How Scalebay turns consent data into better UA decisions

Founded in 2022, with teams in Paris and Madrid, Scalebay runs the full mobile growth stack for app publishers: user acquisition across Meta, Google, TikTok and Apple Ads, App Store Optimization, creative strategy, onboarding and paywall optimisation, CRM and lifecycle marketing, and LTV-based analytics, handled as one connected system rather than a set of isolated services. The agency manages more than €1M in quarterly ad spend across 70+ apps.

Scalebay's consent management platform of choice is now Axeptio, deployed across the accounts it manages. Axeptio's mission is to help brands build trust with their users through clear, branded, and positive consent experiences. Lately, TUI France took that as far as running the launch video for its mobile app inside the consent experience, and records a 71% interaction rate and a 55% opt-in rate over twelve months.

But an important question remains: once that consent has been collected, successfully and ethically, how do you leverage those signals to drive real business growth? This is where the partnership between Axeptio and Scalebay creates a competitive advantage for mobile app publishers.

The Opt-In Rate Became a Media Buying Metric

The opt-in rate compares the consents obtained to the total number of users exposed to the consent experience. It is the indicator that decides how much activable data reaches reporting and targeting, which makes it the ceiling on everything a growth team can measure and, by extension, optimise. A high opt-in rate is the raw material of modern performance marketing.

Reaching one is a design, wording and timing exercise, and that is Axeptio's side of the work. Making it count afterwards is a technical exercise, and it is where many apps stumble.

A common pitfall is initialising SDKs before consent is granted: even if tracking is supposedly disabled, an SDK that has already started may still collect initial data. Another is treating the consent screen as the end of the job. Being able to produce, for a given user on a given date, the record of what was accepted is a requirement in its own right, and it is what homemade implementations most often discover they are missing.

Axeptio's certified CMP lets mobile apps condition their environment securely. Routing that clean data to the right marketing channels takes a different kind of expertise, and that is the one Scalebay brings.

Smarter Paid User Acquisition With Scalebay

Scalebay specialises in mobile growth and in the complex implementation of compliant tracking setups. A high volume of data flowing from Axeptio is what allows its experts to map a growth strategy against something reliable. In practice, the workflow looks like this.

Audit the current consent flow. Before touching anything, the team audits the existing consent flow and rate by market, benchmarking interaction, consent and opt-in rates against category norms. This applies the same activation-milestone discipline used on the onboarding side, measuring a different moment in the same first session.

Strategic sequencing and localisation. Scalebay sequences the CMP ahead of Apple's ATT prompt using Axeptio's mobile SDK, so the purpose is established before the prompt appears. It then localises by jurisdiction using Axeptio's geotargeted, 25-language deployment. Roughly 71% of countries now have a data protection text comparable to the GDPR, split across regimes as different as strict EU opt-in and US opt-out states. A single onboarding sequence built for one market does not hold up once an app scales internationally, and a campaign spending across geographies needs a consent signal that is equally reliable everywhere it spends.

Precision SDK configuration. When a user accepts tracking, Scalebay makes sure that Adjust, AppsFlyer, Firebase and the Meta SDK load in full tracking mode, so conversion tracking and the advertising features that depend on it fire accurately and compliantly. On iOS, one distinction has to stay clean: the consent collected in the CMP covers the purposes of data processing, while access to the IDFA depends on Apple's separate ATT authorisation. A configuration that treats the two as one is either over-collecting or under-measuring, and neither shows up in a campaign report.

Optimising the funnel. If a user refuses tracking, SDK initialisation is properly blocked or restricted and data delivery to external vendors is suppressed. In parallel, privacy-centric standards such as Google's Consent Mode v2 keep marketing performance measurement accurate through statistical modelling.

Feeding the signal back into optimisation. The resulting signal tightens the data Meta, Google and Apple Ads actually receive. Scalebay then re-tests budget allocation once attribution quality improves, rather than assuming it has not changed.

Closing the loop and maximising ROAS. Axeptio secures the high-quality data pipeline and prevents the failures that undermine it, starting with the assumption that Apple's ATT authorisation amounts to GDPR consent. Scalebay turns the resulting data into efficient campaign bidding. That combination is what moves Return on Ad Spend, particularly around the commercial peaks where a few points of measurable audience decide the outcome of a season. Downstream, the same consented, granular data feeds CRM and retention campaigns, so segmentation stays consistent from the first install through renewal.

Why Scalebay Treats This as a Growth Problem, Not Just a Compliance One

Consent implementation is usually handed to a client's engineering team and never looked at again. Scalebay treats that gap as an opportunity. A campaign can hit strong install volume and a low CPI and still underperform on ROAS if the consent and onboarding layer ahead of it is quietly degrading the attribution data the whole optimisation loop depends on.

That is the same logic Scalebay applies to ASO, paid UA, creative strategy and onboarding. They are inputs into the same model, evaluated against LTV and CAC, rather than separate workstreams competing for budget.

Consent-specific results cannot be shared for confidentiality reasons. The same attribution-first rigour is visible in the agency's broader paid UA track record: Le Point grew web subscriptions 96% year-over-year while cutting web CPA 71% following a tracking and funnel overhaul; Euronews moved from break-even to a 1.89x ROAS at 24 months using cohort-level modelling; YouPray nearly tripled paid subscriptions during its seasonal peak while cutting cost per subscriber 67%. Consent is the input that rigour is now being applied to, on the same accounts where a cleaner signal has the most to offer.

An Agency Perspective

"We used to treat consent as something the client's dev team handled before we got involved. Now it's one of the first things we audit, because a bad consent rate quietly caps everything we can do downstream on Google and Meta."

Jean-Christophe Stienlet - Co-founder, Scalebay

"Attribution quality isn't a nice-to-have anymore, it's the foundation the rest of the funnel gets measured against. Axeptio gives us a way to fix that foundation without adding friction to onboarding, which is the part most teams get wrong."

Lorenzo Paccagnini - Co-founder, Scalebay

For a mobile app publisher, a consent management platform is a legal, technical and a measurement layer at once. Axeptio secures the first two. What Scalebay adds is the discipline of treating the third as a growth input, so that every compliant "yes" ends up in the model that decides where the next euro of media spend goes.

Written with insights from Jean-Christophe Stienlet and Lorenzo Paccagnini, co-founders of Scalebay.