AppCalcsPaid acquisition
Apple Search Ads ROAS Calculator
Follow campaign spend down to paying subscribers, and value them after Apple takes its share.
Free calculator
Your assumptions
Campaign return
- Taps
- 3,333
- Installs
- 1,667
- Paying subscribers
- 83
- Cost per subscriber
- $60.00
- Net lifetime revenue
- $11,786.72
- Profit
- $6,786.72
- Payback period
- 9 months
Estimate only. ROAS here is measured over the subscriber's lifetime, not the campaign month, so a figure above 1 can still mean months of negative cash flow. Read it next to the payback period. Organic lift, reinstalls, and refunds are excluded.
Why install cost is the wrong number
Search Ads reports cost per install, which is the easiest number to optimise and the easiest to be misled by. Installs do not pay for anything. The chain that matters runs spend to taps to installs to paying subscribers, and each step multiplies the effective cost of the one customer who eventually pays.
At a fifty percent install rate and five percent paid conversion, a $1.50 tap becomes a $60 subscriber. That is the figure to compare against lifetime value, and it is forty times the number the dashboard shows.
ROAS here is measured over the subscriber's lifetime rather than the campaign month, which is the honest way to judge a subscription campaign and also the one that hides cash flow. A campaign returning 2x over three years still spends real money today. Read the payback period next to the ratio.