App Store offer codes: How to track campaigns, win back subscribers, and grow your app
- One offer per audience: Never create one big offer and share its codes everywhere – give each campaign its own reference name so App Store Connect reports associate redemption activity with that audience’s offer.
- Two code types: One-time use codes are unique strings generated in batches of 500 to 25,000 that last six months; custom codes have memorable names up to 64 characters that many people can redeem, also capped at 25,000.
- Quotas and targeting: Both systems allow up to one million codes or redemptions per app per quarter, and eligibility can be limited to new, existing, or expired subscribers – which is what makes win-backs possible.
- Four audiences to try: Press get private one-time codes, creators get named custom codes with clear disclosure, testers get a free-year code when 1.0 ships, and lapsed subscribers get an expired-only win-back offer.
- Send links, not codes: Custom codes can’t be typed into the App Store’s redeem screen, so put the redemption URL in everything you send – and get eligibility right first, because an offer’s configuration can’t be edited after creation.
- Judge the second order: Track paid conversion and renewal matched to the subscription duration, along with returns and proceeds – 400 redemptions followed by heavy churn can be less valuable than 80 with strong paid conversion and retention.