Trials that activate, for a consumer VPN
A VPN had plenty of installs and few paid conversions. We moved optimisation from download to activation and tested the onboarding flow instead of the ad.
Client: Consumer VPN (confidential)
The challenge
The offer converted well on install but poorly on trial-to-paid. Ad creative promised speed and privacy; the onboarding asked for a payment method before the user had seen the product work.
The approach
In-page push and popunder were split by market, with postbacks mapped to activation and trial start rather than download. The pre-lander was rebuilt to show the product working before signup, and three onboarding variants were tested in parallel. Sources were judged on activation cost, not install cost.
What we would do differently
No campaign is perfect. In this account we would start source-level cuts one week earlier and ship local-language creative for the second-largest GEO before scaling spend. Both would have shortened the path to the target cost per event.
We stopped optimising the ad and started optimising the first five minutes of the product.
Let’s build your version of this.
We will map the offer to the formats and sources most likely to produce your target event.
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