Tell Meta a trial start is a trial, not a purchase

Alper Taner… also could be on the event mapping/the signal engineering side of things because when you optimize towards a purchase where the Meta has a lot of information on and which is great because it goes after people who actually purchases things, but also, you should think about, "Okay, these people are purchasing anything."Just because someone bought a skirt doesn't mean that they're going to try your app. There's also a bit of the relevancy there.

Alper TanerSo, I remember, I think it was sometime last year, had an app that had a really high CAC and because they mapped their trial-to-purchase, and then all we did was mapping their trial event to trial and their cost per purchase/the actual cost per trial went down by, I think, around 35%, only with that change. Same creative, same campaigns, just different event optimization. Also, their CPMs changed, as well, because if everyone is optimizing towards a purchase, and then the guy is, let's say this brand is optimizing towards purchase because his AOV is $200, he's willing to pay up to, let's assume $200 versus a cost per trial's worth for your business is $15, let's say, or $10. How are you going to compete with the guy who is willing to pay 200?

Alper TanerFrom the auction dynamics point of view, that guy is spending more and the way to give the autobid a signal is you increase your budget, you indirectly increase your bid when you have the autobid, when you don't have the bid cap and cost cap. And then that guy keeps increasing and then you're just getting crushed and he's maybe getting the highest intent and you're getting the lowest intent purchasers and stuff like that. So, there's a mismatch …

Alper Taner… the other businesses, then there's a mismatch and that's a whole business model of Meta. It will find exactly the user. It learns from the users that it showed impression to. It gets the conversion as a feedback, and then it will try to find more similar people. So, when you send this mixed signals, mixed funnel, that doesn't make sense from the auction calculation point of view, then you're also potentially losing out on these opportunities.

Alper TanerSo, having said that, if you're happy with your current event mapping, don't try to just challenge it for the sake of challenging. If you are unhappy and thinking there is a room to try something different, I would suggest create another event that gets triggered at the same place. For example, the trial start, add another trial start event in your MMP, then map that to, let's say to subscribe, then run a split test purchased versus a subscribe to see which event is more resonating. Of course, the history of each will not be the same, so I would at least wait a week or two so that the events manager will build some history and understand what does this event mean for their algo and so on. Again, it's difficult to quantify, wait one week versus two weeks, but it's just to build some data history and then run the test and then see how it is.

Alper TanerAnd that's exactly what we did for this particular project. And then we saw a 35% improvement just like that. So, sometimes, you shouldn't think too complex on, okay, but maybe they also come back on day three, then I will fire this super high LTV in predictor event that you can also do that, but also just step back, zoom out. Okay, what am I telling the algorithm? How does the algorithm know me? Is the algorithm X, Y, Z? So, it should start at …