“You can create hurdles for the user to clear that potentially are good proxies for LTV. The most high-intent users will do it — and that could be a very strong signal of ultimate value. One host posted on Twitter after they created a CAPTCHA for no reason other than to test user intent — and it drove a 40% increase in ROAS.”

Signal engineering: create intent hurdles to send higher-quality signals to ad platforms

Signal engineering inverts conventional UA thinking: instead of lowering friction, deliberately add friction at the ad-to-install handoff to filter for intent. The users who clear the hurdle self-select as high-LTV; that signal gets fed back to the ad platform to optimize acquisition. Seufert envisions Meta/Google eventually doing this automatically, personalizing landing pages per user in real time.