Practitioner pattern · Thomas Petit (Thomas Petit client that requires 2x immediate return on paid, Thomas Petit marketplace client with lopsided categories, VC-backed startup where Thomas first ran the whole budget)
Watch how total installs, trials and subscribers shift as spend changes, per country
Catches bad trials and losing segments that ad dashboards miss
Workedanalytics-attributionpaid-social
What they did
Treat blended metrics as the only truth: track the trend of blended cost per subscriber and blended installs, trials and paying subscribers as spend goes up or down, not the absolute value. Run the analysis per country + platform segment (e.g. Brazil Android, US iOS), bundling small countries into groups by region or similar conversion. Clean out days with featuring, seasonality or product changes. Make budget allocation decisions from blended trends and channel-level tweaks (creative, ad group) from network-reported data. At small scale do it by pivoting in Excel or Looker Studio; at larger scale use MMM tools like Meta's Robyn, Google's LightweightMMM, Incremental (used 1+ year), Recast or metric.works.
What happened
Surfaces problems like trials bought at the $20 target that convert far worse, and segments losing money that don't move the overall numbers.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · What it Takes to Succeed with Paid User Acquisition — Thomas Petit, App Growth Consultant“So it's more about how it's evolving as I move spend and that's a must-have exercise to do, one, because that's what's going to show up in the P&L of the company, and two, because that's the only thing you can trust.”
“there are very, very little interaction between countries and even between platform, so I usually run this analysis on a country plus platform segment, so I will only look at Brazil Android and I look at the trends, at the spend, at the install, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Very often what I do is kind of I make my budget decision and budget allocation based on what I see in the blended, but I'm going to make deep channel specific change based on what the network is reporting.”
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