Effectively Analyze Trial Conversions and Improve SKAdNetwork Attribution: Silent Push Notifications and Timed Event Tracking

The subscription app market is thriving, but competition grows fiercer each day. Thousands of apps are competing not just for downloads, but for sustainable subscriber engagement and long-term customer retention. In such a saturated marketplace, offering an engaging free trial experience has become a standard practice, aimed at demonstrating value to potential subscribers and convincing them to commit to ongoing payments.

However, simply offering a free trial isn't enough. To truly leverage this critical onboarding stage effectively, businesses must clearly understand how users engage with their apps immediately after activation, during their first few hours, and throughout their initial days of use. This understanding can dramatically influence conversion rates, retention, and long-term subscriber loyalty.

This is where effective trial conversion tracking becomes invaluable. Precise tracking of initial user behaviors and their resulting engagement patterns empowers subscription app product managers, and marketers to make informed decisions around user-journey optimization, onboarding improvements, and strategic marketing initiatives.

Two essential techniques have emerged as crucial components of any successful trial conversion tracking strategy:

• Silent push notifications: A powerful, non-intrusive method to accurately track user behavior without disrupting the user experience. Silent push notifications enable apps to quietly "check-in" and verify activity, providing reliable data about user engagement right from activation. They do not trigger alerts, sounds, or banners, making them an ideal solution for performing background automation tasks without requiring user permission.
• Timed event tracking: Specifically, tracking key milestone events - Trial Active at 30 Minutes, Trial Active at 1 Hour, and Trial Active at 24 Hours - gives app practitioners critical insights into how users progress through the early-stage onboarding period. Monitoring these intervals allows teams to pinpoint exactly when users perceive value, become engaged, or potentially lose interest in the app.

Subscription app businesses often encounter significant obstacles when evaluating their trial conversion performance:

• Lack of Granular Insight: Many subscription apps have blind spots in their data, missing clarity on how and when users actively engage during the trial. Without granular information, app teams rely on vague assumptions rather than precise user behavior analytics.
• Inaccurate or Delayed Data: Without effective, real-time tracking methods, trial usage metrics can be incomplete, inaccurate, or delayed, leading to misguided attempts at engagement or interventions that come too late.
• User Attrition in Early Stages: Users commonly lose interest quickly, especially if their first impressions of an app experience leave them unsatisfied, confused, or unsure of the provided value.

Due to these common challenges, subscription-based businesses often struggle to accurately determine what specifically drives users' decisions to become paying subscribers after their trials end.

Trial conversion tracking positions subscription businesses with substantial strategic and competitive advantages:

• Better Understanding of User Onboarding Experiences
  Detailed insights on how and when users interact with your app during their first moments of use enable product teams to refine the onboarding process to deliver immediate value, enhancing user satisfaction and retention.
• Optimized Marketing Strategies
  Equipped with granular behavior data, marketers can craft highly targeted and personalized communication campaigns that resonate better with users. Timing, content, and channel strategy can be significantly enhanced using accurate engagement metrics.
• Improved Long-term Subscription Retention and Growth
  Armed with clear, reliable insights into early user behavior, teams are able to continuously refine their product offerings and trial experiences, ensuring a growing subscriber base, higher user lifetime value, and sustainable long-term revenue.

Ultimately, embracing accurate trial conversion tracking transforms uncertainty into actionable intelligence, providing insights that optimize user journeys and drive significant business success.

Now let's look at some practical use cases for implementing new trial conversion tracking strategies.

To navigate the complex waters of subscription app conversions successfully, teams need accurate, real-time visibility into user behaviors. One powerful, yet often underutilized, approach to achieving such visibility is through silent push notifications - a reliable, discreet method to monitor user engagement without interrupting the customer experience.

What Exactly are Silent Push Notifications?

Simply put, silent push notifications - often called background notifications - are notifications sent to users' mobile devices invisibly in the background, without displaying any visible messages, alerts, or banners to the user. Instead of prompting immediate user interaction, silent push notifications serve a critical behind-the-scenes purpose: they quietly request a background status update from the user's device, facilitating accurate tracking and real-time data insights.

How Silent Push Notifications Work: A Simplified Explanation

The use of silent pushes follows a straightforward yet effective technical mechanism:

• Your app’s backend sends a push notification request to the notification service provider (for instance, Apple's APNs or Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging).
• Unlike regular pushes, this message is flagged as "silent" - meaning it'll arrive on the user's device invisibly, without notifying or disturbing the user.
• Upon receiving this silent push, the user's device "wakes up" your app momentarily to perform a background operation - this could be verifying if the app is still installed, has been opened recently, or gathering simple usage engagement data points.
• Finally, your app returns a small data packet back to the server, reporting the user's in-app status and behaviors, allowing your analytics system accurate, up-to-date tracking data.

This entire process usually takes only seconds and remains completely transparent to users, protecting the smoothness of their app experience.

Essential Use Cases for Silent Push Notifications

Silent push notifications prove especially valuable in multiple practical scenarios, notably during your trial conversion phase, for example:

• Verifying User Activity: Determine precisely if the user is still interacting with your app after specific time intervals.
• Identifying App Uninstalls: Immediately detect when a user deletes the app during or after a trial to trigger timely re-engagement efforts via alternative communication channels, such as email or SMS.
• Assessing Background Engagement: Confirm if certain background activities like syncing data, content updates, or app availability checks are functioning well, helping maintain overall user satisfaction and proactive issue management.
• Background Data Updates: Refresh subscription status or sync user data.
• Running In-app Logic Silently: Preload or prepare personalized content ahead of user interaction, like showing a custom paywall.
• Updating App Badge or Local Storage: Automatically update badge counters or local cache in response to backend changes - ideal for reminding users without sending visible notifications.

Apphud Use Case

Create a Rule for the Trial Active event with a silent push notification. When the notification is delivered and the app is launched in the background, developers have approximately 30 seconds to run custom logic. For example, they can update the conversion value for users with active trials to optimize SKAdNetwork performance.

Instead of integrating your own backend for each trigger, Apphud could handle everything. Apphud detects the event, triggers the Rule, and sends the silent push, eliminating the need to build and maintain your own server logic.

Now that you're familiar with the benefits of silent push notifications, it's essential to understand how to implement them practically. While the term might sound complex, integrating silent push notifications is relatively straightforward for app developers.

Below is a simplified step-by-step guide that your team can use to start leveraging silent push notifications effectively.

Step 1: Prepare Your App for Push Notifications

Regardless of your platform (iOS or Android), ensure your app is configured correctly to support push notifications.

• For iOS: Go to your Apple Developer Console and enable "Push Notifications" capability for your App Identifier.Generate APNs Auth keys and add the proper key information to your server and app setup.
• For Android: Go to Firebase Console, create or select your project.Add your app to the Firebase project and download google-services.json file to integrate it into your app build.

Step 2: Set up Silent Push Notifications in Your Mobile Application

Silent push notifications differ slightly from regular visible pushes. They require a specific configuration on both iOS and Android:

• iOS (Swift) simplified example:

func application(_ application: UIApplication,
                 didReceiveRemoteNotification userInfo: [AnyHashable: Any],
                 fetchCompletionHandler completionHandler: @escaping (UIBackgroundFetchResult) -> Void) {

    // Handle background tasks or analytics collection here
    Analytics.trackSilentPushReceived(userInfo)
    completionHandler(.newData)
}

Important note: Ensure your server-side notification payload includes "content-available": 1.

Your push JSON payload may look like this:

{ "aps": { "content-available": 1 }, "custom_key": "custom_value" }

• Android (Kotlin) simplified example with Firebase:

override fun onMessageReceived(remoteMessage: RemoteMessage) {
    if (remoteMessage.data.isNotEmpty()) {
        Log.d(TAG, "Silent push notification received: ${remoteMessage.data}")
        // Handle data payload, record analytics, etc.
    }
}

Important note: Ensure your server-side notification payload contains only a data message payload, without a notification body, as this ensures the message stays silent:

{
    "data": {
        "custom_key": "custom_value"
    }
}

Step 3: Test and Verify Your Implementation

After implementing silent push notification code in your mobile applications:

• Use test tools like Postman or respective platform management consoles such as Firebase Cloud Messaging Console (Android) or APNs testing tools (like Pusher or Pushy) for iOS.
• Confirm push notifications are properly received and logged within your app backend analytics or logging framework.

When dealing with subscription apps, understanding precise user interactions throughout the trial period - especially within the first 24 hours - can make all the difference between gaining an active paying subscriber and losing a potentially valuable user.

Timely measurement of trial usage milestones gives your team a clear snapshot into user engagement, allowing for quick adaptations to your onboarding strategy and user experience in order to boost conversions.

Tracking timed trial events helps address two core objectives:

• Early Signs of User Engagement: Users who find immediate value are more likely to remain engaged. By tracking early activities, you can quickly gauge if your app is appealing and if the onboarding process clearly demonstrates that value. This enables your team to proactively intervene when users fail to engage.
• Deeper Insights into Onboarding Effectiveness: Precise timing allows you to identify exactly when users disengage, indicating friction points or ineffective onboarding sequences. Thus, understanding user drop-offs at particular milestones helps pinpoint operational weak points, allowing quick revisions and testing of optimized user journeys.

Specifically, these three timed trial events are vital to quickly understand user patterns in your subscription app:

Trial Active at 30 Minutes – The "First Impression" Window

At the 30-minute mark, it’s crucial to identify if your app has delivered an immediate sense of value:

• Why it matters: This event represents the user's first crucial impression, revealing if the initial onboarding is intuitive, engaging, and highlights the key value propositions clearly.
• Insights possible: if a considerable percentage of users remain inactive at this stage, it might highlight significant concerns in app design, initial onboarding steps, or messaging clarity.

Trial Active at 1 Hour – Early Engagement Confirmation

This milestone validates early user interest beyond an initial glance:

• Why it matters: An active user at the 1-hour mark typically has progressed from initial exploration to active engagement. Tracking this confirms whether the journey from onboarding to user action continues seamlessly.
• Insights possible: If users continually drop off between 30 minutes and an hour, refining in-app guided tutorials, early-feature engagement, or follow-up communications can significantly improve continued user engagement.

Trial Active at 24 Hours – A Predictor of Long-term Conversion

The first day is a critical point for determining long-term potential subscribers:

• Why it matters: Users genuinely interested in your app will typically show consistent activity within the first 24 hours. Engagement after a full day's exposure strongly signals sustained user interest and potential conversion into paying subscribers.
• Insights possible: A clear understanding of the initial 24-hour usage helps to segment users for targeted re-engagement strategies, giving your team strong early indicators of upcoming renewal success or a clearer roadmap for further onboarding improvements.

Once you've successfully implemented silent push notifications and tracked your essential timed trial events, the next crucial step is to effectively analyze and apply this valuable data. Doing so will dramatically elevate your subscription app’s ability to convert free trial users into engaged and loyal subscribers.

Best Practices for Analyzing Trial Event Data

To maximize the insights derived from your analytics, keep the following guidelines in mind:

1. Clearly Define Your KPIs:

• Determine critical benchmarks for trial activation, such as ideal percentages of users active at 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours.
• Set distinct objectives for each milestone. For example: 30 minutes: Aim for high initial engagement.1 hour: Confirmation that users have progressed deeper into app features.24 hours: Strong predictor for long-term engagement and subscription potential.

2. Segment Your User Data:

• Segment event data based on factors like user demographics, acquisition channel, app version, and geographic region for deeper insights.
• Identifying variations across segments can highlight issues specific to certain user groups or market segments.

3. Compare and Track Trends Over Time:

• Regularly monitor your event data to identify emerging user behavior trends and swiftly react to declining engagement or conversions.
• Track user-engagement patterns before and after any changes to functionality, onboarding processes, or marketing initiatives.

Actionable Use Cases Based on Collected Insights

Monitoring these events empowers you to analyze and fine-tune your marketing strategies with greater precision. Here’s how these enhanced metrics can work to your advantage:

• Use Case 1: Media Source Performance

Break down user behavior by media source to identify how many users cancel within the first hour. This insight lets you optimize your event tracking - for example, switching from trial_started to trial_active - to better gauge user intent and assign more accurate event values.

• Use Case 2: Early Conversion Forecasting

Although install-to-trial conversion happens instantly, trial-to-paid conversion can be delayed due to free trial periods. With these new metrics, you can now access early indicators at 30 minutes, 1 hour, and 24 hours - enabling you to better predict long-term conversion outcomes.

• Use Case 3: Detailed User Journey Analysis

Gain a deeper understanding of how different user segments behave throughout the funnel. By tracking progression from trial initiation to activation and ultimately conversion, you can pinpoint where users drop off - be it due to quick cancellations or payment issues - and refine your ad strategies to boost conversion rates.

As we’ve explored throughout this article, the key to increasing your trial-to-paid conversion rates lies in leveraging powerful tracking methods: silent push notifications and critical timed trial events (Trial Active at 30 Minutes, 1 Hour, and 24 Hours). These techniques give you unmatched insight into user behavior patterns, illustrating clearly where users find immediate value, where they lose interest, and how potential improvements could drive significant business outcomes.

By accurately tracking these events, you can:

• Identify friction points in your onboarding funnel early and proactively address them.
• Craft targeted, timely, and personalized marketing campaigns to convert more users to paid subscriptions.
• Engage inactive or slipping users faster, thereby reducing churn risk and strengthening subscriber retention.

However, managing the detailed data collection, analysis, and implementation of silent push functionality can seem technically complex. That’s why adopting an integrated solution that simplifies event tracking and data analysis is essential.

Don’t leave your subscription conversions and customer lifetime value to guesswork - optimize your approach to trial conversion tracking today and unlock your app’s full revenue potential with Apphud.

Nataly

Head of Marketing at Apphud

7+ years in product marketing. Nataly is responsible for marketing strategy development and execution. Committed adherent of the agile methodology.