Review in-app subscription performance

At the top of your screen, you'll see the following information:

• Active subscriptions: Number of subscriptions that were active for at least one day over the selected time period, including users with free trials.
• New subscriptions: Number of subscriptions that started in the selected time period, including users with free trials.
• Canceled subscriptions: Number of subscriptions that were canceled during the selected time period, including cancellations within a free trial.
• Gross revenue: Estimated revenue generated during the selected time period. This is the amount paid by users, including taxes, and other fees.
• ARPAS: A summary of the average revenue per active subscription. ARPAS is calculated as the total subscription revenue during the selected time period, divided by the total number of active subscriptions.
• Refunds: Total number of refunds that were issued during the selected time period.

When reviewing your app's dashboard, keep the following terms in mind:

• Subscriber: A user with at least one active subscription in your app. This includes users with free trials or those in a grace period.
• Active subscription: An SKU that a user has activated, including free trials. Active subscriptions end when a user cancels their subscription, even if their access continues until the end of the current billing period.
• First-time subscription: The first subscription a user activates in your app.
• Returning subscription: A second or subsequent subscription that a user buys in the same app. For example, a user cancels their first subscription in May and purchases one again in September.

Your app's total subscriptions card shows all active, new, and canceled subscriptions during the selected time period, including users with free trials.

Your app's revenue card shows daily and 30-day revenue generated during the selected time period, including taxes and other fees.

The retention card displays the percentage of subscriptions that remain active over time. You can use this information to better understand how well different SKUs retain subscribers.

To see a detailed breakdown of your retention and conversion data, select Explore report.  

The cancellations card shows the churn breakdown for your cohort’s subscriptions. You can use this information to identify ways to try to decrease cancellations for different scenarios. 

To see a detailed breakdown of your cancellation and recovery data, select Explore report.

On your Subscription retention report, you can compare retention and conversion rates between two subscription cohorts to better understand how to best retain and convert subscribers. You can configure cohorts by subscription, base plan, or offer, country of purchase, and the date range of when a subscription started. Cohorts in the retention report include all new subscriptions, including first-time and returning subscribers.

Compare retention rates

You can evaluate how well each cohort retains subscribers and when or if they churn using the “Retention by billing period” and “Retention by day” charts.

On the “Retention by billing period” chart, you can see how many billing cycles your subscribers remain active for. This can give you insight into how well you’re monetizing subscribers in each cohort.

Note: If you’ve set up introductory price billing cycles for a subscription, they’re included in the billing periods. If an installments base plan is selected, the report will show installment subscriptions that were billed during each billing period.

On the “Retention by day” chart, you can get more detailed insights on how far subscribers get into a billing period before canceling. This chart includes the first day a subscription was active to the day it was canceled, including any free trial, grace period, and account hold time periods.

Below each chart, you can view the data in a table by selecting the down arrow next to Data table.

Compare conversion rates

Under the retention charts, there are cards that show you how well subscribers convert from the following states:

• Free trial offer to a paid subscription
• Introductory price offer to full price
• First full payment to second full payment

On each card, you can see how many subscribers in a cohort entered the subscription state and how many of the subscriptions that existed in that state either canceled or converted to a paid subscription, along with a breakdown of cancellation reasons.

For example, imagine that you had 2,000 subscribers start a free trial offer, and 1,000 of them have now completed the free trial offer, either by canceling or converting to paid subscriptions. If 200 of those 1,000 subscribers are no longer using the free trial because they canceled it, and the remaining 800 people converted to paid subscriptions, your cancellation rate would be 20%, and your conversion rate would be 80%.

If you choose the base plan view, your cancellation metrics will also show users who switched to a different base plan within the subscription. If you choose the offer view, your cancellation metrics will also show users who switched to a different base plan, or a different offer.

On your Cancellations and recovery report, you can get detailed insights on why users canceled their subscriptions and how well subscription recovery features, such as grace period and account hold, are performing.

After you select a subscription, base plan, or offer, countries, and time period that you want to view data for, you can view charts that summarize and categorize why users canceled their subscriptions. To get details for specific dates, hover over the graph.

Analyze your churn breakdown

The Churn breakdown chart acts as your diagnostic tool. By segmenting your churn data, you can move from looking at raw numbers to answering specific business questions, such as:

• Product vs. Tech: Are subscriptions churning because users chose to leave, or because a billing integration failed?
• New vs. Long-term subscribers: Are we losing subscriptions immediately after a trial, or are long-term renewals churning?
• Pricing impact: Did a recent price increase cause a spike in unconfirmed price change expirations?

When you apply filters for a specific product, base plan, or offer, the chart displays data for subscriptions that churned while active on that specific plan.

A sample of the Churn breakdown chart is as follows:

To get the most out of this chart, you can adjust the following core dimensions:

1. Choose your core event: Expirations vs. Cancellations

   By default, the chart measures Expirations (through the Show expirations setting). This represents actual churn—the moment a subscription expires and you lose the revenue.

   You can toggle the chart to view Cancellations instead (through the Show cancellations setting). This isolates user intent by displaying only active, voluntary cancellation events. Churn caused by system events, like billing failures, is completely excluded in this mode. A subscription might be canceled today but remain active until the end of its billing period. Viewing cancellations helps you tie cancellation decisions to specific dates, like a product update or an email campaign.

2. Select your metric

   Depending on your goals, you can analyze your churn through different lenses using the metric selection in the toolbar:

   • Churned subscriptions: The total number of churned subscriptions in the selected time period (daily, weekly, or monthly).
   • % of total churn: The percentage of total churn driven by each category (total churn on the chart equals 100%), helping you identify which categories are driving the majority of your losses.

3. Group your data to find the Why and Who

   Use the viewed by control to segment the stacked area chart to answer different business questions:

   Viewed by	What it tells you
   Churn reason	Separates churn by underlying cause (for example, Voluntary, Involuntary, Unconfirmed price change).
   Subscription tenure	Categorizes churn by how long the subscription was active before churning (< 1 month, 1–3 months, 3–6 months, 6–12 months, 1 year +), unaffected by plan changes. Helps you identify whether you are losing newly acquired subscriptions or long-term renewals, allowing you to tailor your retention strategies accordingly.
   User device tier	Analyzes churn across hardware performance levels (Premium, Mid-range, Entry-level). Helps you identify whether hardware constraints or purchasing power differences are causing friction, connecting your high-level churn numbers straight to specific device segments you can focus on.
   Country	Isolates your highest-churning regions by displaying the top 5 countries for the selected metric and time period, plus an aggregated group of all other countries.
   Subscription or Base plan or Offer	Isolates your highest-churning products by displaying the top 5 subscriptions, base plans, or offers for the selected metric and time period, plus an aggregated group of all other items.

4. Filter out the noise

   • Subscription changes: Toggle between Exclude subscription changes (default) and Include subscription changes. By default, upgrades, downgrades, and crossgrades are excluded from this chart so they don't artificially inflate your churn rate. If you want to visualize plan movements, enable this toggle to see them as a separate category.
   • Base plan type: Filter by the billing structure of your plans (such as Auto-renewing, Prepaid, or Virtual Installments). Prepaid plan expirations are excluded by default to prevent their naturally higher drop-off rates from inflating your auto-renewing churn metrics. You can enable this filter to analyze prepaid churn separately.
   • Offers: Filter by promotional pricing inclusion (such as Free trials or Introductory pricing). Free trials are excluded by default, helping you focus strictly on the churn of paying subscribers.
   • Billing period: Filter by the renewal frequency of the base plan.
   • User device tier: Filter your chart to view specific hardware tiers (Premium, Mid-range, or Entry-level), allowing you to isolate whether subscription friction is concentrated on entry-level devices versus premium hardware.

     Tip: To accurately benchmark your billing performance against premium-only platforms, filter by Premium device tier to compare user segments with similar hardware and purchasing power.

   • Subscription tenure: Filter by specific tenure bands (Less than 1 month, 1–3 months, 3–6 months, 6–12 months, or 1 year or more) to isolate where drop-offs occur across the subscriber lifecycle. For example, filtering by Less than 1 month helps you diagnose early onboarding and value realization issues, while filtering by 1 year or more helps you evaluate long-term retention and renewal fatigue.

     Note: Subscription tenure is calculated starting from the first payment (or sign-up if the Offers filter includes free trials) until expiration (or cancellation if the Show cancellations setting is enabled).

Understanding churn reasons

When grouping your chart by Churn reason, you will see your data categorized into the following areas:

• Voluntary: The subscription was explicitly canceled by the user (for example, through the Play Store, or through support).
• Involuntary: The subscription expired due to a payment failure (for example, insufficient funds, or expired card).
• Unconfirmed price change: The user did not confirm a price increase requiring consent before their next billing date, resulting in expiration.
• Integration issue: The subscription expired because of a technical failure, such as Unacknowledged purchases in your app's API integration.
• Developer-initiated: You explicitly canceled the subscription through the Google Play Developer API or order management.
• Subscription change (shown only when Include subscription changes is enabled): Includes Switched subscription (upgrades, downgrades, or crossgrades between different subscription tiers) and Switched base plan (such as switching from monthly to annual billing within the same subscription).
• Other: Miscellaneous reasons, such as an inactive account or an app suspension.

Next steps: Mitigate your top churn drivers

After you identify your primary churn drivers on the chart, you can take specific actions across Google Play and your app to improve retention:

View cancellation survey responses

When users cancel their subscriptions using the subscription center, they’re asked why they decided to cancel. Responses from users who chose to provide a reason for cancellation are shown in the Cancellation survey responses card.

Users that choose “Other” may optionally provide their own reason for canceling. You can download a CSV file containing these responses from the Other responses card if you have the global "View financial data" permission.