The pros and cons of web-to-app funnels

Nathan Hudson is the Founder of Perceptycs. You can find the 2x former Head of Growth and international keynote speaker on LinkedIn sharing practical insights for Web2App funnels, paid UA, ASO, onboarding journeys, and paywall optimization.

It’s not often that something (positively) game-changing comes along for those of use working in the subscription space. But if there ever was a silver bullet for app publishers, it has to be web-to-app funnels.

At Perceptycs, we’ve had great results leveraging this tool to improve profitability and scale acquisition for apps with budgets as low as $3000 per month to larger budgets of >$500,000.

“So, should we build web-to-app funnels?”… I hear you ask!

Well, as with many areas in mobile growth… it depends.

Let’s zoom out and dive into the pros and cons of building web-to-app funnels.

Why you should be building web-to-app funnels

1) You won’t pay any fees to Apple or Google

Yep, you read that right! No fees. Zero. 

One of the biggest challenges with growing a profitable mobile app is that everyone wants a piece of the pie. Especially the stores. With web-to-app funnels, instead of paying Apple or Google 15% or 30%, you pay a much smaller fee of 2-3% to your payment processor.

That means you can reduce fees by up to 10x. 

And what’s even more exciting are the things you can do with the savings. You could lower your target ROAS to be more competitive in the auction. Or perhaps you pass that discount to your more price sensitive users instead.

Either way, lower fees is a huge plus.

2) You’ll get your money faster

With Apple, payments are made within 45 days of the last day of the month in which app purchases were made. And Google initiates payouts on the 15th of each month for the previous month’s sales.

This means that when you collect payments in-app you can end up waiting up to 60 days before the stores actually pay out and you receive your proceeds!

Sounds fun right…

Fortunately your web payment processor won’t do that! Depending on the region, you could receive your money the same day! That’s a huge win for cash flow and will be especially beneficial for bootstrapped apps and indie developers. I’ve personally worked with teams that were able to scale user acquisition significantly faster because of this.

3) You can say goodbye to SKAN & ATT attribution struggles

With web-to-app funnels, you’re pushing traffic to your website, not to the App Store. This means you play by a different set of rules!

• No privacy / crowd anonymity thresholds
• No 24-48 hour post back delay
• Complete visibility on what channels your subscribers come from
• Precise conversion data down to the ad creative level
• Downstream conversion visibility (data beyond the trial)

All of this means faster creative testing and more accurate attribution data to inform decision-making.

📚 Further reading: Read our guide to using web-to-app funnels to fuel your paid user acquisition.

4) Build and deploy onboarding experiments faster

There are a couple of reasons it’s faster to experiment with web funnels than it is app funnels.

Firstly, it requires less engineering time to set up an A/B test.

If you wanted to test two completely different onboarding journeys against each other, you’d need to use feature flags and set up the right infrastructure to split new users in your app.

I’ve worked with dozens of mobile apps and I’ve only ever seen larger teams leverage feature flags in this way. 

But with web-to-app funnels, it’s as easy as sending half of your traffic to one landing page and half to another, each tied to the journey you want to test.

Secondly, you can deploy experiments without submitting an app release. Sure, this might not seem like a big deal. But over time, that delay stacks up. If you can eliminate, you’ll be able to run a higher volume of experiments over the mid to long term.

Bonus Benefit

Did you know that users who convert on web typically renew at a higher rate than in app? Looking at RevenueCat data over the past few years we see rates such as the below:

Platform	Monthly 1st renewal rate	Monthly 2nd renewal rate	Yearly 1st renewal rate	Yearly 2nd renewal rate
Web	68.4%	79.2%	61.9%	67.8%
Apple App Store	61.7%	77.4%	26.0%	44.7%
Google Play Store	61.0%	75.0%	28.5%	42.0%

5) Reach new audiences

When you build web-to-app journeys and run paid acquisition campaigns you’ll unlock new audiences. The prospects you can reach with app install campaigns are different to those you can reach with web campaigns. There are more of them too!

Plus with pixel tracking or conversion APIs it becomes much easier to retarget. An ode to the good old days!

On top of this, with stronger attribution you can more easily leverage other channels like affiliates, partnerships, referrals, Google web campaigns and SEO (since you can convert traffic directly on web).

Overall, this means that you’ll be able to scale your acquisition efforts in different ways.

6) More control and more customization

Finally, you’ll have significantly more control over your web funnel than your app funnel.

One of the biggest advantages for performance marketers is that they can build a more coherent journey from ad view to checkout. With app campaigns we can’t deep link users to different journeys based on the channel they came from or the ad they saw. But with web journeys we can.

And when it comes to paywall or checkout page optimization, you have much more flexibility in how you present the price of your plans and how you leverage free trials and discounts.

And whilst I don’t advocate for it, it’s worth mentioning that some apps running web funnels don’t remind users that their trial will end, meaning higher conversion rates from trial to paid.  

Why you maybe shouldn’t build web-to-app funnels…

As with all great things, there are a few drawbacks of using Web-to-app funnels to be aware of especially if you plan to invest significant amounts of your UA budget into them. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest considerations to keep in mind.

1) Your ASO rankings will take a hit

When you run App promotion campaigns – be it on Meta, TikTok or Google – anyone that clicks on your ad generates a lot of traffic to your app store listing.

In turn, this means a high volume of installs, ratings and reviews, all of which Apple uses as signals to help determine ASO rankings.

Now, with web-to-app funnels, you end up with significantly fewer installs because it’s only those who convert (paying subs or active trials) who end up downloading your app.

For smaller apps focused on achieving profitability through paid user acquisition, this probably won’t be such a big problem, the trade off might be worth it. But for apps that already hold strong organic rankings in competitive niches, this can be a huge issue.

If you divert significant spend from app campaigns to web campaigns while your competitors are investing primarily in app campaigns, you could lose positions to them.

This can also hurt apps scaling paid acquisition who will need support from ASO to continue scaling with their target ROAS. Stronger rankings mean a higher volume of organic installs which can drastically lower your blended acquisition cost.

2) You need to build the funnel!

Sounds obvious right? But it’s still something to keep in mind as some teams just might not have the resource for this. There have been cases where I’ve spent over 6 weeks working with teams to get web-to-app funnels live.

You might say, “6 weeks! How is that even possible?” Well, it’s not as simple as just building a landing page. Ideally you’ll want your web funnel experience to be as native as possible for users and responsive depending on whether they are on mobile, tablet or desktop. 

While you can get away with being hacky and using tools like Webflow and Typeform to get things off the ground, as you begin to optimize the experience you’ll need to invest in the proper tooling or consider building a web app for the best user experience possible.

Oh, and let’s not forget that you’ll need to integrate your payment gateway and payment processor to collect payments. Then you’ll need to integrate these with RevenueCat in order to manage your web user subscriptions alongside your mobile subscriptions.

When you scope out the project, you realize that it will require quite a bit of engineering resource, which also means proving to stakeholders that it’s worth the investment.

3) Financial complications

We often take for granted how much Apple does to make our lives easy as developers and publishers. They act as a payment gateway, payment processor, they localize costs, they handle cancellations and take care of chargebacks.

All of these are things that you’ll need to cover on your side when you run web-to-app funnels. Again, this means more overhead for your team.

Tax is also a very important consideration. Not only are there different tax obligations in different regions, but even in different states. With in-app purchases, Apple makes this simple, but If you’re scaling acquisition with web-to-app funnels you’ll need to take care of this on your side.

4) Difficulties analyzing and iterating customer journeys across platforms

When you have one funnel, you only need to analyze one user journey. You’ll also only be conducting experiments on one funnel which means it’s easier to run sequential A/B tests and understand the impact of incrementality tests.

When you introduce another user journey into the mix it complicates things a bit. All of a sudden you need to track and compare conversion and retention of web users as well as app users. This means investing more resources into product analysis and being more meticulous about your user cohorts.

In my experience, this actually isn’t too much of a burden, but it becomes increasingly difficult as you iterate across both platforms. There will be times where you test the same thing with each funnel only to find different results. 

It’s important to remember that running web funnels doesn’t just mean copying over what you have in your app and calling it a day. Sure, that’s a great starting point, but after that, you’ll need to optimize a completely new funnel on a different platform.

5) The return of attribution struggles

But hang on, you just said that it’s easier to attribute with web-to-app funnels.

I did! And that’s true! Especially if you’re diverting all of your spend to web. But for the majority of apps that scale with web-to-app funnels, they’ll be testing web campaigns alongside app campaigns. This means a combination of web attribution and app attribution. (A marketer’s worst nightmare).

Firstly, as you divert budget into your web funnel you’ll want to keep an eye on the install volume of your app campaigns to make sure you’re reaching privacy / crowd anonymity thresholds.

I also recommend running incrementality tests across both platforms. I’ve seen an uplift in search traffic and organic install volume from running web campaigns but I’ve also seen an increase in web sales from running app promotion campaigns.

These halo effects will vary between apps; a shopping app should expect different behaviour to a fitness app and a startup should expect to see something different to an established brand.

Either way, it’s safe to say that attribution will still be top of mind for most apps running web funnels.

So, should you build a web-to-app flow?

Hopefully, if you’ve gotten this far, you have a pretty good idea of whether or not web-to-app journeys would be a good fit for your app.

What I would say is this: For the majority of subscription apps, it shouldn’t be a question of should we build web-to-app flows. The real question is to what extent should you invest in your web-to-app funnel over your core funnel?

And this will depend on the variables we’ve explored above. Your pricing strategy, ASO strategy, team’s capacity, profitability targets, budgets, and scale will all play a factor in this decision.

But as we’ve seen for many of our clients at Perceptycs, web-to-app funnels work and should certainly be a discussion point in your next growth meeting.

💡Find out how RevenueCat Billing makes it easy to offer web subscriptions for your app.