Shopify App Store ads calculator: are your ads worth it?

What the calculator works out

Each result follows from the seven numbers you enter, over 30 days of ads.

ARPU is the average monthly revenue per paying store, and churn the share of paying stores that stop paying each month. The starting values ($20 a day, $1.50 a click, 15% of clicks installing, 30% of installs paying, $29 a month, 5% monthly churn) are placeholders to replace with yours, not market averages: as of October 20, 2026, Shopify publishes no average cost per click or conversion rate for App Store ads. With those placeholders, $600 buys 400 clicks, 60 installs and 18 paying stores, at $10 per install and $33.33 per paying store.

Turned around, the same formulas give the most you can pay and still break even: a cost per install up to your paid conversion rate × net LTV, and a cost per click up to your install rate × paid conversion rate × net LTV.

How Shopify charges for App Store ads

You pay per click, and a click costs exactly what you bid.

• Shopify calculates the cost per click with a first-price auction: the price of a click is the bid you entered for the keyword or placement that showed your ad.
• The auction weighs relevance as well as the bid. Shopify says keywords cost less for highly relevant apps, and that an ad with a high bid but low relevance may not win a slot.
• The budget is daily, in US dollars, with a minimum of $5 a day. It is the most you are charged in a day: Shopify slows, then stops bidding as your spend gets close to it.
• Shopify bills every 30 days, or as soon as your balance across all campaigns passes $100, in US dollars, on a Visa, Mastercard or American Express credit card (prepaid cards are refused). Clicks from bots are credited back, and tax appears on the invoice if your jurisdiction taxes ad purchases.

The calculator assumes you spend the whole budget every day. Because the budget is a ceiling, a campaign on rarely searched keywords can spend less: in that case, enter your real spend divided by 30 as the daily budget. At $20 a day, the $100 threshold also means you are charged several times a month, not once.

How Shopify credits installs and revenue to an ad

Shopify's ad report counts gross revenue, and counts it late, which is why the calculator works on net figures over a store's lifetime.

Shopify recommends reading customer and revenue numbers 60 days after the ad was shown, and notes that a return on ad spend chart that trends down at first is not necessarily bad: you pay for ads up front and earn later.

Because that return is gross, a campaign only breaks even on it at about 1.03 in the 0% revenue share tier (1 ÷ 0.971) and about 1.22 at 15% (1 ÷ 0.821), before refunds. The 0% tier covers your first 1,000,000 US dollars of lifetime gross app revenue counted since January 1, 2025, as long as you stay under Shopify's size thresholds; check where you stand with the revenue share calculator.

Where to find your real rates

Your campaign report holds most of them. Shopify's documentation places it in the Partner Dashboard under Apps, then App ads.

A suggested bid of 1 US dollar is Shopify's default when no other app bids on a keyword or data is lacking, and Shopify says it does not mean merchants search for that keyword. No suggested range at all means your app's relevance is too low to compete in the auction.

The "Current merchants" export of the Partner Dashboard says, for each current merchant, whether the install was organic or attributed to a paid ad campaign, so you can follow the stores your ads brought in apart from the others.

In Google Analytics 4, once your measurement ID is on your listing, a visit from a paid search result carries surface_type=search_ad, and a visit from organic search surface_type=search. As of October 20, 2026, Shopify's list has no separate value for homepage or category ads. Its tracking page also lists a shopify_app_ad_click event, sent when a merchant reaches your listing from an ad. How Shopify App Store ads work covers placements, keywords and targeting, and reading your App Store search terms in GA4 shows how to tie an install to the visit it came from.

Luseri splits your listing views between search, ads, categories and other App Store pages, from your own Google Analytics 4, so you can follow paid and organic visits side by side.

What the calculator cannot know

It treats every install Shopify credits to an ad as won by the ad, and it leaves time aside.

• The effect on your organic ranking. As of October 20, 2026, Shopify's documentation says nothing about whether ads change your organic position; ads sit in their own slots, marked with a badge.
• Installs you would have had anyway. An install counts for the ad if it happens within 30 days of a click, even when the merchant would have found you without it. Compare search and search_ad visits over the same weeks, with and without ads, to see whether paid visits add to organic ones or replace them.
• Brand searches. Since November 18, 2024, brand terms can be bid on, and an app that strongly matches a search for its own name is shown above the ads. Clicks bought on your own name may come from merchants already looking for you, and a competitor can bid on it too.
• Free trials. Revenue starts after the trial, so add its length to the payback time, and expect Shopify's report to fill in up to 64 days plus the trial after the click.
• Rates that move. The calculator holds every rate constant; in practice bids change, and stores won through ads may churn faster or slower than your average.
• Taxes, refunds and ad credit. Results are before tax and refunds. If Shopify gave you ad credit, it is applied to your running search ads first, and charges start once it is used up.