When you're running early-stage MVPs, the standard playbook breaks down fast. ROAS? Meaningless when you have 3 signups a week. Conversion rate? Statistically irrelevant on 40 sessions a day. We ran into this across our portfolio at — our AI personalized song generator — we had weeks with solid traffic but zero purchases. Does that mean the product is dead? Not necessarily. Users were generating songs, sharing previews, coming back. The engagement was real; the monetization path just wasn't optimized yet.
Optimizing for ROAS at this stage is premature optimization. You'd kill promising products and keep ones that happen to convert on a tiny, non-representative sample.
Engagement Events with Weighted Values
Instead of tracking a single conversion event, we define 5-8 engagement events per product and assign each a fractional value that sums to 1.0. The idea: distribute "one unit of PMF signal" across the user journey.
For , the weights look completely different. There, "challenge completed" and "shared with friends" carry most of the score, because the product's value is inherently social.
Setting This Up in GA4
The implementation is straightforward:
1. Define custom events for each engagement milestone. Use gtag('event', 'engagement_milestone', { milestone_name: 'analysis_generated', weight: 0.25 }).
2. Create a calculated metric in GA4 called "Engagement Score" that sums the weighted values per session. Under Admin → Custom definitions → Calculated metrics, define it as the sum of weight parameter values.
3. Build an Exploration report with Session as the dimension and Engagement Score as the metric. Sort descending — high-scoring sessions are your power users.
4. Set up a segment for sessions with score > 0.5 (we call these "meaningful sessions"). Track what percentage of total sessions are meaningful — that's your engagement rate.
The beauty: this runs on GA4's free tier. No BigQuery export needed, no custom infrastructure.
Reading the Numbers
After running this across our portfolio for several months, here's what we've learned to look for:
Engagement score per session is the headline metric. If this trends up week-over-week without changes to the product, you're seeing organic pull. If it's flat or declining despite traffic growth, the product is leaking interest — people show up but don't engage deeply.
Meaningful session rate (sessions scoring > 0.5) tells you what fraction of visitors actually experience the product's core value. At and sharing what we learn along the way. More measurement and growth posts coming — follow along if this framework is useful for your own MVPs.
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR