Which keywords are actually making you money?

You're running Apple Search Ads. You bid on your competitor's name, some category keywords, maybe a few broad matches. People are tapping. People are installing. Apple's dashboard says you got 24 installs at $24.33 CPA. Seems fine.

But 24 installs isn't 24 paying customers. It's 24 people who downloaded your app. Some of them opened it once, saw the onboarding screen, and never came back. Some reached the paywall and closed it. Some started a trial and cancelled. Some actually paid.

Apple doesn't know which bucket they ended up in. Apple knows they tapped the ad and downloaded the app. Everything after that is invisible to them.

So your $24.33 CPA is a fiction. Your real cost per paying customer might be $48. Or $140. Or $12. You have no idea, because the ad platform and the payment platform don't talk to each other.

Right now, you're looking at two separate dashboards:

Apple Search Ads tells you: 24 installs, $584 total spend, $24.33 CPA, 6.2% tap-to-install rate. It breaks this down by campaign, ad group, and keyword. It might tell you the keyword [competitor-app] drove 12 installs and [habit tracker] drove 8. This is useful but incomplete.

RevenueCat tells you: 18 trials started, 12 converted to paid, $964 total revenue. It shows subscription lifecycle events — who upgraded, who cancelled, who refunded. But it doesn't know where any of those people came from. It has no concept of keywords or ad campaigns.

The gap between these two dashboards is where your money disappears.

You know [competitor-app] drove 12 installs. You know 12 people converted to paid. But you don't know if those 12 paying customers came from [competitor-app] or [habit tracker] or organic search. The keywords and the revenue are in different systems with no connection between them.

Grometrics sits between these two systems and connects them.

First, the Grometrics mobile SDK captures the Apple attribution token on first launch. This token identifies which campaign, ad group, and keyword drove the install.

Second, the SDK tracks every screen the user sees — Welcome, Signup, Profile Setup, Paywall, Purchase Success. This is the journey you can't see in either Apple or RevenueCat.

Third, when the user starts a trial or makes a purchase, RevenueCat fires a webhook to Grometrics with the transaction. Because both SDKs share the same user identity, the transaction links back through the journey to the original keyword.

The result: you can open Campaigns and see that the keyword [competitor-app] cost $142 in spend, drove 12 installs, 8 of those reached the paywall, 6 started a trial, 4 converted to paid, and generated $420 in revenue. That's a 3.0x ROAS.

Meanwhile, [habit tracker] cost $82, drove 8 installs, but only 2 reached the paywall because 6 bounced on the profile setup screen. Different keyword, same app, completely different problem.

You need three integrations connected. If you've been following the mobile funnel tracking guides, you probably have two of them already.

Most people find the same patterns when they first connect Apple Search Ads to Grometrics: