Custom product pages: 23% more installs on the same spend
One of the last mechanical conversion wins left in app marketing, plus an honest note on why Apple's headline number will not be yours.
the short answer: keyword-matched custom product pages produced 23% more downloads than default store pages on identical spend and identical keywords, measured across more than a million apple ads ad groups. it is boring, mechanical work with one of the clearest returns available in app marketing, and most teams have not done it.
The number, decomposed
the 23% is not one effect, it is two smaller ones stacking:
- tap-through rate rose from 9.7% to 10.9%
- tap-to-install rose from 63.9% to 70.1%
more people tapped the ad, and more of those who tapped installed. the second is the bigger contributor and it is entirely a store-page effect.
Why it works
your store page is a landing page, and default store pages are written for everybody.
somebody searching for a specific job to be done sees a page describing your product in general. a custom product page matched to that keyword group shows screenshots and copy about the thing they typed. it is exactly the same logic as matching an ad to a landing page, applied to a surface most teams treat as fixed.
The honest caveat about Apple’s number
apple’s own published figure is a 2.5 percentage point conversion improvement against a 1.6% baseline, which they present as a 156% relative increase.
that is a best case, not a forecast. relative percentages against a low baseline are dramatic and fragile. the million-ad-group figure of 23% is the more useful planning number, and even that is an average across advertisers who did the work properly.
if someone quotes you 156% while pitching this service, they are quoting apple’s marketing rather than a benchmark.
What actually to build
start with your top three to five keyword themes, not your top keywords. group by intent: people looking for the same outcome in different words belong on one page.
change the first two screenshots. that is where nearly all the effect lives. the rest of the page matters far less than teams assume.
match the language exactly. if the theme is “track my runs”, the screenshot caption says track your runs. this feels crude and it works.
measure per page, not in aggregate. the whole point is that different intents behave differently, and an averaged number hides which page is carrying the result.
Where it sits in the priority list
below retention and below creative volume, honestly.
if your first-renewal rate is broken, fixing store conversion sends more people into a leaking product. i wrote about that ordering in why your AI app loses nine in ten subscribers before the first renewal.
but if acquisition is working and you want a mechanical improvement that does not require new creative or more budget, this is close to the top of the remaining list. it is also one of the few levers where the work is finite: you build the pages once and they keep working.
The wider shift it belongs to
custom product pages and in-app events are now ranking inputs rather than only conversion tools, alongside rating recency and behavioural signals like retention and session frequency. two apps with identical metadata rank differently based on what happens after the install.
that is the real story of app store discovery in 2026, and it means the store page is no longer the end of the acquisition funnel. it is part of the ranking system.
if you want your store pages audited against your actual keyword themes, let’s talk.
sources: splitmetrics state of apple ads 2026, covering 1M+ ad groups · apple developer documentation on custom product pages · app store algorithm reporting, 2026.