Meta Developers

Try Before You Buy (TBYB) allows you to offer users a free trial of your Meta Horizon Store app, ranging from 15 to 30 minutes. This feature can boost user confidence and increase conversions without additional software development.

TBYB overview

Free trials end after 30 days, when the time limit expires, or if you disable the feature—whichever occurs first. Users may participate in multiple app trials simultaneously, but are limited to one trial per app. They cannot purchase in-app products or downloadable content during the trial, but they can earn and keep achievements.

Key points include:

TBYB is unavailable for the Oculus Rift section of cross-buy titles.
Disabling TBYB immediately terminates all active trials and prompts users with an upsell dialog to purchase the app.
Re-enabling TBYB does not reset a user’s trial time.
Trials begin when users start the app.
Removing the headset or exiting the app pauses the trial, allowing continuation later.
Purchasing the app during the trial lets users resume from where they left off.

TBYB in the Meta Horizon Store

Users can accept a TBYB offer from the Try Before You Buy shelf in the Store or directly from your app’s product details page.

Set up TBYB

Developers with a published Store app can set up TBYB from the app page of the developer dashboard.

Use the following steps to create a TBYB offer:

Log on to the Developer Dashboard and navigate to your app.
Select Try Before You Buy, and then on the Try Before You Buy page, select Enable Now.
Define the parameters of your free trial as follows:
- User Trial Duration. Choose from periods of 15 to 30 minutes in 5-minute increments.
  Try to set a trial duration that aligns with your app’s gameplay, such as ending the trial on a cliffhanger or stopping point that rewards audiences. For more information, see Maximize Your TBYB Effectiveness.
- Audience Size. Choose whether to make free trials available to 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of users. Users are selected at random.
  If this is your first trial, don’t set this higher than 50% until you know that TBYB is having a positive effect on your conversion rate. For more information, see Handling Your First Free Trial.
Click Enable.

Disable or edit

You can use the same TBYB page in the developer dashboard to disable or edit an active TBYB offer.

Disable: Disables the active TBYB offer for your app. This immediately ends all free trials for your app for all users, even if they have time remaining in their free trial period.
Edit: Changes you make to the User Trial Duration or Audience Size take effect as soon as you select Save Changes. This might immediately end free trials for some users if you select a shorter trial duration or a smaller audience size than what is currently available.

Handling your first free trial

Consider the first trial you set up as your “initial test period.” This test period is important for determining how TBYB impacts your sales and whether it is a good fit for your app. If the conversion rate with TBYB is not statistically better than without it, the app’s genre or initial game loop might not be optimal for TBYB.

To help mitigate the potential risk of your initial test period:

Restrict your audience size to a maximum of 50% and run the TBYB offer for 30 days.
After 30 days, go to the Try Before You Buy page and then select View Analytics to see information regarding the conversion rates with and without TBYB.
If TBYB has had a beneficial effect on your conversion rates, you can consider opening your TBYB offering to up to 100% of users and keeping it running for a longer duration.

View and analyze TBYB statistics

The TBYB analytics available in the developer dashboard help you evaluate whether TBYB supports your strategy. You can see conversion funnel metrics including:

Reach: The number of people who have seen your app.
Unique Clicks: The number of unique users who clicked on your app and viewed the product details page. Note that this excludes users who have purchased your app.
Unique Conversions: The number of people who purchased your app after a unique click.
Conversion Rate: Unique Conversions divided by Reach.
Confidence Level: A measure of likelihood. The higher the Confidence Level, the higher certainty there is in the experiment results.

The portion of people to whom you are showing the TBYB offer is the TBYB Test audience. Your control group, if any, is represented by the Original audience. Compare the Unique Conversions and Conversion Rate between the Original and TBYB Test audiences to determine whether TBYB is beneficial to you.

Maximize your TBYB effectiveness

These insights can help you maximize the effectiveness of your TBYB offers.

Choose an appropriate trial duration

Before you set up your initial test period, it’s important to know roughly how long it takes the average player to progress through various stages of your app. This information can help you set a trial duration that aligns with your app’s gameplay, such as ending the trial on a cliffhanger or stopping point that rewards audiences. If supported, we recommend a stopping point that gives your users a reason to return. This can take the form of an achievement, level completion, ability unlock, etc.

Experiment with cover art

If you enable TBYB, your app will be featured in a dedicated TBYB shelf on the Store homepage. To achieve better visibility for your app, consider using the A/B Testing Tool to ensure your cover art is driving clicks to your app’s product detail page.

Try pairing TBYB with a discount or sale

TBYB can help boost awareness of your app, and pairing with a discount can help to boost conversions even more.

Continued testing

Build on what you’ve learned. Run more tests with an altered hypothesis to improve key metrics and asset performance. A data-driven approach conducted through multiple tests can help you understand the incremental impact of TBYB.

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