Signal Hold (Signal Engineering)
Spend your ad budget on customers who stay.
Your ad platform is told the moment someone subscribes, before anyone knows whether it will be canceled. Signal Hold waits up to 24 hours and sends that signal only if no cancellation follows.
Your ad platform can't tell which conversions stuck.
That signal is called a postback, and it goes out in real time. For most events that's the right default. For anything a customer can reverse, it isn't.
Real-time delivery is the industry default.
A customer subscribes or places an order, and the conversion is posted to your ad platform right away. Every attribution tool works this way, and for an event that can't be undone, that's exactly what you want.
Nothing goes out when the customer cancels.
Ten minutes later, the customer cancels. Your billing system records it, and so do your Airbridge reports. But the postback went out before any of that happened.
Both end up in the training set.
A real conversion and a canceled one look identical in the training set. The platform can't separate the two, so your budget goes to finding more people who look like both.
Hold the postback until the conversion is confirmed.
Signal Hold keeps a conversion event waiting instead of posting it in real time.
Match on Transaction ID, not event name.
Whatever you call your cancellation event, Airbridge lines it up with the conversion it belongs to. Both events have to carry one for the match to work.
Hold the pair together, then send or drop it.
Both events are suppressed together, so your platform never receives a conversion it would later have to unlearn. If no cancellation arrives, the conversion goes out on schedule.
We call this Signal Engineering: choosing what your ad platforms get to learn from, rather than handing them every event you collect. Signal Hold is the timing piece. It decides when a conversion counts.
Made for businesses where a conversion can be undone.
Trials canceled on the day they start
A cancellation scheduled the same minute the free trial begins, from a subscriber who never intended to keep it. A window covering the first day holds those back, so your campaigns optimize toward trials that turn into paying subscribers.
Refunds requested right after the first charge
The trial converts, the charge lands, and the refund request follows within the hour. A one- to two-hour window keeps that pair out of the training set instead of teaching the platform to find more of it.
Purchases undone minutes after they happen
A mis-tap on the paywall, or the wrong plan picked and swapped straight away. Most of these land within minutes, so even a short window removes the bulk of them.
Signal Hold works best when these three line up.
Signal Hold currently applies to Meta Ads only.
Only the postbacks sent to Meta Ads are held. Your other channels keep receiving conversions in real time, exactly as they do today.
Both events need to carry a Transaction ID.
The conversion and the cancellation are paired on Transaction ID. If an event has been collected with a Transaction ID fewer than 20 times in the last 24 hours, you can't select it.
Each campaign needs 20 conversions a day.
That's the selection threshold. Below it there isn't enough signal for holding anything back to change what the algorithm learns. If your spend is split across many narrow campaigns, consolidating them into fewer, larger ones is usually what clears the bar.
Set up Signal Hold in the dashboard. No SDK change.
Signal Hold is configured in Signal Studio. Airbridge Owner and In-house Marketer accounts can view and set it up.
Open Signal Studio
Go to Integrations, then Signal Studio, then Signal Hold.
Set up the event pair
Select your conversion event and your cancellation event, and confirm both carry a Transaction ID.
Choose the hold window
From 10 to 60 minutes in 10-minute increments, or up to 24 hours. Cover the stretch where your cancellations cluster and stop there, so real conversions aren't held longer than they need to be.
Save and let it run
Holding starts right away. Nothing changes in your app or your SDK.
Frequently asked questions
Start winning more customers who stay.
Signal Hold is available on every plan and takes four steps to set up. Start free for 30 days.