Web quiz or straight to the App Store?

TL;DR

• Built With Science sends ~90% of paid traffic to a long, personalised web quiz; in a direct test, the quiz converted much better than sending ads to the App Store.¹²
• An almost identical quiz inside the iOS app still lost to the web; on Android the in-app quiz converted on par with web — the gap was specific to App Store traffic.³⁴
• Simply was 100% app campaigns; web campaigns now bring ~20% of Simply Piano revenue, and the web flow made Facebook work for the first time.⁵⁶
• Why: social users are in a lean-back mindset; jumping straight to “download and start learning” is too much friction, while a quiz moves them through consideration.⁷⁸
• Treat web as audience expansion, not fee avoidance — Jacob Eiting says the net gain from saved store fees is “pretty close to marginal”.⁹¹⁰

Details

What the quiz does (Ethan Ethier). Educates about the product, overcomes objections, raises perceived value, shows how personalised the plan will be — and the answers actually build the user’s plan in the app.²

Holistic flow (Yoav Sharon). The win comes from carrying the ad’s message through onboarding to the paywall: someone clicking a parent-targeted ad gets an onboarding about their kid’s needs. Don’t replicate the App Store experience on the web; set expectations so the paywall’s value is clear.⁷¹¹

Who responds. David Barnard relays Rise Science’s experience: web funnels worked almost exclusively on Facebook, attributed to older users who are less “app-native” and need more warming up.¹²

Things only the web can do. Simply markets its multi-app bundle on the web (“welcome to Simply — access all apps”), impossible when an app-install ad sends someone to one store page.¹³

How Simply decides. No fixed rule — creative × placement × destination (store vs web) are tested together per app and maturity stage.⁶

Disagreements / caveats

• Ethan’s hypothesis for why direct-store traffic converts worse: store-direct users today may be higher-intent organic types who don’t need the quiz — he plans to retest.³
• RevenueCat’s own test (linked in the BwS episode description) found web subscriptions reduced take-home revenue ~6% in one case — web isn’t automatically better; test.
• Compare Why run web2app funnels (and when not to) for the fee/cash-flow case and Steve P. Young’s warning about bolting web checkout onto an in-app paywall.

See also

• Why run web2app funnels (and when not to), Web2app funnel structure, step by step
• Built With Science — scaling Meta from $0 to ~$100k/month on top of a big YouTube audience
• Ethan Ethier, Yoav Sharon

Footnotes

1. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 00:00 — Ethan Ethier ↩

2. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 24:51 — Ethan Ethier ↩ ↩²

3. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 26:23 — Ethan Ethier ↩ ↩²

4. Why 90% of their paid traffic goes to a quiz, not the App Store @ 27:09 — Ethan Ethier ↩

5. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 17:34 — Yoav Sharon ↩

6. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 23:14 — Yoav Sharon ↩ ↩²

7. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 20:42 — Yoav Sharon ↩ ↩²

8. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 21:30 — Yoav Sharon ↩

9. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 24:48 — Yoav Sharon ↩

10. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 28:49 — Jacob Eiting ↩

11. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 25:37 — Yoav Sharon ↩

12. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 24:01 — David Barnard ↩

13. How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply @ 19:07 — Yoav Sharon ↩