Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Sells consulting services and runs a paid signal-engineering workshop at App Growth Annual; works with Voyantis)
Look up each conversion's value from a server so you can change it without a release
Avoids app releases for every price or currency change; says it makes a big difference
What they did
What happened
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… with an MMP SDK, it's not very complicated, either. I mean once you figure it out once It can get more complicated later, like, for example, for value, for the value optimization. One thing that happened is that it doesn't go through an SDK, but through an API that sends back the information to the SDK. I'm like, "Okay, so I've got this combination of" We could hardcode it. We could say, "Okay, if there is this plan that is done on this device,
Thomas Petithaving answered this particular question at onboarding, then the value is 56. And if it's the other combination, it's 23." And we could hardcode this. But then every time I need to update, and that happens constantly, because we change plan, currency value change, and so on, I would need to have the code touch, and then another release. So, if I know I'm going to do a lot of signal engineering later, what I'm doing is actually there's an API call and say, "Okay, I've got all these parameters, what's the value right now?" "Oh, 56." And next week, it's going to be 68.
Thomas PetitAnd I'm not going to have anyone touch the code anywhere, but I can dynamically change it. And one particular case where you do want it like this is when you operate in countries where the currency tends to fluctuates a lot. Turkey is a very big one, for example. Turkey where, yeah, if you hardcode the value there, you're dead. But that's kind of sophisticated, and it can break, because then you've got the SDK talking to an API, like is not necessarily where you want to start, but eventually, it does make a big difference.
David BarnardIt's a great insight, too, that as marketers, it's something to be cognizant of and to work toward, is better understanding at the code level what's actually going on, so that you can work more collaboratively with the engineering team to successfully deploy these things, and then to kind of understand what's going on under the hood to be able to troubleshoot when it's not working well. And to your point,
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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
- 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: signal-engineering, value-api, currency, no-hardcoding