Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Sells consulting services and runs a paid signal-engineering workshop at App Growth Annual; works with Voyantis)
Keep at least 10 conversion events per campaign per day before filtering
Under ~10/day optimization breaks; well above it, fewer better events win
What they did
In their words
Signal Engineering: Strategic Data Filtering for Better Ad Performance — Thomas Petit, Independent Consultant
Thomas Petit… missed the previous webinar, and not read the article that I haven't posted yet, [laughter] necessarily they've missed it. So, I'll go back to it, because it's pretty fundamental, but yeah, you can have a fantastic event. If the platform is seeing one or two every day, is not going to work. Like, the filtering, I mentioned before, like for me filtering out people is the last result, but that's not true. If I've got a very large amount of data,
Thomas PetitI would be more inclined to exclude people. It is the number of events you send So, here is at campaign level, like every campaign, basically there's a threshold of optimization that networks there's no exact number, but the number that's floating around is somewhere between 50 and 100 per week, so I simplify in my head and say, below 10 event per day per campaign, things are going to go a little bit wrong. It's a bit the more the merrier. So, if I can have 25 instead of 10, I'd rather not filter and have 25.
Thomas PetitAnd if I have 40 instead of 20, then I have 40, it's better. But once you get there, there's very little upside to sending 300 every day, and there's a lot of upside of sending only 30 every day, but that are super filtered. So, in this case, this is where the trade-off between volume and quality is. So, if you're too early, basically, you can't do qualified trials, almost, because you already only have five trials per day, so don't try to filter them, like, almost you'll want to go higher up before the free trial,
Thomas Petitand say, "Okay, these users haven't tried a free trial, but they've shown very good intent around around onboarding questions, about the first activity, I'm going to also send them, so that I have more event." And so, the more event you have, the more you can filter around. That's pretty clear, and this trade-off is is pretty fundamental. That day on the webinar, we didn't talk too much about timing, but I think I covered it decently today, also …
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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
- 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, google, tiktok, signal-engineering, event-volume, learning-phase, budget