Auditing a Paid Funnel With Nothing Measuring It
A solo founder was spending on paid acquisition with no way to know what was suppressing installs and paid conversion.
- Product
- iOS journaling app
- Model
- Digital subscription at $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr, plus a mailed-letter tier at $19.99/mo
- Timeframe
- 2 weeks
The approach
- Audited all four stages: paid ads, store listing, signup, paywall
- Opened the ad account first, and found the pixel and SDK had never been installed
- Zero events in 325 days
- Campaigns were optimizing to landing-page views with no post-click signal
- $131.86 of total spend across 11 months, so nothing ever reached a learning phase
- Benchmarked against the right profile
- Paywall-first rather than freemium, so install-to-paid benchmarks at ~11%, not the ~2% freemium median
- Mixing freemium stage rates with hard-paywall endpoints would have set the wrong target
- Ranked the fixes: tracking first, then paywall structure, then the store listing, then onboarding sequence
The founder came in expecting to hear his ads were too expensive. Cost per install was being quoted in the hundreds of dollars. That number was never real, because with no pixel and no SDK there was never an install event to measure against. The raw material was fine: the best creative was pulling 11-13% CTR at about $0.11 a click. Everything after the click was invisible. The first fix was not a bid or a creative, it was installing the thing that lets you learn.
We help consumer apps and products reach their next phase of growth.
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