Master Your Free Trials: Unlock Advanced Insights with Apphud's Performance Report

Apphud's advanced Free Trials Performance report provides unparalleled insights with 33 detailed metrics. It identifies whether trials originate from first-time installs or redownloads, highlights billing issues during trial conversions and their resolution outcomes, and tracks cancellations - pinpointing when and why they occurred. Additionally, it reveals when users start trials and whether they switch to a different product, offering a comprehensive view of your trial-to-subscription pipeline.

Curious to uncover these unique insights for your app? Let’s take a closer look at the report's key aspects.

Free Trials Performance is an event-based report built over installation events; it includes users from different cohorts uniting first-time installs and redownloads happened during the same period under one roof. This allows a more precise understanding of how strong your app's first impression is, how good activation practices are, and how well value provided during a trial correlates with a plan price.

Imagine this scenario - a successful marketing campaign drives a surge in installs, many new users, and returning dormant users start a trial right after the download during their first session. At first glance, it seems like a win. However, the report reveals something concerning: a high percentage of these trials fail to convert to subscriptions on time due to billing issues, and later on, a big portion of these users still converts, but with a different product. This can signify that you used the wrong offering for your Onboarding, and, while users do see the value, they prefer a cheaper plan, switching from yearly to monthly.

The advanced Free Trial Performance report will immediately reveal such a story to you - no need to go back and force through charts trying to uncover what’s going on.

Thus, it empowers businesses to gain a nuanced understanding of user interactions from installation through subscription, enabling targeted improvements as it covers all needed areas:

• User Acquisition and Trial Engagement
• Conversions w/timing details
• Billing issues and Recoveries during or after the Grace period
• Cancellations by users or system ones
• Promotions and Product switches

As a report user, you'll find that the numerous and diverse metrics offer a great opportunity to uncover a wide range of insights, and your efforts to learn them will pay off very soon.

Free Trials Performance Report at Apphud

Besides, you can always adjust the report layout by choosing the metrics you are most interested in or those which correlation you need to monitor regularly.

Once a good or bad trend is detected, you can always segment and filter the report’s data by installation source, country, device data, acquisition channel, and a bunch of other parameters to identify specific areas where improvements can be made, or what scenarios must be replicated.

1. User Acquisition and Trial Engagement

It’s essential to understand the size of your top funnel section.

Metrics such as New Users, Redownloads, and Total Downloads provide insight into installs volume during the chosen period. All the rest of the metrics in the report are cohort ones; they depict what happened next to those users with installations.

Free Trials metrics indicate users who decided to try your premium offer after installing the app during the chosen period, and Re-engagement Trials number signifies a portion from them corresponding to trials started after the app redownload.

By analyzing Day 0 Trials and Session 0 Trials you can get invaluable insights into your app's ability to captivate and convert users immediately.

These metrics go beyond surface-level indicators, offering a deep understanding of how effectively your app engages users during:

• their first day of interaction with your app (Day 0 counts in trials started within 24 h from the initial app install)
• or initial launch of your app (while Apphud does not track actual sessions, Session 0 is the estimate showing trial purchases started within 30 min after the initial launch after the app install).

By leveraging Day 0 Trials and Session 0 Trials, app owners can align their marketing, onboarding, and paywall strategies to maximize early engagement and drive sustained growth.

Marketing campaigns bringing high-quality users genuinely interested in your app’s offering will have a higher value of the metrics. The metrics also signal how well your messaging and CTAs resonate with users.

Users who spend too long exploring features without being prompted to start a trial may lose interest. Ensuring trial offers appear earlier can prevent drop-offs. Apphud Experiments will help to determine when and where to introduce the paywall (e.g., after the first tutorial or feature demonstration) and can improve Session 0 conversions.

Active Trials measures the number of free trials that are still active and have their auto-renew option turned on. This metric is useful for assessing how well users progress through the trial without abandoning it midway, and it marks unfinished trial cycles.

2. Conversions

To grow, your app must not only attract users but convert them effectively while addressing friction points in the subscription process.

In addition to the classic Total Trial-to-Conversion Rate, which directly measures your app's ability to monetize trials, the report has Download-to-Conversion Rate, providing a holistic view of the funnel for any download and Install-to-Conversion Rate, showing how effectively your app turns new users into paying customers.

The report reveals a volume of conversions that happened smoothly from the first payment attempt via On-time Conversions and On-time Conversion Rate metrics. You can also see how many had Billing Issues and recovered or not after it.

And here’s where the report becomes invaluable, offering metrics that help you recover potentially lost revenue.

3. Billing Issues and Recovery

A high Billing Issue Rate - the percentage of failed payments out of total conversion attempts -  signals a recurring problem with offering mismatch (audience likes the product but cannot pay the price issues) or behavioral (user financial friction).

The Billing Recovery Rate measures the percentage of recovered users compared to total failed payments. If recovery rates are low, it suggests your retry mechanisms or recovery communication needs optimization.

Besides understanding how many issues were recovered, you can also see when most recoveries happened - during the grace period, when users still had access to the premium features, or after it - during the billing retry. А high Grace Period Recovery Rate indicates effective use of the grace period, while low rates suggest the need for better reminders, incentives, or even reconsidering Grace period length. For instance, if a grace period is too long, it might encourage users to be complacent in updating payment information. Conversely, a very short or nonexistent grace period could lead to immediate service interruption, frustrating users who might have resolved their payment issues given a bit more time.

The report also shows Pending Billing Issues - still unresolved billing failures with no successful recovery.

4. Promotions and Product switches

When users encounter friction - whether from billing issues, pricing concerns, or changing needs - promotions and product flexibility can be powerful tools for recovering conversions and retaining users. Apphud’s Free Trials Performance Report offers two essential metrics for iOS subscriptions to track these behaviors and measure success.

Converted with Promo Offer metrics show a number of free trials converted using a paid Promo Offer, regardless of the timing and potential future refunds. It helps you to analyze how well promo offers bring back users experiencing billing issues or hesitation. This metric success depends on the specific offer, with better offers leading to higher conversions.

The number of free trials that convert to a subscription for another product than selected initially, regardless of timing or future refunds, can be analyzed using Converted with Different Product metrics. It is especially valuable for understanding user behavior when facing payment difficulties or reassessing the app’s value. Users often cancel subscriptions in iOS settings during billing issues, and this behavior can lead to a successful win-back under the right circumstances - users can switch their plan instead of canceling. Some, seeing a more affordable option available, choose a cheaper plan that allows them to stay subscribed while reducing financial strain at the moment, e.g., switch from annual to monthly. Others, after calculating long-term savings, prefer to change from weekly to annual.

5. Trials Cancellations

Understanding cancellations is as important as monitoring conversions in subscription-based models. While conversions indicate growth, cancellations reveal potential weaknesses in user experience, pricing, or value perception. Ignoring cancellation metrics can lead to overlooked issues that erode your subscriber base over time.

Apphud's Free Trials Performance Report provides detailed insights into various cancellation metrics, enabling you to identify patterns, understand user behavior, and implement strategies to reduce churn.

The high volume of User-Initiated Cancellations, which reflects voluntary churn, can signal dissatisfaction or unmet expectations.

Average Time to User Cancellation from the moment of trial start along with 50th Percentile (Median) Time to User Cancellation and 70th Percentile Time to User Cancellation (the time by which 70% of user-initiated cancellations have occurred) will help you to identify when users are most likely to churn. These insights allow for timely interventions, such as in-app engagements or feature highlights, to reinforce value before typical cancellation periods.

The Free Trials Performance Report is more than just metrics - along with its filters and layers of data segmentation it’s an advanced analytics tool that will enable you to build a roadmap for improving acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization from the very first days of your users journey. Use its insights to pinpoint friction points, experiment with solutions, tune your strategies after monitoring trends, and grow your app’s subscription revenue.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your app's trial-to-subscription journey? Sign up to Apphud for free and start identifying opportunities to optimize conversions, recover revenue, and enhance user experience.

Ren

Co-founder at Apphud

Ex iOS app and game developer. 11 years in the industry since iOS 3. More than 50 apps are in the background with 4 exits. Entrepreneur and traveler.