Growth Insights Series: Effective Expectation Setting in Your Product Details Page

Welcome back to the Growth Insights Series! Following up on our first article that highlighted sustainable monetization mechanics, we’re continuing to explore strategies to drive engagement, retention and monetization in the Meta Horizon ecosystem. As a developer seeking to maximize the potential of your app or game, these articles can provide you with proven approaches to foster meaningful, long-lasting engagement.

Today, we’ll be focusing on how to set expectations for prospective users through your Product Details Page (PDP) and how doing so can lead to stronger user onboarding. There are many available tools that we will highlight to help you drive user acquisition and make your experience stand out within a library of great content on Horizon. Dive in below to get started.

While we’ll be diving deeper into onboarding, sometimes referred to as the new user experience (NUX) or first-time user experience (FTUE), in an upcoming article, it’s important to break down the basics of effective onboarding and how it begins with new user acquisition. Often this relationship is depicted as a funnel, with user acquisition at the very top. The following graphic represents the volume of users at each stage of the funnel. You can see how the volume decreases with each passing layer.

There are several best practices for increasing the size of the top of the funnel; however, today we will focus on how to do so while setting subsequent steps up for success. Acquisition is fundamentally tied to downstream metrics, and keeping this in mind can help you avoid a leaky funnel and increase the number of users you can retain and potentially monetize within your app.

To help ensure that users are happy with their purchase, your PDP should accurately and honestly communicate what to expect in your app. This expectation setting supports downstream retention and monetization by attracting the right users to your experience.

If you’ve ever marketed a product, this best practice may seem counter-intuitive because at a basic level, marketing is about maximizing the number of people who purchase or engage with your product; however, improving your review scores and creating a passionate fan base who increase virility goes a long way towards improving your discoverability. Authentic marketing is crucial to high user reviews and reduces initial churn. Your PDP on the Meta Horizon Store, advertisements, and referral links all showcase the key selling points and features of your app.

There are multiple avenues to maximize your user acquisition funnel, both on the Meta Horizon Store and off-platform. In the Meta Horizon OS ecosystem, your PDP can be the first experience a prospective user has with your app or developer studio. Consequently, this first impression places an outsized impact on your choices when it comes to converting impressions to installs and installs to retained users. As the top of the user funnel, this stage is the start of a user’s journey with your app, and the space between impressions and installs is also where you can lose the most potential customers.

Carefully curating your PDP maximizes acquisition and later retention. As a baseline strategy, you should aim to always accurately represent the best parts of your experience in ways that will appeal to your target demographic. In order to achieve this goal, focus on the following:

For more details on Store Asset guidelines, please visit our Developer Resources page.

Key art is your most powerful expectation-setting tool. Many users will make download decisions based solely on your visuals, without reading a single word of your description. Therefore, your key art and trailer(s) should instantly communicate what users will experience in your app.

Each asset you use should be tonally consistent and carefully selected to maximize your impact. Remember, first impressions matter!

When you submit your app to the Meta Horizon Store, you are required to select at least one Category and a primary Genre for your app, but you may choose up to three genres if you want to be more specific.

These choices are more than merely cosmetic; users will set their expectations of your app content based on the selected genre tags. For example, if you tag your game as a "shooter," they will expect action-focused gameplay. If you label it as an "RPG," they will likely anticipate narrative depth and character development.

These expectations can also drive different behavior within your app and impact first-day engagement. For example, among the top games by time spent, the highest median D0 time spent for new users is in Action games, followed by Sports games, where players expect a more streamlined control scheme that adheres to real world physical movements. In general, people expect action games to have complex, combat-oriented controls—in the Meta Horizon OS ecosystem, many of the top action games feature multiplayer game modes that require a few rounds of play to get acclimated and therefore increase first-session play time.

Choosing the correct genre helps users searching for a specific experience find your game. If you meet both their motivations and genre-based expectations, you will be more likely to win a long-term customer. For more info on our supported genres and categories, see Content labeling and taxonomy.

While your PDP may provide users with a first impression of your app, it’s also often the final checkpoint before download. If users aren’t completely sold by your key art, the information you provide on your PDP is your opportunity to convert those who are still on the fence. That’s why it’s important to use your app’s PDP strategically to highlight features that complement your visual marketing, clearly communicate your experience's unique value proposition and set the tone.

Meta provides developers with many unique features you can use to help users understand your experience on a deeper level. For example, making use of the 360° Preview Graphics not only helps your app stand out, but also helps convert an impression into a download.

It’s also important to pay attention to your markdown options as well. In some cases, rich text and emojis can go a long way towards a compelling PDP. Keep your eye on the Developer Resources pagefor more articles detailing your markdown options coming soon.

Fresh content communicates that your experience is vibrant, consistently being improved and worth users’ time and money, so don’t forget to test and refresh your PDP frequently. Seasonal updates should prompt key art or logo changes, while major updates containing new features may be enough to make you rethink your trailer. Once your assets are ready, they provide the basis to test against, never the final version. You can test your updated assets easily by leveraging A/B tests through the Developer Dashboard.

Once expectations have been effectively set for a new user, it is time to pay them off. This is where marketing and gameplay finally meet to support a user’s onboarding journey. From the moment users launch your app, the genre, tone and aesthetic principles you just set via your PDP should be readily apparent.

With some games, such as mini-golf experiences, users come with prior knowledge that can help establish expectations (i.e. “it’s a casual version of golf”) and early goals (i.e. “I need to put the golf ball into the hole”); however, for many genres, the concept isn't immediately obvious. You can use your opening moments such as the loading screen and the tutorial to not only teach users how to play but also establish expectations and goals.

Our research shows that a typical first session runs about 28 minutes for premium games and about 18 minutes for free-to-play titles. What this means is that you have a limited window to capture users' interest. It’s crucial to remember that users are engaging with your app because they chose it, and if you want them to become a long-term user, it’s your job to give them clear reasons to keep exploring.

If you can identify elements that make your app fun and captivating, use them as your onboarding foundation. For example, in social VR, the magic often comes from presence and co-presence, so it’s important to make sure new users can feel connected to others within moments of starting, even if it’s as simple as a hand wave to another user. In a shooter game, users may want to try out weapons right away, so in this instance you could start by teaching shooting mechanisms instead of showing off every gadget that users can unlock.

Later this spring, we will explore how to continue a user’s onboarding journey by providing best practices and actionable tips to engage and retain a new user.

The Growth Insights Series will continue to expand in the coming months with deeper dives into user acquisition strategies, engagement tactics and audience insights specific to the Meta Horizon ecosystem. Our goal is to provide you with actionable strategies to boost retention, drive engagement and build sustainable revenue streams across various business models. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to catch up on our previous Growth Insights Series articles on monetizing through in-app purchases and executing your monetization plans.

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