Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Sells consulting services and runs a paid signal-engineering workshop at App Growth Annual; works with Voyantis)
Send ad networks only the trials likely to pay, as their own event
Guest's go-to first step when paid trial quality lags; no numbers given
Workedanalytics-attributionpaid-social
What they did
When trial-to-paid from paid traffic trails other sources or its own past, run a regression on non-converting trials. Hard factors: device, OS version, language. Soft factors: onboarding answers (stated goal, intent, e.g. 'just browsing'). Keep the raw trial event unchanged; engineers add a new event (e.g. mapped as 'subscribe' or 'purchase') fired via the MMP (Adjust, AppsFlyer, Singular) or platform SDK only when a trial meets the criteria, and campaigns optimize to that. Most predictive factors across apps: age, goals, and consumer vs prosumer/solopreneur vs business. Advanced: add onboarding questions designed to create this variance. Exclusion is a last resort; skip it if trial quality is already fine.
What happened
Guest calls it the most common low-hanging fruit; no specific numbers.
“But the second step for me would be either going to what we call qualified trials or filtered trials, and typically, that would be when you see that the your free trial rates are either not as good as other networks, or not as good as what they used to be.”
“The free trial is going to remain a free trial. Okay, if there is a free trial, and the answer to this question is this, then send it to Adjust, AppsFlyer, or Singular as being subscribe, or whatever.”
“So yeah, age, goals, and I don't know how to define this, like typology of users between like consumer, and prosumer, and real businesses, like and big businesses.”
Related topics
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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
- 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
- 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
- Voyantis: 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