This work happened during my time at Studio Mosaic, together with the Studio Mosaic team. The strategy, what we learned and the results came from that collaboration: my thinking and the team's knowledge and work, side by side.
the leak wasn'tin the ads.
Miraj makes Islamic stories for kids, and parents were happy to pay for them. But every extra dollar on ads was bringing back less. Here's what was actually going on, and what fixed it.
decent numbers, stuck growth
The app had real revenue and paying families. Scaling it profitably was the problem.
three things holding it back
The paywall had a hole in it.
It was a soft paywall, and a lot of the stories were free. Families could use the app for a month or two without ever starting a trial or paying.
The paying parents weren't where we expected.
Everyone assumed the UAE, India and Pakistan would convert best. The data pointed somewhere else entirely.
Search was the missing channel.
Parents look for this kind of app in the App Store, and there was almost no Apple Search Ads activity to catch them. We built it out on the most relevant keywords.
fewer trials, better trials
We tested two ways of closing the gap.
A hard paywall
Families had to start a trial to keep reading.
Same paywall, less free content
Keep the paywall as it was, but lock the stories from the second chapter on.
the data surprised us
The buyers were families living abroad who wanted their kids to stay close to their heritage and culture. They cared about that more than the price.
So we moved budget toward those countries and built the targeting around those families.
Each country got its own price.
We tracked lifetime value country by country and set prices to match. The strongest markets didn't need discounts to convert.
They tripled our sales and boosted our organic traffic and conversion rates, which further resulted in lowered ad spend.Adiba Ataeva, Founder, Miraj · from her review of Studio Mosaic on Clutch
three things I still use
Check the paywall. A leak there makes every ad look worse than it is.
Let paid data tell you who your customer is. It's often not who you'd guess.
Price by what each region is actually worth, not one global number.
let's find where your growth is leaking
A Growth Diagnostic looks at your ads, funnel, pricing and tracking together, and tells you what to fix first. Five working days.
Studio Mosaic project, June 2020 to July 2021, delivered together with the Studio Mosaic team. Results are from Studio Mosaic's published case study for Miraj. The quote is from the founder's public review of Studio Mosaic on Clutch.