Effective UA starts with setting the right strategy. If you don’t know what a player is worth, when they’ll pay back, and if you’re hitting your goal, you’ll set your money on fire.
To set the right user acquisition goal, you need to understand how your product is monetized, and what your business goals are.
For most games and apps, that goal is a ROAS buying target: the minimum return on ad spend a campaign needs to hit by a particular date so your ad spend pays back on schedule. This is the key goal for nearly every product aiming to scale via paid UA.
In certain situations, setting a CPA (Cost Per Action) target fits better: what you’ll pay for a revenue-signal event like a first deposit or first purchase.
Subscription apps are often measured against CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and trial conversions.
This guide digs into the nuance required to effectively measure and optimize your marketing performance
How to Set Your ROAS Buying Target
The predominant way growth marketers think about performance is based on Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Return on Ad Spend is the measurement of how much revenue you generate from your marketing dollars.
ROAS is computed as: Lifetime Value (LTV) / Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
For effective performance marketing you need to set a buying target. Your buying target is the minimum ROAS a campaign or segment needs to achieve to hit your payback goal.
Buying targets are most often thought of in cohorts against a payback period.
A payback period is the timeframe by which your business aims to recoup your marketing spend. Reaching it means a cohort has reached 100% ROAS: the breakeven point where ad spend becomes profitable.
To ensure marketers are on track to achieve their profitability target during their payback period, marketers measure what percentage of their cohort’s marketing spend is being returned over time. This is often represented as ROAS by Day X (i.e. D7, D30, D90, etc.).
As an example: if you are targeting a D90 payback of 100% ROAS, you may be targeting a D1 payback of 32%. In that case, each cohort that makes above 32% is “on target” and anything below is “missing target”. See example below:
Buying targets convert a business goal (like “be profitable in six months”) into a daily signal your UA managers can actually optimize against.
Deriving the buying target from your payback window
The buying target falls out of two inputs: your committed payback window, and the shape of your LTV curve.
Explaining the example above:
- LTV (Lifetime Value) curve: The average underlying monetization behavior of a cohort (visualized above)
- Payback window: D180. You want break-even in six months. 100% ROAS
- D7 buying target: 25% ROAS. You’ve made back a quarter of your ad spend.
- D30 buying target: 75% ROAS. You’ve made back 3/4ths of your ad spend.
It’s best practice to set a target at key checkpoints along payback period. Typical targets include: early optimization targets like D1, D3, D7, D30, and long-horizon checkpoints like D30, D90, or D180.
Early targets let you course-correct quickly. Longer horizon targets keep you honest about what real life health of your performance.
Why are buying targets the main goal?
Buying targets do three things other UA metrics can’t do alone.
They link boardroom strategy to the campaigns UA managers are actually running. A payback commitment buried in a finance deck never reaches the person placing bids; a D7 ROAS target on their dashboard reaches them every morning.
They make scale decisions defensible. Over D7 target, scale. Under, pull back. The buying target removes the negotiation.
They reconcile leading and lagging signals. Early-day ROAS arrives fast but reads noisy. The actual revenue doesn’t show up for months. A laddered set of targets (D1, D7, D30, and D90) lets you act on the early signal while still being judged on the late ones.
The buying target depends on trustworthy data
Your buying targets are only as good as your underlying measurement and performance data.
If your D7 ROAS, your LTV model, and your ad spend all live in different systems that never quite reconcile, your “25% by D7” target is decoration.
See how having a unified mobile marketing intelligence system unifies your data layers, cohort forecasting, and ROAS attribution to actually make a buying target executable.
Setting reliable UA targets depends on having reliable data. The Upptic Game Growth Engine forecasts cohort performance up to 360 days, reconstructs iOS attribution and revenue from SKAN and ATT signals, and lets you examine payback periods and set buying targets with a highly actionable and granular cohort explorer.
When to Optimize on CPA Instead of ROAS
ROAS is the headline goal for most IAP-driven games. For a meaningful subset of titles, CPA (Cost Per Action) is the better optimization signal. The action might be a first deposit, a purchase event, completing the first time user experience (FTUE), or any other in-app event closely tied to monetization.
CPA are an effective alternative to ROAS in three situations:
- When you have a simple monetization framework like a subscription product. Lifetime value is gated by retention across renewals rather than by a long tail of variable purchases, so a CPA goal pegged to a converted subscriber is often tighter than modeled ROAS.
- If a single in-app event predicts monetization unusually well. First-time deposit in real-money gaming is the canonical example. Those in-app economies are too complicated to model cleanly, so the first deposit is a clean CPA target.
- When products have a single price. If you’re selling a product or catalog at one fixed price, the value of every purchase can easily be measured as the cost of the product plus your expenses and markup. Because each conversion is worth the same amount, a CPA target maps cleanly to revenue, making it a clearer proxy than ROAS.
The trade-off is that CPA is a shallower signal than ROAS. CPA targets should be set based on what the completion of the tracked event is worth to your business. Ensure it accurately measures business value, and re-check this correlation if your monetization changes.
UA Goals for Subscription Apps
For subscription apps, CPA targets are usually the right fit. The monetization is simple: an upfront purchase, then a renewal rate.
Many subscriptions also start with a free trial with a goal of converting to a paying subscriber. That trial-to-paid conversion rate is a core metric for any app monetizing subscriptions.
Churn rate is the share of subscribers who fail to renew. When you’re deciding whether to extend your payback period past the first renewal, churn rate is an important consideration.
Churn Rate = Churned Users / Total Users
Example: 120 churned users / 1,000 in cohort = 12% churn rate
On the flip side, retention rate is the share of users who continue to renew their subscription.
Retention Rate = Retained Users / Total Users
Example: 880 retained users / 1,000 in cohort = 88% retention rate
Retention and UA goals
Retention is the most misunderstood UA goal, because its role changes as your product matures. The mistake is treating it as one fixed target across a product’s whole lifecycle.
- Before monetization is tested: retention is the primary indicator. Measure retention to confirm stickiness. If retention isn’t there, make changes to the product or kill it. This happens before significant UA spend.
- Once ROAS campaigns are running: retention becomes an additional signal. Check it per publisher or per campaign. ROAS and retention move together: when your ROAS campaign is performing, retention is usually healthy too. So you typically don’t need to optimize for both at once.
- During product economy or endgame changes: retention is a product KPI. Studios measure it at specific days (D30, D60) to evaluate the change.
The bottom line
Your user acquisition goal is the key number your team is optimizing against everyday. For most studios that number is a ROAS buying target. For some businesses, CPA is a simpler way to measure marketing efficacy. In rare cases marketers will optimize against retention targets.
Taking action on that nuance while building marketing infrastructure to set buying targets, track marketing performance, and forecast ROAS is a massive undertaking. But off-the-shelf solutions now exist that you can set up and tailor to your business in weeks, not months or years. Want to see what that looks like for your studio? Let’s talk.