2022 Holiday Monetization Guide: Boost Your Strategy and Acquire New Users

The holidays are approaching, which means it’s time to start gearing up your monetization strategy for the busiest shopping season of the year. The Meta Launch Management team wants to make sure that you’re in a position to succeed, and in the spirit of giving, they’ve created a holiday monetization guide to help you plan and execute your holiday schedule. Below we dive into topics that can shape your holiday season success, including timely and engaging metadata updates, promotions, key dates to know, and more.

Starting your holiday monetization plan early will help you capitalize on upcoming merchandisable moments, and it’s important to be aware of deadlines for submitting metadata updates. Here are some key dates you can plan around:

During the blackout dates above, you may experience delays for metadata submission review. Please note that you are more than welcome to submit metadata updates during these times, but they may not be reviewed until the blackout period ends.

By capitalizing on these merchandisable moments with new creative assets and monetization tools, you can capture the interest of both new users and VR veterans to drive conversions and reach your holiday marketing goals.

Are you planning on updating your app’s content around the holidays? If so, you’ll want to get your creative assets submitted as early as possible to ensure that we have time to process them. Our review team typically receives an influx of submissions leading up to the holidays, and we want to ensure your holiday monetization and marketing plans go off without a hitch. When it comes to making metadata updates during the holiday season, earlier is always better!

The holiday season is always busy, and time may fly by faster than you expect. That’s why we recommend preparing assets that your app can revert to after your holiday assets have served their purpose. If you submit your assets early, we can review and approve them so they’re scheduled for release in a timely manner—rather than sitting in a queue after a blackout date. Be sure to include detailed notes in your submission if there are any special circumstances around your metadata update.

During the holidays, you’ll have new users ready to experience your app for the first time—especially if your title has some multiplayer or social components. If you’re managing your own infrastructure, please be prepared to handle the additional number of users jumping into your experience. You’ll want to prepare for spikes in engagement and possibly a larger number of concurrent users over the next few months. Planning for a boost in traffic can help you create the best possible experience for users’ first time in your app!

With the uptick in traffic on the Meta Quest Store during the holiday season, you’ll want to make sure you’re making the best first impression possible. Immersive Image Layers are a new type of product detail page (PDP) asset that can help portray the core aesthetic and personality of your title. These immersive assets are shown in-headset and include a combination of environments, characters, and objects that are placed behind the Store panel—giving your app’s PDP a 3D-feel that resembles its core experience more accurately.

Immersive assets can help your app’s PDP stand out, but they also reduce buyer hesitation as these assets help people become more familiar with your title. For more information on Immersive Image Layers check out our blog post—or get started by viewing our documentation.

If you want to try some impactful experiments with your metadata or gain clarity about what types of assets resonate with audiences before making a marketing push, we recommend using our A/B Testing Tool in the Developer Dashboard⁠.

This tool lets you individually test several types of assets within your app’s PDP to drive improvements in clicks and conversions. The tool also allows you to choose the audience size for your test asset, which can help minimize risk and validate the performance of existing assets. Since launching in June, the A/B Testing Tool has driven double-digit improvements in conversion rates for multiple apps—including those highlighted in our A/B Testing Case Study.

To help you turn more asset insights into asset performance, we’ve also added a release holdout feature when submitting metadata updates. This feature gives you the option to automatically run A/B tests on multiple types of metadata updates—giving you peace of mind that all changes to critical PDP elements like cover art, descriptions, or logos will be tested to ensure they don’t cause a major negative impact to your app sales. Release holdouts allow you to A/B test your PDP as a whole, versus testing individual asset types. Best of all, release holdouts safeguard you from poor asset performance by reverting your metadata to its previous version if a drop in sales occurs that’s greater than 3%.

From testing asset variants, the audience size you want to interact with, alternate trailers, and more, you can find value in working on your metadata right now and getting them ready for the holidays.

For more information on A/B testing, check out our blog post. To get started with A/B testing, check out our documentation.

On a rapidly growing platform with a large library of brand-new titles, finding ways to increase purchase consideration can be a challenge whether you’re a new or experienced VR developer. Our internal research suggests that while people are eager to seek out experiences, unfamiliar IPs and new immersive experiences may cause hesitancy about whether they’ll enjoy the experience—and that hesitancy can ultimately prevent them from making a purchase.

Try Before You Buy (TBYB) is a new service that addresses these barriers head-on, allowing you to offer time-restricted trials in the Meta Quest Store so people can experience your app first-hand, make a more informed decision about their purchase, and feel confident that your app is right for them.

To optimize your free trial offer this holiday season, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of the early stages of your users’ journey in your app. Knowing your users’ journey helps you take advantage of customizable options like trial duration and audience size so you can build your strategy around your app’s genre and game loop—and leave audiences eager to experience more after their trial has ended.

For more information on TBYB, check out our blog post. To get started, check out our documentation.

In addition to the latest monetization features we covered above, we highlighted even more tools at Connect, including Add-On Content/In-App Purchases and Subscriptions. These self-service tools include customizable options such as subscription tiers and pricing flexibility—empowering you to create the perfect approach for your target audience.

Our app ecosystem is growing, which means developers are making more revenue faster than ever. Over $1.5 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Meta Quest Store, with roughly one in three titles making revenue in the millions. As more apps are published on our platform, marketing the core elements that make your app unique will be critically important to help it stand out within a library of great experiences. To help you boost your marketing efforts, we invited ForeVR Games Senior Marketing Director Lauren Koester to share best practices for driving awareness and engagement—and how these practices have fueled the success of ForeVR Bowl⁠, ForeVR Darts⁠, and ForeVR Cornhole⁠.

Whether your app is a longtime fan favorite or just gearing up for its first holiday in the Meta Quest Store, we want to help you find success. Using a combination of these features and tools can help you bring in new users, drive revenue, and have the best holiday season yet.