Unity & In-App UA
tCPE
Target cost per event — the price you set for the algorithm to aim for on your chosen optimization event; set below what the funnel can support, it quietly strangles delivery.
tCPE is the target cost per event you hand the algorithm for whichever optimization event the campaign runs on, whether an install, a registration inside a D0, D1 or D3 window, or a payer. It is a target rather than a cap: the model aims for it on average and will knowingly pay above it for users it expects to be worth more.
Set it from the funnel economics you actually have rather than from what you wish the offer paid. Too low a tCPE does not make traffic cheaper, it makes the model decline auctions until delivery thins to nothing, and buyers routinely read that silence as a broken campaign instead of as their own target. Move it in measured steps, and not during the roughly two-week learning phase that every new optimization event triggers.
In buyer speech
“Delivery did not break, we strangled it, the tCPE is twenty per cent under what this geo can carry.”