An app with consumer and business users · Thomas Petit client
Count a business user's yearly plan as worth 5 weekly consumer plans
Worked at first; went stale after 18 months of price changes and needed fixing
What they did
What happened
- Effort
- Ran about 1.5 years
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… broken data, but haven't thought much through it. Like, "Okay, let's optimize through the free trials and we'll see." Or, or have something set up I have one particular case where they actually find a somewhat not super sophisticated, but like a little bit more elaborate scheme where they were sending back different signals when people were taking different types of subscriptions. So, like, they have a mixed up of of user type and weekly/yearly,
Thomas Petitand they just have a multiplier. Say, "Okay, if it's the weekly subscription from a normal user, send one. And if it's a yearly subscription from a business user, send x5 back to the platform." So, but then they hardcoded it, and they iterated for a year and a half on the pricing and so on, and and when I came in, I realized that this hardcoding that did make a lot of sense back when they did it, was actually not representative of the value of users that were coming in,
Thomas Petitand then it became again a priority to fix, in the sense of to to get closer to the real value. So, and and the last phase is when you get really sophisticated. So, I went a little bit around, but like, if it's broken, you really need to fix it. Find a place where you're comfortable with, and dedicate your attention on creative and diversifying and other things, but at some point, as you grow, becoming a little bit more sophisticated about it, …
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
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
- Send Google only the trials that look likely to payGoogle trials converted at ~15% vs ~40% elsewhere; the fix moved the needle
- 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: signal-engineering, value-multiplier, hardcoded, business-users