Initial Conversion Rate: Share of New Customers Who Start a Trial or Buy

New customers are grouped by their cohort date. For each one, RevenueDot looks for a trial start, a subscription purchase or a one-time purchase inside the timeframe. Day 0 means the calendar day (UTC) of the cohort date, and 7 days means that day plus the next seven. A customer counts once, however many things they bought.

The timeframe is the conversion_timeframe selector and defaults to 7 days. A trial start counts as a conversion even though no money has moved yet, which is why this chart reads higher than Conversion to Paying. A paid introductory offer is not told apart from a regular purchase and counts as a direct purchase.

Cohorts whose timeframe has not finished stay marked incomplete until it has. Filters on the purchase (store, product, offering) change what counts as a conversion but never change the new-customer denominator. Sandbox purchases are excluded. You can open it in the dashboard under Charts or fetch it with GET /v2/projects/{project_id}/charts/initial_conversion. The response has the same shape as RevenueCat's Charts API, so scripts written for that API keep working. The secret key needs the charts_metrics:charts:read permission. The Charts guide lists every parameter.

A week with 200 new customers, read at the 7 day timeframe.

Initial conversion is 36 / 200 = 18.0%.

Initial conversion is the first measure of whether your paywall and onboarding turn visitors into subscribers or trial users. It reacts within days of a change, long before revenue charts do, so it is the right chart to watch while you test paywall copy, prices or the placement of the paywall in onboarding.

It also shows when you are leaving money on the table before the paywall. If few new customers reach any purchase screen, the fix is earlier in the flow. Compare the day 0 and the 7 day timeframes: a large gap means customers need time and reminders, a small gap means they decide in the first session.

How to read it

• Pick the timeframe before you compare. A 7 day rate and a 30 day rate are different numbers.
• The newest cohorts always look low until their window has passed. Trust the points without the incomplete mark.
• Compare it with Paywall Encounter. If only half of new customers ever see a paywall, conversion is capped by exposure, not by the offer.
• A jump in new customers from a low-intent channel lowers this rate without any change in your paywall.
• Segment by country or platform before you decide a paywall change failed.