Your Web Users Are Worth Less Than You Think. Here's the Data.

I’ve spent years growing apps to millions of downloads, and if there’s one pattern I’d bet on every time, it’s this: the same person is worth far more inside your app than on your website. Not by a rounding error. By a multiple. Most teams I talk to already suspect this. What they’re missing is the number, the proof, and a way to justify pulling the app work forward instead of leaving it as a someday project.

So here’s the case, built entirely on independent research and one peer-reviewed study. Use it however you like.

The mobile conversion gap nobody fixes

Start with where your traffic actually is. Smartphones drive the majority of retail visits, close to 80% in most markets, but mobile web converts at roughly half the rate of desktop. Contentsquare’s 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark, built on 99 billion sessions across 6,500 sites, puts mobile web conversion at 2.03% against desktop’s 3.81%.

Read that again. The device where most of your visitors show up is the device where they convert worst. That gap has been sitting there for a decade, and mobile web conversion rates have barely moved. The app is the fix that’s been available the whole time.

Conversion: apps win in every study, every time

The number you’ve probably heard is that apps convert three to five times better than mobile web. That comes from Criteo’s Global Commerce Review, based on 5,000 retailers across 80 countries. It’s real, but I want to be straight with you: Criteo uses a generous way of counting (buyers divided by product-page viewers, not by sessions), which inflates the multiple. Treat three to five times as the ceiling, not the floor.

The floor is more convincing anyway. Poq’s 2026 analysis ran the strictest comparison I’ve seen: the same brand, the same time period, the same currency, sessions as the denominator, across 21 brands in the UK, US, Europe, and Australia. The result was a median lift of 1.8x, and every single one of those 21 brands converted better in-app than on mobile web. Top performers cleared 4x. When even the most conservative methodology can’t find a single brand where the app loses, you’re not looking at a marketing stat. You’re looking at a structural fact.

Tapcart’s same-brand data lands in the same place, at 2.3x. Different dataset, different method, same direction.

Now the metric that makes it visceral: cart abandonment. On mobile web, somewhere between 80% and 86% of carts get abandoned, according to Barilliance and SaleCycle. In an app, it’s around 20%. The reason is boring and completely mechanical. App users log in once, then check out with a saved address, a stored card, and a fingerprint or face scan. Mobile web users re-enter their details every time, hit a login wall, fumble through 3D Secure, and a huge share of them simply give up. You are not losing those sales to a competitor. You’re losing them to friction you could remove.

Retention: this is where the gap compounds

Conversion is a single moment. Retention is what turns a one-time win into a compounding advantage, and it’s where the app pulls away completely.

Across 19 retail brands, Poq’s platform data shows 50% of app users still active after one month, 30% after six months, and 20% still active a full year after install. Best-in-class brands hold 40% at twelve months, meaning two of every five users stick around for a year. For context, Adjust and AppsFlyer peg typical ecommerce app retention at 5 to 9% by day 30. In other words, the best app programs retain more people at twelve months than most apps hold at one.

What drives that? Overwhelmingly, one thing your website can’t replicate: push notifications. Airship’s 2025 benchmarks, drawn from billions of users, found that a single push notification lifts 90-day retention by 120%, and any push engagement roughly triples it. On the web, you can only capture demand a user already has when they happen to visit. In an app, you can create demand: a 6pm flash-sale alert, a back-in-stock ping on a wishlisted item, an abandoned-cart nudge at lunchtime. There is no real web equivalent, and iOS web push adoption is still negligible. This is the single biggest reason app economics run away from web economics over time.

It’s not accounting. Behavior actually changes.

Here’s the objection a good CFO will raise: maybe app users just look better because your most loyal customers self-select into the app. Fair challenge. It’s why the strongest evidence isn’t a vendor benchmark at all, it’s peer-reviewed academic work.

Narang and Shankar, published in Marketing Science in 2019, tracked roughly 30 million shoppers at an omnichannel retailer and compared the same customers before and after they adopted the app. After adopting, those customers spent 37% more, purchased 33% more often, and bought 34% more items. Critically, the lift showed up across both online and offline channels. That’s the tell. If the app were just moving existing sales around, you wouldn’t see more spending in the physical store too. This is genuine behavior change caused by the app, not a reshuffling of where a sale gets recorded.

Tapcart’s Incrementality Index, based on 330 million orders and $31.5 billion in measured revenue, adds that web-to-app customers spend 36% more in total, on top of their web spending rather than instead of it, and that 11% of app customers are net-new to the brand. Order values run higher too, from about 9% higher in Poq’s data to 17% in Criteo’s matched-shopper analysis. And Google’s research puts app customers at 33% more frequent purchasing, with a lifetime value that’s a multiple of web-only shoppers.

”But won’t the app just cannibalize my web sales?”

This is the number one reason app projects stall, so it’s worth killing properly.

Poq tracked monthly app and mobile web revenue for five brands over 13 months. If the app were stealing web customers, web revenue should fall as app revenue climbs. It didn’t. Both channels rose together, both peaked in the same seasons, and in one premium brand web revenue actually tripled at peak while the app also grew. Across all five brands, there was no sign of the app progressively displacing web.

Their conservative model, which assumes every single app install came from a web user who would have bought anyway, still finds that around 70% of app revenue is incremental. The app isn’t dividing your existing pie. It’s growing it.

Why now, and not next year

Zoom out and the timing gets sharper. Mobile commerce is now about 59% of ecommerce revenue globally, roughly $2.5 trillion in 2025 per eMarketer. More than 90% of mobile time is spent inside apps, and less than 6% in browsers. App users spend 64% more time per session than mobile web visitors. The center of gravity has already moved. Your web funnel is optimizing the channel that’s shrinking in share and converting worst.

Put it in your own numbers. Take a month of your mobile web traffic. At a 2% conversion rate, 100,000 sessions gives you 2,000 orders. Move even a modest slice of those users into an app converting at a conservative 3.6%, add roughly 10% higher order values, and layer on the fact that they’ll come back two to eight times more often over the year. The gap isn’t a few percentage points. Compounded across a year of repeat behavior, it’s a different revenue trajectory entirely. This is exactly the kind of split we built Easy App Reports to measure, which is why the pattern is so hard to unsee once you’ve put numbers on it.

The bottom line

Every credible study points the same way. Apps convert more, hold users longer, and change what those users actually spend, and the incremental revenue is real rather than borrowed from the web. The conservative floor is 1.8x conversion with every brand winning. The behavioral proof is a peer-reviewed 37% lift in spend. The objection about cannibalization doesn’t hold up in the data.

So the app isn’t a someday project. It’s the fastest way to get more out of the traffic you already have. It’s July, and every quarter you wait, the web leak keeps running.

This is the kind of problem we work on at Beyond Analytics. If you’re sitting on web traffic you haven’t turned into app revenue yet, that’s a conversation worth having.