🤦🏽♀️ This one word broke everything
What I learned when our best-performing paywall suddenly tanked. And, an invitation for London.
I still remember the first time our trial opt-in rate collapsed overnight.
Not dipped. Collapsed from over 27% down to less than 5% in a matter of hours.
No warning, no obvious cause. Just a sudden crash.
Cue the messages from the CEO. The type of message that only comes in late at night, just as I was falling asleep:
“Have you checked the numbers? What’s going on with performance? What did you change?”
If you’ve ever received one of those messages, you know the feeling. So, I took a deep breath and did what you’d expect. Crawled out of bed, blearily shuffled over to my laptop, opened up Ads Manager, and analysed. Spend, targeting, performance, creatives - all of it.
Everything looked infuriatingly normal: no weird spikes, no drops, nothing in the data gave even a hint of what had just happened.
Spend was steady. CTR was strong. My ugly-cute creatives were still chugging along, and installs were coming through just fine. The intent was there, surely?!
Top of funnel? Still gorgeous.
But everything past the install? Toast.
Nothing was converting.
I hadn’t touched the ads. We hadn’t changed anything on the App Store. We didn’t discuss any onboarding changes. And yet… no one was converting.
So I kept digging. And eventually, after meticulously going through the onboarding flow (with the old delete-and-reinstall trick you may know and love), I checked the paywall.
Tucked away, sitting quietly, smiling up at me, like it hadn’t just broken everything: the CTA (the thing users had to tap to start their trial) had changed. I blinked at it.
Originally, it said “Start your 7-day free trial.” Clean. Clear. Under control. It had been working beautifully for months.
It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that was it - a single change, buried in the flow.
And when I saw it gazing back at me (👁️👄👁️), it all made sense. Let me explain.
Apple had recently decided to start rejecting “7-day free trial” (even though they use it in their product flows, naturally), so our delightful devs had made the line of copy dynamic. When the original was blocked, it would fall back to another version.
And that fallback?
It was “Subscribe.”
If you’ve worked in subscriptions, you probably already know what that word does. It triggers a reaction:
“Subscribe” feels heavy. Permanent. It carries the weight of every time someone got locked into something they didn’t mean to sign up for, or couldn’t figure out how to cancel. Even when the trial is free, the word signals cost.
This taps directly into loss aversion; we’re wired to fear loss more than we value equivalent gain. So, a button that might mean paying before I’m ready? That's enough friction to stall the moment entirely.
And it’s not just fear of commitment, it’s ambiguity aversion too. “Subscribe” doesn’t tell you what you’re subscribing to. When will I be charged? Can I cancel? Where does this take me? Am I about to get scammed?
Even if the answers are all reasonable, the doubt is there.
And once that pause creeps in, the click is gone.
That one word derailed everything, and fortunately, swapping it over again (literally just changing the CTA) was enough to get conversion back on track.
All was well again.
Until it happened again a few weeks later.
Same fallback -> Same crash -> Same late-night texts.
Quickly, I stopped checking Ads Manager first when performance dropped and started checking the paywall.
And I’m telling you this now because I see this pattern again and again, I’ve just spent half a day doing the same thing again, this time for a client.
Their cost per trial had spiked 300%.
I pulled everything. Placements, device splits, platform breakdowns, age groups, genders. All of it.
Top of funnel looked fine. Really solid, actually, so I went through the flow. This time it was sent to a website, not an app (we love web-to-app flows).
And yep, the trial wasn’t working. That’s half my day gone. All because of one small break in the flow, right at the bottom of the funnel.
This is the bit we forget:
Your onboarding flow is your performance. Your paywall is your performance.
It doesn’t matter how good your targeting is.
It doesn’t matter how clever your ad copy is.
If the thing people land on doesn’t make sense, doesn’t feel safe, or just doesn’t work, everything else falls apart.
So if your numbers suddenly tank and nothing in the ad account looks broken… check the flow. Do you have random pop-ups appearing whilst someone is onboarding? STOP IT.
And check the copy.
Especially the button.
Would you tap it?
The smallest cracks in your flow can wreck everything; even the best ads in the world can’t save a broken journey. So take a breath. Go through it like a user would. And if something feels off, I’m here. Just reply. I’ll help you figure it out.
Events & invites
📊 I’m joining a panel this Monday, 23rd June, where we’ll be digging into attribution chaos, modelled data, and how to actually trust your numbers when nothing agrees.
I’ll be joining Sara El Bachri, David Vargas, Eran Friedman, and John Koetsier for a live session on LinkedIn. It’s going to be spicy.
Got a question about what your marketing’s really doing? Join us live and ask it →
🚨 Aperture is hosting an event in London on July 2nd, great drinks, better conversations, and zero sales pitches. If you're a founder, investor, or senior tech person, apply to join here →
Thank you for reading.
Speak soon,
Hannah
Ah devs. Making well intentioned changes without consulting marketing.