Adding in-app subscriptions to accelerate the revenue growth of an app monetizing with ads

Zephyr Mobile team created a successful mobile app in the trivia category. The app was downloaded more than 10M times on Play Store and monetized successfully with ads. But the team was eager to grow revenue further and decided to test an added subscription monetization.

The problem – subscription implementation 

Zephyr team did not want to spend engineering resources on implementing complex server-side logic to handle subscription statuses and manage premium users’ access. Adding a subscription was an experiment, after all. It’s hard to justify the experiment if you need to spend a lot of time and resources before you can see any results. 

This is when the team found the Qonversion platform and realized that Qonverion’s SDK with subscription management toolset is ideal for starting with subscriptions quickly. The SDK allows to implement subscriptions with three simple steps:

• Show the subscription price and duration 
• Handle the purchase flow 
• Check subscriber status and unlock premium access

Qonversion takes care of obtaining accurate and up-to-date information on any changes to subscriptions’ states directly from App Store and Google Play. The Zephyr team implemented and tested sand-box subscriptions in just several hours without writing any server-code.

After launching the updated app’s version with subscription implemented, the team monitored performance and in-app revenue from subscriptions in real-time using Qonversion’s dashboards. 

Data Accuracy and Analytics 

What stood out to Zephyr Mobile is the data accuracy in Qonversion. The revenue data in Qonversion was within 99.8% accuracy compared to the data on Google Play Console. Furthermore, the team got the set of tools to manage the data easily, including the webhooks to power internal BI.

Zephyr’s experiment of adding a subscription was successful and its subscription revenue quickly became a significant contribution to the app’s total revenue.

“I’d recommend that anyone planning to try subscriptions for their mobile app or game give Qonversion a try. The implementation was super quick and easy. We are happy to have saved tons of resources on in-app subscriptions implementation while also getting top-notch subscription analytics. I like the out-of-the-box analytics that do not require any additional setup and that immediately allows us to see conversion funnels, including new-user-to-trial and trial-to-paid conversions. We also get the data on how our subscribers retain within the app, revenue by cohort of subscribers, and the ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying Users) directly in Qonversion’s dashboard.”

Roman, Head of Analytics at Zephir Mobile