Conversions
A download tells you someone installed the app. A conversion tells you they did something with money attached: started a trial, subscribed or bought something. Conversions is the single number that counts all three.
Updated
Apple Ads reports up to the download. For a subscription app, that is where the useful part of the funnel begins. Conversions, as reported in Adapty Ads Manager, counts the first monetization events that follow the download, so you can compare campaigns, ad groups and keywords on what their users did after installing.
How Conversions is calculated
Conversions adds up three event types for the reporting period: new trial starts, new paid subscriptions started without a trial, and one-time in-app purchases that are not subscriptions.
Subscriptions started counts only new sign-ups without a trial. A trial that later converts to paid is counted once, as a trial start, and not again as a subscription, so Conversions measures entries into monetization rather than payments.
Conversion CR and Cost per Conversion
Two metrics are built on top of Conversions. Conversion CR shows how often a download turns into a conversion; Cost per Conversion shows what each conversion costs in ad spend.
Total Downloads here is the Apple Ads figure, including tap-through and view-through downloads and redownloads. That makes Conversion CR a download-to-conversion rate, which is not the same as Apple’s conversion rate from taps to downloads.
Reading Conversions in a subscription app
Conversions is a good first filter. A keyword with plenty of downloads and almost no conversions is buying installs that do not monetize, whatever its cost per download says. It is also a stable signal for small ad groups where trials or subscriptions alone are too few to read.
The combined total has limits. It weighs a trial, a direct subscription and a one-time purchase equally, although they are worth very different amounts. A trial may never convert, while a direct annual subscription is paid on day one.
- Break Conversions down. Check Trials, Subscriptions and Non-subscriptions separately before changing a bid.
- Follow trials to paid. Look at trial-to-paid conversion for keywords that drive mostly trials.
- Finish with revenue. Revenue, ROAS and ROI per keyword show whether conversions paid back, and cohort views show it over time.
An illustration of the arithmetic: keyword A has a Cost per Conversion of $12, and almost all of its conversions are trials, of which a third convert to paid. Keyword B has a Cost per Conversion of $20, and half of its conversions are direct subscriptions. Per paying user, keyword A costs about $36 and keyword B at most $40, and less as its trials convert, so the gap is far smaller than the headline metric suggests.
Related metrics
Trials, Subscriptions and Non-subscriptions started each have their own CR and cost metric with the same structure. Revenue, ROAS and ROI close the loop from conversion to money.