What is Conversion Rate (CR)?

In app store analytics, conversion rate shows how efficiently your product page turns visitors into installs. If you’re asking what is conversion rate in this context: it’s the percentage of users who download your app after viewing it in the store, your first, most telling signal that messaging and creatives land.

Apple defines it directly in App Analytics as downloads divided by unique impressions or page views, depending on the report.

Conversion rate formula

The conversion rate formula you’ll use most often is: CR = (Installs ÷ Product Page Views) × 100.

This gives you product-page performance, independent of how users arrived (search, browse, ads). Google Play surfaces comparable peer benchmarks in Play Console so you can see your median vs. category percentiles.

Why it’s important (with benchmarks)

CR compounds growth. Higher conversion means more installs from the same impressions, better chart velocity, and cheaper paid acquisition because fewer ad views are needed per install.

Across H1 '24, AppTweak found an average page-view > install CR of ~25% in the U.S. App Store and ~27.3% on Google Play, with wide swings by category (e.g., Board Games near 1–7%, Navigation and some utilities much higher).

That spread is exactly why you benchmark against your niche, not a universal number.

How it works (and what moves CR)

Discovery brings people to your storefront (search, browse, ads, featuring). What happens next depends on the message–market fit at a glance: the title and subtitle set intent, the icon anchors recognition, screenshots and video communicate value in three seconds, and ratings/reviews provide social proof.

Category norms matter, gaming visuals telegraph mechanics; fintech leans on trust. Even small changes ripple: a color shift on the icon, reordered screenshots, or a clearer first line in the description can meaningfully change the ratio of views that become installs.

What is a good conversion rate?

There isn’t a single “good” number; good means beating your peer median and your own baseline. As directional guardrails for page-view > install: ~20–30% is common across many categories in the U.S.; top performers in fit-to-intent niches go higher, while hyper-competitive game subgenres trend lower.

Use Apple’s Peer Group Benchmarks and Google Play’s store listing conversion views to anchor targets by category and country.

Example

Say you average 18% CR on “budget planner” terms. You rework the icon to emphasize “free sync,” swap screenshot #1 to a clean balance view, and rewrite the first three lines to mirror the query language.

Two weeks later, CR climbs to 26% and paid CPI falls because fewer impressions are needed per install, exactly how conversion lifts ripple through both organic and paid performance.