ShortVydz · Launch Marketing Decision · Sep 2026

Conversion Funnel Comparison

Two ways to turn an ad viewer on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube Shorts into a ShortVydz user.

Direct to App

6 steps

Paid traffic deep links straight to the App Store. One continuous session.

  1. User sees TikTok / Instagram / YouTube Shorts ad1,000,000
  2. User pushes button10,0001% click
  3. User lands in App Store9,00090% land
  4. User installs app3,15035% install
  5. User opens app2,52080% open
  6. User creates account (email + password)1,64065% finish

Why it wins Fewer steps and, more important, zero time gaps. The user never has to remember to come back. This is the industry standard for app marketing.

One million people see the ad

Same ad, same 1,000,000 impressions, benchmark rates applied at every step. The counts on each step above show who is left. These are industry estimates, not our data; we swap in real numbers the day the ads run.

~1,640accounts from Direct to App: 0.16% of impressions, 16% of the 10,000 clicks
~14accounts from the Newsletter Route on the first send: 0.0014% of impressions
117xmore users from the exact same ad spend by going direct

Rates used: 1% ad click-through, 90% survive the redirect, 20% of web page visitors leave an email, 35% newsletter open rate, 12% of openers click the app link, 35% App Store install rate, 80% of installs open the app, 65% finish creating an account. The newsletter route does bank about 1,800 emails for retargeting, and a drip of several sends could double or triple its 14. That still leaves it two orders of magnitude behind. aTwist, our closest competitor, runs fully app first: their website is a shell and everything lives in the app.

What the newsletter side gets right

A fair point for the other side: the newsletter route captures an email even when the person drops off, so a failed conversion is not a total loss. We can retarget that list at launch. The direct route is all or nothing: no install means we got nothing.

That makes email capture worth having for free. It does not make it worth paying for.

Recommendation: it’s about sequencing