A subscription app with free trials · B2C · guest's 2017 app
Send Google only the trials that look likely to pay
Google trials converted at ~15% vs ~40% elsewhere; the fix moved the needle
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- 2017
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
David Barnardbecause then you can determine, "I'm not sending free trials of users under 25 to TikTok." And so, you can do the math then of like, "Okay, we know that when I was sending 100%, it was working, and so now I'm only sending, you know, 75%, and so now I have an idea of like what should be arriving at that particular ad network." And then, that's how you do your data validation once you start doing the signal engineering, right?
Thomas PetitYeah, correct. I mean, all of this I remember doing this in 2017, and and it didn't come up from a brilliant idea in my mind, it just come up from the observation that my free trial rates on Google Ads was terrible. Like, we would have like, let's say, 40% trial-to-paid conversion on organic, on Meta, like, I mean, small differences, and then we'd have like 15% on Google. I was like, "What what are we doing wrong here?" I was like, "Okay, for Google, we're going to identify the some of the reasons those trials are not converting,
Thomas Petitand we're going to send them a different signal to try to fix it." It was not like we're not trying to be smart just to do signal engineering, but we started from a problem initially. Like, maybe if you don't have this problem, maybe if your free trial quality coming from from paid is great, you don't need to go further for now. Like, maybe you could you could do even better, but like I started from a from a problem. And then, seeing that this was moving the needle in ways, I said, "Okay, now I can get a little bit smarter."
Thomas PetitOne of the next step is that, historically, all these platforms, so they they offer event optimization, so they offer install optimization, which, honestly, you should never do. There are a couple edge cases where you might, but in most cases, a very bad idea. There's event optimization, which can be different events, they can be filtered, and so on, and we can talk a little bit more, and there's revenue optimization. And the problem with revenue …
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More from this episode
- Check that Meta and Google receive the same event counts as your own analyticsGaps of 30-50% are common; fix anything above 10% before touching ads
- Send trial starts, direct purchases, trial conversions and renewals as separate eventsDefault SDK mapping often lumps them all into one event; guest says fix it first
- Send ad networks only the trials likely to pay, as their own eventGuest's go-to first step when paid trial quality lags; no numbers given
- Tell Meta to value some users more or less instead of excluding themKeeps cheap under-25 reach instead of cutting it; no numbers given
- Report each user's expected value at month 13, not what they paid on day oneGuest's main advanced lever; no numbers given
- Look up each conversion's value from a server so you can change it without a releaseAvoids app releases for every price or currency change; says it makes a big difference
- Send your conversion signal within a day, waiting a few hours to see early useVoyantis showed timing matters; guest says signals after 24 hours are nearly useless
- Keep at least 10 conversion events per campaign per day before filteringUnder ~10/day optimization breaks; well above it, fewer better events win
- Report low-value users as worth less and high-value users as worth morePushes delivery toward top users but hides true ROAS; has backfired when overdone
- Send every event to every ad network, then pick a different signal for each
- Compare the value you report with real revenue by country, not just in total
- Count a business user's yearly plan as worth 5 weekly consumer plansWorked at first; went stale after 18 months of price changes and needed fixing
- Change which events you send to ad networks, even as a young appBig uplift per the guest; details saved for a blog post
- Put all spend behind one channel and one optimization signalGrew from 0 to eight figures in two years, then had no fallback when it broke
- Let a signal specialist filter and send your ad events, and test itOne of two tests looks good, the other doesn't; not conclusive
- Tell ad networks which users reported high anxiety, since they pay far more
- Treat users who rush a 30-screen onboarding in under a minute as low valueHeld for one app; another app found its fastest finishers were its best users
- Change what you report as user value when cash matters more than long-term LTV
- Sell $5-10 top-up credits on top of subscription tiers
- Send buyers to web checkout once the store fee jumps from 15% to 30%Works for them, per the guest; no numbers
- Report a $1 value for non-payers who look likely to stick around
- Report your biggest spenders as mid-value so Meta doesn't stop early
Tags: google, signal-engineering, qualified-trials, trial-quality