Lookalike Models: Convert free trial users to subscribers

Free trials are a great way to introduce users to your product or service and encourage them to develop a habit of engaging with your brand. But once the trial is over, it’s important to target the right users to help smoothly transition your best users from the trial phase and ensure conversions.

The first step to building a Lookalike Model is selecting your source and target audiences. Start by defining the desired outcome for the target audience, in this case, "subscribers." The source audience is free trial users. If you haven't already, you can create these audiences in Lytics using the fields from imported data to identify users who have signed up for a free trial and current subscribers.

In the Lytics UI, go to the Laboratory section and click Create New Model at the top right. On the configuration page, you'll select the source and target audiences that you just defined.

By default, the Auto Tune option is turned off. If you’re not getting enough performance out of your models, try Auto Tune, which will select the default parameters for you. Leave Model Training Only selected if you're in an exploratory phase and not ready to target users based on this model's predictions. Learn more about the configuration options in our Model Builder documentation.

Depending on the sizes of your source and target audiences, your Lookalike Model may take a few minutes up to a few hours to build. On your Model Dashboard, you'll see a "Building" status until the model is complete.

Once your model is built, view the Model Summary to determine if it's ready for use in your targeting. You must Activate a Lookalike Model before creating a Predictive Audience, which will evaluate users and write the model's prediction scores to user profiles. This process can take up to three days for large audiences.

On the summary page, click Create Predictive Audience in the Model Usage section, which will open the audience builder pre-populated with your model's predictions. The default model decision threshold of 0.5 is used, but you can adjust the decision threshold as needed. Using a higher decision threshold will target a smaller number of users who are most likely to subscribe.

After creating a Predictive Audience of users with free trials most likely to convert to subscribers, you may want to target different subscription materials to this audience to improve paid activation rates.