Guides / Conversion
I have downloads but no one's converting to paid — what do I fix first?
Check attribution before you touch the paywall. If you can't see which install source actually produces paying users, you're optimising blind — and the fix that looks obvious, usually a paywall redesign, is often not the real problem.
Work through it in this order:
- Attribution. Do you know revenue by keyword or campaign, or only installs? One EdTech client's account had live Apple Search Ads spend with no attribution stack connected at all — bidding on installs with zero visibility into which keywords converted to paying users. Setting up RevenueCat and AppsFlyer and connecting revenue events back to keyword-level data came first. The CPI reduction — 20%, sustained — was a consequence of that visibility, not of touching the paywall at all.
- Funnel location. Where's the actual drop — onboarding, trial start, or trial-to-paid? These need different fixes. A weak onboarding-to-trial number usually means the value isn't clear fast enough. A weak trial-to-paid number usually means pricing, trial length, or paywall placement.
- Structure. Trial length, hard vs. soft paywall, weekly vs. annual anchor — but only after 1 and 2 are ruled out, because tuning a paywall you can't measure correctly just produces noise.
A useful reference point: one of our longer-running Apple Search Ads accounts converts at roughly 20% trial-to-paid and 1.5% install-to-paid, on a €70 average revenue per paying user. Those percentages look unremarkable in isolation. Against a €0.46 achieved CPI, they produce a 2.3× LTV:CPA. The ratio is what matters — not whether any single stage looks impressive on its own.
Worth checking specifically, in order:
- Is attribution actually wired correctly, or are you bidding on installs without knowing which ones pay?
- Is conversion segmented by country? A blended average can hide a profitable US cohort sitting next to an unprofitable emerging-market one.
- Is the drop happening before the trial starts, or between trial and paid? Those are different problems with different fixes.
This is almost always a foundation-month fix: get visibility first, then decide what's actually broken instead of guessing at a paywall redesign that may not be the issue at all.
If this sounds like where you're stuck, book a call and bring whatever numbers you already have.