Understanding your subscription reports

Learn how to access reports and measure key performance indicators

In addition to the charts in subscription analytics, creators with an Apple Podcasters Program membership who have at least one active subscription can access next-day, downloadable reporting in Apple Podcasts Connect to measure the performance of their subscriptions.

How do the reports work?

Data is recorded when a customer initiates a subscription transaction and is based only on the transacting customer. Customers who have access to a subscription via Family Sharing are not included in the reports.

Where are the reports located?

In Apple Podcasts Connect, navigate to the Analytics tab, then scroll down to see all reports available to you.

How do I open the reports?

Use spreadsheet apps such as Numbers, Tableau, or Excel to open your downloaded reports. You can use pivot charts to visualize your active subscriber counts over time.

What kinds of reports do I have access to?

Subscription Snapshot Report

The Subscription Snapshot Report allows you to see how many active subscribers you’ve had for any previous date your subscription has been available, so it’s an easy way to view your total cumulative subscribers as of the Report Date. It is available as a daily, weekly, or monthly report. If you want to get a sense of the change in subscriber count over time, you can download multiple daily reports and compare those totals side by side. You can also download the weekly and monthly reports, and compare totals by Report Date. Learn more about the Subscription Snapshot Report.

Note: For accurate subscriber counts, only add subscribers together from Subscription Snapshot Reports with the same Report Dates. Adding subscriber accounts form reports with different date ranges will result in an inaccurate, inflated count.

Subscription Events Report

The Subscription Events Report contains aggregated information about subscription events such as renewals and conversions. You can use this report to calculate additional metrics such as conversion rate and churn rate. It is available as a daily, weekly, and monthly report. Learn more about the Subscription Events Report.

Subscription Sales Summary Report

The Subscription Sales Summary Report contains aggregated information about subscription purchases such as price, proceeds, and number of subscriptions sold. It is available as a daily, weekly, and monthly report. With these reports, you can summarize the proceeds totals to estimate the amount you can expect to receive in your monthly payment from Apple. Learn more about the Subscription Sales Summary Report.

Listening Report

The Listening Report contains aggregated information about engagement with your content, including number of hours listened, type of listener, and number of plays, by storefront, episode, and episode type. You can use this report to understand the ways listeners engage with free versus subscriber content. Learn more about the Listening Report.

What key performance indicators can I measure from these reports?

The data contained in these reports can be used to generate multiple metrics that are helpful for understanding the performance of your subscriptions.

Understand your expected monthly earnings

If you notice any differences between the Subscription Sales Summary Reports and Financial Reports, it could be due to one of a few reasons:

• Fiscal months. Financial reports show payments made to you based on closed transactions and finalized proceeds using the Apple fiscal calendar.
• Processing status. Transactions may take time to process and close. Transactions initiated in a particular month and shown in Apple Podcasts Connect may not be reflected in Financial Reports until the customer’s payment is processed and collected and an invoice is issued, which may be in the following fiscal month. Further, transactions where we are never able to collect payment will not be shown in financial reports.
  
• Exchange rate. All downloadable reports show amounts in the local currencies transacted by customers. Final payments in Financial Reports are based on the exchange rate used to convert each report currency to the currency of your bank account.
  

Introductory offer conversion rate

You may choose to set up your subscription with a free trial or introductory offer to help with customer acquisition. If you do so, you will be able to calculate the rate at which subscribers convert from free to paid subscriptions. Using the Subscription Events Report, you can calculate the conversion rate by taking the number of introductory offer subscriptions that converted to a standard price divided by the total number of introductory offer subscriptions taken for the same period.

One way this can be done is to divide the sum of “Paid Subscription from Introductory Offer” events into the sum of “Start Introductory Offer” events. To accurately track conversion rates for a specific cohort of subscribers who took an introductory offer, you will need to wait for reporting for an amount of time equal to the duration of the introductory offer plus an extra week as the Subscription Start Date represents a cohort week.

How to measure your subscription churn rate

Understanding how well your subscription is retaining and losing customers is critical for measuring growth and the lifetime value of your customers. Using the Subscription Events Report, you can calculate churn by taking the number of subscriptions that cancelled during a specific period, divided by the number of subscriptions that were up for renewal during the same period.

One way this can be done is by taking the sum of the Quantity column for Cancel and Refund events in the Subscription Events Report and dividing it by the sum of the Subscription Count column for full paid subscribers in the Subscription Snapshot Report as of the last day of the prior period.

Below is an example of a monthly churn rate calculation. The same methodology can be applied for a weekly churn rate calculation as well. If you prefer to look at retention rates rather than churn rates, you can simply subtract the calculated churn rate from 100% to identify the retention rate.

To calculate a net churn rate that takes into account subscribers who have rejoined after churning (known as “winbacks”), include the sum of the Quantity column for Reactivate and Reactivate with Crossgrade events in the Subscription Events report in (A) above.

Using the churn rate to organize and identify your subscribers

You can cohort your subscribers by when they began their subscriptions to understand changes in churn rates among different groups. For example, you may be curious if churn changes across subscribers who sign up before, during, or after a marketing campaign you run.

By including the additional information of Subscription Start Date from the Subscription Events Report in the above calculation, you can identify the groups that align with those marketing initiatives. These groups can then be tracked over time as the Subscription Start Date will persist in our event reporting as long as subscribers retain an active subscription.

Identifying your “gray area” subscriber numbers

There are subscribers who have access to the service during their grace period, but do not have a payment method on file that can result in a successful sales transaction. If we cannot close the sale before the grace period ends, these subscribers go into “billing retry” state where Apple continues to make charge attempts on their payment method on file in order to reinstate their subscription. During this time, subscribers do not have access to the service.

Whether subscribers should be included in the churn rate calculation when they are in the “gray area” or at the time that they cancel from/expire out of the gray area is a decision left to you. Learn how subscription grace periods and billing retry work.