A freemium subscription app · B2C · Thomas Petit client
Report a $1 value for non-payers who look likely to stick around
What they did
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… your weekly plan has a higher LTV when people renew a lot. So, you're just telling the platform something that is wrong about what you're looking for. And here the idea is not only to tweak, and I remember talking to Andre about signal engineering, and and he summarized it that, "Oh, Thomas is manipulating the ad platform." I'm like, "No, I'm manipulating data to send the ad platform what is the closest value of the users they're sending me.
Thomas PetitI'm not trying to lie here. At the contrary, I'm trying to fix something that is broken, in the sense of the platform is receiving a value that is not representative of my business value. Like, the default configuration is not what representative." One thing I'm working on right now, for example, is that users that are not converting within 24 hours, but are demonstrating a very high likelihood of retaining for long as a freemium user or converting later, we're going to assign a small value to it, so not the $10 per month or $90 per year, or whatever,
Thomas Petitbut maybe $1, like, because I'm like, "Hmm, I like this user, and if I send zero, there's zero event, there's zero value, the platform is going to conclude that this is the kind of users I don't want, and maybe because they create the network effect, they create DAU, they call they create late conversions that are very hard for the network to assimilate, I'm going to have to send something that shows them, 'Hey, this user is really zero, but that …
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
- 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 your biggest spenders as mid-value so Meta doesn't stop early
Tags: signal-engineering, value-optimization, freemium