What to measure before your first ad campaign
A short checklist for founders: which events to track, how to pass the ad source to your app, and how to test it all before you spend on ads.
Most first campaigns are judged on numbers nobody checked. The ad platform says one thing, the app says another, and the team argues about which is right instead of deciding what to change. You can avoid that with a few hours of preparation before launch.
1. Agree on three to five events
Do not track everything. Pick the few actions that show a person moving towards paying you:
- Sign-up: an account was created.
- Activation: the person did the first useful thing, for example booked a class or sent an offer.
- Purchase: money arrived.
Write down the exact name of each event and when it fires. The campaign will be optimized for one of them, usually sign-up or purchase, so it has to mean the same thing everywhere.
2. Count the event where it really happens
A sign-up really happens on your server, when the account is saved. If you only count it in the browser, ad blockers, closed tabs and failed requests will make your numbers lower than reality. Send the event from the backend as well, so the number the ad platform learns from is the number in your database.
3. Keep the ad source with the user
When someone arrives from an ad, the link carries parameters such as utm_source and utm_campaign. Save them with the new account. Later you can answer the question that matters: which campaign brought people who actually paid, not only people who clicked.
4. Test it before you spend
Before the campaign goes live, go through the whole path yourself: click a test ad link, sign up, pay with a test card. Then check that each event appears once, with the right source, in both the ad platform and your own data. Fix duplicates now. After launch they are much harder to find.
5. Make sure the product can take the traffic
A good ad can bring more people in one evening than your product saw in a month. Check that sign-up, payment and the first screens still respond under that load. A campaign that works on a product that falls over is the most expensive kind.
6. Decide how you will review the numbers
Choose one weekly review with the same few numbers every time: sign-ups, cost per sign-up, activation and purchases. Same numbers every week make decisions easy to compare.
This is how we prepare every launch at Byte & Brand: the product and the campaign are planned together, so the sign-up the ad pays for is the sign-up the app measures. If you want us to look at your setup, book a 30-minute call.
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