Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Sells consulting services and runs a paid signal-engineering workshop at App Growth Annual; works with Voyantis)
Send trial starts, direct purchases, trial conversions and renewals as separate events
Default SDK mapping often lumps them all into one event; guest says fix it first
What they did
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… work, the amount of reason that can be for it not to work, but that's something you need to fix yes or yes, like, one way or another. That could be changing the source, that could be sending different parameters, changing the event entirely, or whatever. It's also because the default configuration of like, for example, the the Meta SDK, or Basically, you can put the Meta SDK and tell Meta, "Okay, just map my event on your own," and you have like
Thomas PetitThe install, for example, is the hardest to debug because it's not an event, it's something that came prepackaged, so when it doesn't work, you've got less levers to move. But for example, the free trial the paid conversion can be mapped and something that happens very often is that a direct purchase without a free trial, and a free trial that converts to pay, and a renewal would all be mapped to purchase together. How can you actually read anything when you've got this mixed bag of event?
Thomas PetitWhich I sometimes use a mixed bag of event for optimization, but as long as I understand what's what's actually passing through, and I'm going to want all of those individually to make sure like, "Okay, I've unbugged that they work properly, now I can start getting a little bit smarter around what I'm sending." And the default configuration is not as easy as it looks. I think it's one of the case where making a little bit of effort, because it's …
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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 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
- 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: meta, signal-engineering, event-mapping, sdk-defaults