When ATT and other privacy changes reduced mobile signal, moving core events to the web gave us better downstream visibility.
On the web we could track click to signup to renewal with full UTM context. That let us measure which creatives delivered users who actually stuck around beyond the trial.
We used Mixpanel to stitch sessions to identity and focused on events that correlated to renewals instead of installs. That produced reliable levers to increase LTV.
Which retention signals did you start paying more attention to after you moved some of your funnel to the web?
My biggest insight was that downstream events matter more than installs.
Once we tracked web events through to renewal we stopped optimizing for installs and focused on the actions that predicted retention. The Web2Wave setup gave us consistent event exports that fed Mixpanel.
After moving events to the web we could see true downstream conversion.
That changed our creative mix because some ads that drove installs were terrible at delivering users who renewed. The web funnel and analytics let us stop wasting budget quickly.
We started looking at week one active time and key events instead of installs.
That helped us predict retention and focus on messages that brought users who engaged.
Retention follows actions not installs
Privacy changes mean you must be smarter about signal. I focus on a handful of high quality events on the web that are cheap to collect and predictive of renewals. Use lift tests to validate the correlation.
If an event is predictive, make it part of your funnel and optimize towards it. Then attribute renewals back to the original campaign via stored UTMs.
We found onboarding completion and a single in app action predicted renewal.
Once we optimized the web flow to force that first action the cohort LTV moved up.
Also monitor the quality of traffic by creative not just channel.
Some creatives brought high intent users and others did not. Web analytics made that obvious fast.
I started tracking post signup events more closely.
They tell you if the traffic was worth it.