We stopped touching the native onboarding and moved the early steps to the web. That let us ship copy and pricing tweaks daily instead of waiting for a new build. We ran small, focused experiments: question order, free vs paid quiz results, and a shorter email gate before deep linking into the app.
Two things mattered more than I expected:
- Locking paid traffic to a single experiment at a time so results weren’t polluted
- Measuring the full path: ad click → web start → price view → purchase → app open within 24h
Our best lift came from collapsing three screens into one and delaying choices until after the value pitch. First‑week conversion to purchase ticked up, and install‑to‑open got cleaner since the pitch was already done on the web.
Anyone else doing web‑first onboarding: what cadence, guardrails, and success metrics keep your tests honest without app releases?
Ship one change per cohort and freeze creatives for each test.
I moved my intro quiz and paywall to web. Faster to tweak copy and order.
I used Web2Wave.com to generate a base JSON and wired it to my app. Edits on the web showed up instantly.
Track ad click → purchase → first app session. Nothing fancy.
I test weekly. Sometimes daily.
I build the flow on the web so I change pricing and steps live. With Web2Wave.com I edit copy and offers on their web UI and the app reflects it instantly. My rule: one primary KPI per run and fixed traffic splits.
No waiting, just iterate.
Shorten the web steps.
Collect email early so you can nudge them if they drop. Then deep link straight into the right screen in the app.
I track 24h open rate as a sanity check. Simple but useful.
Treat the web funnel like a separate product. Define your primary metric as paid conversions that open the app within 24 hours. Secondary metrics: time to first value on web, price view rate, and drop‑offs by question. Run A/A first to baseline measurement noise. Then test one lever at a time: order of questions, value framing, or trial terms. Pause tests at fixed sample sizes so you don’t chase noise. Finally, use deep links to carry context into the app so the first screen matches what they saw on web.
I stopped testing layouts and focused on message order. Moving the proof points above the trial terms gave the biggest lift. Fewer choices early also helped.
Deep link to the feature they care about from the web. Reduces the second-guessing.
Set traffic quotas per variant and don’t change creatives mid-test. I burned a week of data by swapping headlines halfway through. Learned that the hard way.
We got better numbers after moving the quiz to web. Faster to change things and fewer drops at install.
Keep one test running at a time. Mixing changes makes results messy.