Practitioner pattern · Steve P. Young (Sells App Masters agency services (including Meta Ads management); Web2Wave and MaxFusion are episode sponsors)
Run Meta ads only once each install is worth at least $3
Host's minimum; Meta installs are expensive
Unknownpaid-socialpricing
What they did
Require at least $3 LTV per install (his friend Henry would set it higher), measured as LTV around month 11, not first revenue; for some apps month 1 and month 11 LTV are about the same. Find LTV per install in RevenueCat or your paywall manager (Adapty, Superwall). Apple Search Ads can work without hitting this bar.
“we're going to stick with at least a $3 LTV per install”
“So usually that's what we look at: what is my LTV at roughly around month 11?”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Wait to run Meta ads until 5-10% of installs start a trialHost's agency rule of thumb; 30%+ trial-to-paid and ~2% install-to-paid also required
- Prove strangers will pay using ASO and Apple Search Ads before MetaHost's standard process; no numbers given
- Check that Meta's install and trial counts match App Store Connect before launching312 trials in App Store Connect vs 276 in Meta; close enough to launch
- Copy ideas from competitor ads that have run for months in Meta's Ad LibraryResearch step; no results reported
- Cal AI: Run a short ad with a one-line hook, the app in use, then the store linkAd has run about four months, which the host reads as a winner
- Test 3-5 very different ad ideas first, small tweaks laterHost's launch practice; no results reported
- Set Meta to find trial starts, and budget for 50 a week$1,000 at $2 installs gives ~35 trials, short of 50; ~$95 per subscriber
- Send each audience's ad to its own App Store page with matching screenshots
- Show Meta ad users a hard paywall during onboarding