almost ready to launch. One more thing before starting the experiment is to check that each variant looks as expected. You can easily do it using variant ID in Qonversion.
You do need full visibility into what happens to users after they start a trial or a subscription to be able to make any conclusions in case of subscription monetization model. Qonversion A/B testing module uses Qonversion’s best-in-class precise subscription analytics. So you have the full details of the performance in each experiment group and can make correct conclusions.
Let’s quickly recap what we discussed above:
By
Kate | Jun 22 