Driving Performance and Innovation with PEPr: Liftoff’s Experimentation Program
At Liftoff, innovation isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a strategic imperative. To stay ahead in a constantly evolving ad tech landscape, we’ve built mechanisms into our product development and optimization process to ensure we’re always learning and improving. One of the key drivers behind this innovation is PEPr, our Performance Experimentation Program focused on surfacing and scaling high-impact wins.
What Is PEPr?
PEPr is Liftoff’s internal experimentation process. While our R&D teams focus on long-term innovation in product and machine learning, PEPr complements this with a hands-on approach to testing. The program surfaces high-impact opportunities, designs quick tests, and scales what works.
These ideas often come directly from our Operations teams, who, through their frontline work with customers, identify setups and strategies that may not yet be best practices but show strong early signals. By rapidly moving from concept to validation, PEPr helps us uncover performance improvements we might otherwise miss. In some cases, it even accelerates the development of new product features that might have taken longer through traditional pipelines.
How We Choose Experiments?
Experiment ideas flow from the field, directly informed by customer feedback, insights from our Sales and Operations leaders, and input from technical engineering and product teams. Whether it’s a new campaign setup or an early-stage ML lever, if there’s potential for measurable uplift, PEPr provides a structured way to test, validate, and scale.
What We Measure?
We focus on outcomes that matter to our customers. That includes proprietary models assessing campaign performance and uplift, particularly in KPIs like cost per install (CPI), conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS). In some cases, PEPr experiments also explore atypical or account-specific metrics like reinstall rates or downfunnel events. By aligning with client goals, we ensure successful tests are both impactful and scalable.
Real-World Impact: Success Stories from PEPr
Some of PEPr’s most compelling contributions come from its ability to solve high-stakes challenges in real-time. One standout example is the Hourly Pacing experiment, a breakthrough in campaign budget distribution. This approach wasn’t previously part of Liftoff’s standard toolkit, it originated as a custom solution during the Super Bowl push for a well-known sports-betting app. The campaign required precise hourly spend control, and Liftoff delivered, meeting hourly goals with near-perfect accuracy.
This marked a significant improvement over prior pacing capabilities, allowing the client to maximize performance during peak engagement windows. The impact was clear, with notable lifts across key performance metrics:
- 3x higher click-through rate (CTR)
- 5x increase in impression-to-install efficiency (ITI)
- More than 30% improvement in cost per action (CPA)
The success of this initiative led to broader adoption across verticals, including travel, iGaming, and eCommerce. The underlying learnings are now influencing how we evolve our pacing infrastructure.
In another initiative, we piloted a High Value User experiment using a high-percentile, revenue-based CPA model. The goal was to test if more aggressive bidding on top-tier super-users, those most likely to drive substantial revenue, could outperform standard CPA models. Results showed strong potential and the ability to double campaign budgets while maintaining KPIs, especially for gaming partners targeting this high-value audience segment.
What’s Next?
With PEPr, we’re not just testing hypotheses, we’re accelerating what works. By identifying real-world wins, validating quickly, and scaling success, PEPr helps turn promising ideas into performance drivers for all our customers.
Stay tuned as Liftoff continues to scale the future of performance-driven advertising. Want to uncover high-impact opportunities in your campaigns, or have an idea you’d like us to test? Reach out to Liftoff to learn how PEPr-inspired strategies can unlock smarter performance.
