How to Increase App Upgrade Revenue with A/B Testing

ChordShaker, an iOS app that makes learning guitar chords easy and fun, increased their revenue from upgrades by 20.1% with an A/B test of a simple copy change. With Apptimize, this change took only a few minutes to set up and was deployed to their users immediately, which meant that ChordShaker was able to iterate and optimize at lightening speed.

ChordShaker has a pop-up that appeared at a certain point in the user’s learning progress that prompted the user to upgrade to pro for $7.99. Their general hypothesis was that the upgrade could be increased by either changing the copy of the headline of the message, the bullet points, the button, or a combination of all three. The first test they ran implemented their first hunch:

The new variant (Yes, Let’s Rock) performed terribly. ChordShaker learned from this experience immediately. They learned that they could not tell what about this change turned users off because too many things were changed at once.

With Apptimize, Chordshaker didn’t need to wait until the next development release cycle to test their next idea, so they immediately set up their next A/B test:

Unlock for Life increased clicks on that button by 28.8% as compared to Upgrade Now.

Chorshaker had set up this experiment using the visual editor, meaning that they created the copy change and set the button click as the their metric without programming and released the A/B test to their users in between app release cycles. Apptimize then automatically detected that this click metric was associated with an event in the app that triggers when the purchase is completed, so it created the next metric in the funnel automatically.

Because the actual rate of purchase (not just clicks to purchase) was tracked, we also know that the new copy increased ChordShaker’s actual revenue from upgrades by 20.1%.

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