How we cut Lifesum's Subscription CPA by 37%

Written by Abhilasha Mishra | Aug 13, 2026, 1:39:19 PM

"With Adikteev, we improved our subscription CPA by nearly 50% by focusing on the right users in our strongest markets."

Irina Dan,
Senior Performance Marketing Manager @Lifesum

background

Lifesum is a popular Swedish digital health and nutrition app that helps people eat healthier, lose weight, or build muscle through personalized, data-driven diet plans and daily habit tracking. It offers tailored calorie and macronutrient goals, easy food logging via barcode, text, or an AI-powered camera, thousands of recipes across structured diets, syncing with fitness trackers, and a gamified weekly Life Score.

The app is free to use with limited features, with a Premium subscription unlocking advanced meal plans and analytics. This campaign focused on converting installed users into Premium subscribers.

objective

The goal was to re-engage users who had installed the app but never taken a Premium subscription,
turning them into paying subscribers while reducing the day-7 subscription cost per acquisition (CPA).

campaign strategy

The strategy centred on two focused levers.

Geo-based segmentation: We concentrated spend on the best-performing markets, led by Germany (DE), the app's main geo.
Non-subscriber targeting: Our focus was on installed users who had not yet converted to Premium, the audience closest to subscribing.

results

takeaway

For health, fitness, and other freemium subscription apps, the users most likely to convert are often those who already installed the app but never subscribed. This campaign showed that re-engaging those non-subscribers, while concentrating spend on the strongest geos, can significantly improve subscription CPA.

Focusing on proven markets rather than spreading the budget thinly lets the algorithm optimise faster, and the efficiency gains tend to compound the longer the campaign runs.

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