A mobile game with big spenders · B2C · guest's gaming contact
Report your biggest spenders as mid-value so Meta doesn't stop early
What they did
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… but that this $50 is actually 100, like, and I'm going to force it, like I'm going to make it a little bit more extreme. The trick here is that it makes that I can't really read the value anymore in the platform. I can't read my ROAS on Facebook, because it's all faked. I'm going to look at it on my side, but it's okay. I'm going to try to force the platform to gear towards the users that are most valuable to me by forcing it a little bit.
Thomas PetitAnd I had this fun conversation with someone from gaming, who said, "Oh, I do the opposite." "What? So, when you have a high-value user, you tell the platform that he's a medium-value user?" He's like, "Yes, because we've got whales, and then if I really declare a big whale of 500 or 1,000, Meta is going to say, 'That's it, my job is done for the day, I bring that one user, and I'm done.'" So, they actually tap it. The thing is that it it's a lot more rare in subscription that you want to do that. But let's say you've got this tier of subscription with ChatGPT,
Thomas Petitmaybe ChatGPT is going to fake it, that the $200 plan is actually only 100, because otherwise the campaign could derail faster if too many of these users come simultaneously, so you want Because at the end of the day, that the the machine of optimization, they're very sophisticated, but they're also a little bit dumb, and sometimes when you when they see a couple of good signals coming, they start like completely changing delivery. And, yeah, …
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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
- 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
Tags: meta, signal-engineering, value-cap, whales