Trials
For most subscription apps, the trial start is the first moment a new user shows real purchase intent. Counting trials per keyword, and what each one costs, is how you tell Apple Ads traffic that will pay from traffic that only installs.
Updated
Apple Ads reports taps and downloads. What a subscription app needs to know next is how many of those downloads started a trial. Adapty Ads Manager adds that count, plus the rate and cost built on it, to every campaign, ad group and keyword.
Trials, Trial CR and Cost per Trial
- Trials. The number of new trial subscriptions initiated during the reporting period.
- Trial CR. The percentage of total downloads that started a trial.
- Cost per Trial. Total spend divided by the number of new trial starts.
Total Downloads is the Apple Ads figure: tap-through and view-through downloads and redownloads. Trials counts only new trial starts; a trial that later converts to paid appears separately under trials converted.
A published benchmark, and its denominator
Adapty’s Apple Ads for subscription apps 2026 report compares how often installs turn into trials for Apple Ads and for other paid channels. The figures below are global, all-category aggregates for 2025 campaigns.
| Traffic source | Install-to-trial |
|---|---|
| Apple Ads | 3.66% |
| Other paid channels | 1.45% |
Source: Adapty, Apple Ads for subscription apps 2026. The 2026 edition covers January to December 2025 campaigns across 8,000+ apps and 1,000,000+ ad groups; per-row app counts were not published.
Reading trial metrics
Cost per Trial is often the earliest cost metric that says something about subscriber value. It arrives within days, long before renewals do, which makes it a practical signal for bid changes on keywords with enough volume.
It is still an intermediate signal. A trial is not revenue, and keywords differ in how often their trials convert to paid. A cheap trial that rarely converts can cost more per paying subscriber than an expensive trial that usually does.
- Pair Cost per Trial with trial-to-paid conversion before changing bids.
- Compare keywords with the same trial offer; a different trial length or price changes both metrics.
- Check Subscriptions too if your paywall offers direct purchase alongside a trial.
How to get more trials from the same spend
- Move budget toward keywords with a low Cost per Trial and healthy trial-to-paid conversion.
- Match the product page and paywall to the search intent behind each ad group.
- Use negative keywords to cut searches that bring downloads but no trials.
- Test the trial offer and paywall, then watch whether the extra trials convert.