Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Sells consulting services and runs a paid signal-engineering workshop at App Growth Annual; works with Voyantis)
Check that Meta and Google receive the same event counts as your own analytics
Gaps of 30-50% are common; fix anything above 10% before touching ads
Workedanalytics-attributionpaid-social
What they did
Audit starts in Meta Events Manager / Google Ads Goals, not Ads Manager. For the last 7 or 30 days, compare total installs, free trials and paid subscriptions the platform received (not attributed ones) against RevenueCat, Amplitude or Mixpanel before sending. ~5% gap is fine; above 10% must be fixed (change source, parameters or the event itself). Watch for pitfalls: double sources that Meta deduplicates but Events Manager shows twice; missing parameters so only opted-in (IDFA) users are attributed (one change left only 20% of conversions reported). Once fixed, it can run 6-12 months but must be rechecked.
What happened
Guest treats this as the blocking first step; broken signals are frequent in small and large companies.
“And they say, "Oh, here here's the Ads Manager." And I say, "I don't care about the Ads Manager, show me the Events Manager."”
“If I'm seeing more than 10% discrepancy here, it's going to be a problem.”
“But in so many cases, I'm seeing 30% or 50%, and this this is going to be a a major problem that I need to fix before seeing anything else.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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