Tracking Audit & Reconciliation
A full event inventory across GA4, Meta, Google Ads, Klaviyo and Shopify, reconciled against order data to quantify exactly where and how much data is lost.
Baltimore, MD
Analytics, Tracking & Data in Baltimore, MD
Tracking and reporting built for a Baltimore P&L, where shipping cost is the variable that decides whether an order was worth taking.
Delivered remotely for brands across Baltimore and Maryland.
Scale · Baltimore
Why Baltimore brands come to us for this
- Contribution margin per order including gel, dry ice, cold-pack and zone-based overnight cost — the number that decides profitability here
- Freight-shipped orders reported separately from parcel, because averaging pallet and parcel economics hides both
- B2B account revenue reconciled into the reporting layer and attributed to what created the account, not the latest reorder
- Consent mode v2 and data minimisation configured for MODPA, in force since October 2025
- Season state carried as a dimension, so a year-on-year comparison is not silently comparing April to January
In most ecommerce reporting, shipping is a line item. In this region it is the line item. Overnight cold-pack on a perishable order can consume a share of the order value that would horrify an apparel brand, and freight on a palletised industrial shipment varies by destination in ways a blended average completely hides. So a Baltimore store running on revenue and ROAS is optimising against a number that does not describe its business. We build reporting to contribution margin per order — product cost, packaging, gel and dry ice, carrier charge by zone and service level — because the answer to 'which channel is working' changes materially once shipping is inside the calculation.
The second gap is the one B2B creates. Trade orders placed through account logins, quotes and POs frequently never appear in the marketing analytics stack at all, so a supplier looks unprofitable in GA4 while the account business it acquired quietly funds the company. We reconcile B2B revenue into the same reporting layer, attributed to the activity that created the account rather than to the session that placed the fifteenth reorder.
Underneath both sits the plumbing: a full event inventory reconciled against Shopify order data, server-side GTM on a first-party subdomain, Conversions API with proper browser-to-server deduplication, and a GA4 schema documented well enough that a report means the same thing in six months. Most stores we audit are losing a meaningful share of events to blockers and ITP and have never quantified it.
Local context
Maryland's privacy and consent rules are stricter than the defaults you inherited
Two things make a Baltimore tracking build different. The Maryland Online Data Privacy Act took effect in October 2025 and is one of the more demanding state privacy laws in the country, particularly on data minimisation and on sensitive categories — which matters directly if you sell diagnostic, medical or lab products, because the categories you are inferring about a visitor may themselves be sensitive. On top of that Maryland's two-party consent rules make casually configured session recording a genuine exposure. So we implement consent mode v2 wired to a real CMP with modelled conversions, minimise what is collected rather than hoarding it, mask and exclude aggressively in any replay tooling, and document the whole configuration so someone can answer a question about it without reverse-engineering a tag manager. The reporting layer then carries the local variables that actually drive decisions: cold-pack and freight cost by zone, season state, wholesale versus retail revenue, and the Washington corridor split out so you can see whether that market pays its own way.
Scope
What Analytics & Data includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Baltimore brand’s realities.
Full service detailServer-Side Tracking
Server-side GTM on a first-party subdomain, resilient to ad blockers and ITP, with deduplication between browser and server events done properly.
Conversions API Integration
Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions and TikTok Events API with hashed identifiers, targeting event match quality of 8 or above.
GA4 Event Schema
A documented, consistent eCommerce event and parameter specification across every surface, so reports mean the same thing in six months as they do today.
Consent Mode & Privacy
Consent mode v2 wired to your CMP with modelled conversions, plus Shopify's customer privacy API and regional compliance handled correctly.
Executive Reporting Layer
One dashboard for blended MER, contribution margin, cohort LTV, new-versus-returning revenue and channel payback. Reconciled to Shopify, refreshed daily.
Scoped and quoted for your Baltimore store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Baltimore engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Audit & Quantify
We measure the gap between platform-reported and actual orders per channel. Most stores we audit are losing 15-30% of conversion signal before we start.
Specification
A written measurement plan: events, parameters, identifiers, consent states and destinations. Signed off before implementation begins.
Implement
Server-side container, CAPI, enhanced conversions and consent mode built in a staging environment and validated event by event.
Validate
Order-level reconciliation against Shopify for a full week, plus match-quality checks in each platform. We do not sign off on a screenshot of a tag firing.
Report & Maintain
Dashboards built, team trained, and monitoring in place to alert on event volume anomalies before someone spots them in a monthly report.
Proof
Analytics & Data results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Consumer Electronics & Accessories
~$9M/yr, 210 SKUs, US + AU · Shopify Plus (migrated from BigCommerce)
Meta ROAS had slid from 3.6x to 1.9x in a year and the team had spent twelve months buying new creative to fix it. The real cause was measurement: the BigCommerce checkout dropped 22% of purchase events and the Conversions API had never been installed, so both ad platforms were optimising on incomplete data. The named constraint: peak season was 14 weeks out, and the replatform had to be live and stable well before Black Friday traffic arrived.
1.9x → 3.4xMeta ROAS, once the 22% event gap closed60 days after server-side tracking went live, spend up 18%. Most of that is signal we recovered, not performance we invented — the honest number is the blended CAC below, which is measured against Shopify orders
-32%customer acquisition cost$44 to $30 blended across Meta and Google
4.1s → 1.7smobile LCPdesktop went 2.9s to 1.2s over the same window
+47%peak-season revenueBlack Friday through Cyber Monday, year over year
In their words
Clients on this work
GA4/Shopify gap 14% → under 2%
“Paid audit, and worth every dollar. Forty pages on where our measurement was lying to us — duplicate purchase events, CAPI never configured, GA4 and Shopify off by 14% — each one ranked by the revenue it was hiding. No pitch deck at the end. We fixed six of the items ourselves before we ever signed a retainer.”
FounderHome goods brand, ~$3M/yr · Denver, CO
Verified client, 2026FAQ
Analytics & Data in Baltimore — your questions
It changes what you should collect and how you justify it. MODPA leans harder on data minimisation than most state laws and treats certain categories as sensitive, which is directly relevant if your catalogue is medical, diagnostic or health-adjacent. In practice we collect fewer fields, gate more behind consent, shorten retention and document the reasoning — which usually improves the analytics rather than degrading them, because the noise goes away.
By loading real cost inputs rather than a shipping average. We bring in product cost, packaging and coolant consumables, and carrier charge by zone and service, then compute contribution margin at order level. It usually reveals that a specific zone-and-service combination is loss-making at your current price, which is a pricing and threshold decision you can only make once you can see it.
Yes, and it is one of the most valuable fixes available to a supplier here. Account-based and quote-originated orders are reconciled from Shopify into the reporting layer with the acquisition source attached to the account rather than to the session, so the marketing that recruited a trade account gets credit for its lifetime rather than for one transaction. Without it, everything that acquires accounts looks like it fails.
Only if the reporting knows about seasons. We carry season state and ship-day availability as dimensions so year-on-year comparisons hold conditions constant, and flag periods affected by embargoes, weather closures or carrier disruption. Otherwise a nor'easter in one year turns into a marketing conclusion in the next, which is how budgets get cut for the wrong reason.
Browser tracking loses 15-30% of conversions to ad blockers, ITP and consent rejections. Server-side sends events from your own infrastructure, which recovers most of that signal. Better signal means better algorithmic bidding, so it usually pays for itself in media efficiency within a quarter.
Four to six weeks for a typical Shopify store, including the validation week. Complex setups with subscriptions, multiple markets or a headless front end run six to ten. The audit and specification phase takes about a third of that and is the part that determines quality.
Yes. We use Shopify's Web Pixels API and customer events for checkout tracking, which is the supported path since checkout.liquid was retired. Order-level data comes through the server side, so checkout tracking no longer depends on scripts Shopify will not let you inject.
Next step
Analytics & Data for your Baltimore brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.