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App Store Connect Peer Benchmark Tracking

Apple's March 2026 Analytics overhaul added 100+ metrics and peer benchmarks — what to track to use download-to-paid and proceeds data correctly.

Revenue

Apple shipped its biggest update to Analytics in App Store Connect since the tool launched, adding over 100 new metrics in March 2026, including in-app purchase and subscription data, cohort analysis by download date and offer start date, up to seven simultaneous filters, and — for the first time — peer group benchmarks for download-to-paid conversion and proceeds per download. It’s a genuine improvement for developers who previously had to stitch together revenue insight from Sales and Trends exports and third-party tools. It’s also a lot to work with at once: a hundred new metrics without a framework for prioritising them just becomes a hundred numbers nobody checks.

Peer benchmarks are the feature worth the most care. A single percentile comparing your app’s conversion or proceeds against a “peer group” is easy to misread if you don’t know how that group was defined — category, price tier, region, and app age all affect what a fair comparison looks like, and Apple’s methodology isn’t fully transparent. Teams that chase a peer-benchmark number without understanding its cohort composition risk optimising toward a target that was never really comparable to their app in the first place. There’s also a migration underway: Sales and Trends dashboards are being folded into Analytics over 2026 and 2027, starting with subscription dashboards, so reports and saved views built on the old tool need a plan before they disappear.

Data Points to Track

  • Peer benchmark percentile over time, not a single snapshot — trending your download-to-paid conversion and proceeds-per-download percentile monthly shows whether you’re actually improving relative to peers, not just relative to your own past
  • Own-metric trend versus benchmark delta — the gap between your conversion/proceeds trajectory and the peer median, since a shrinking gap matters more than the absolute percentile in isolation
  • Cohort retention by acquisition source and offer start date, using the new cohort analysis views to see which channels bring in users who actually convert and stay, rather than just install volume
  • Filter combinations actually in regular use against the seven-filter maximum, so dashboard sprawl doesn’t outpace the metrics your team genuinely reviews
  • Sales and Trends migration status per legacy saved report or export, tracked against Apple’s phased deprecation timeline

Setup Steps

  1. Shortlist the metrics that map to a real decision your team makes — pricing, offer design, acquisition channel budget — before building dashboards around all 100+, since most won’t get looked at otherwise.
  2. Set up cohort analysis by download date and offer start date first, since these are the two dimensions most likely to explain swings in conversion that a top-line number hides.
  3. Pull peer benchmark percentiles on a fixed monthly cadence and log them somewhere outside App Store Connect’s UI, so you have a trend line rather than whatever the dashboard shows on the day someone happens to check.
  4. Export subscription reports via the new Analytics Reports API into your own data warehouse, both for longitudinal history beyond Apple’s retention window and to combine with in-app behavioural data.
  5. Migrate every Sales and Trends saved report and integration to its Analytics equivalent ahead of each deprecation phase, rather than waiting for the dashboard to disappear.

Actionable Insights

The benchmark-delta trend is more useful than the raw percentile for spotting real progress, because it separates “did we get better” from “did the peer group’s composition shift.” A cohort that shows strong day-one conversion but weak offer-start retention usually points to a pricing or paywall-timing problem rather than an acquisition problem, which the blended top-line proceeds figure would never surface on its own. Treat the Sales and Trends migration as a project with a deadline, not a background task — every saved report left unmigrated is a gap in historical data the day its dashboard is retired.

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