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.
Columbus, OH
Analytics, Tracking & Data in Columbus, OH
A measurement layer where a sale is only counted once the return window has closed and the reason code has landed.
Delivered remotely for brands across Columbus and Ohio.
Scale · Columbus
Why Columbus brands come to us for this
- Returns joined to orders, line items and acquisition source, so margin after returns becomes a number you can actually report on
- Return rate by style and by size surfaced next to sell-through, giving merchandising and marketing one shared view
- Server-side GTM on a first-party subdomain with clean browser-to-server deduplication, resilient to blockers and ITP
- Like-for-like comparison logic built for a spiky calendar — drop against drop, event week against event week
- Reporting day set to Eastern Time so the dashboard closes when your trading day does
Most ecommerce reporting stacks stop at revenue. In an apparel or footwear business that is a fiction, because a meaningful share of that revenue reverses over the following six weeks and the reversal is not distributed evenly — it clusters in specific styles, specific sizes and specific acquisition sources. A dashboard that cannot show contribution margin after returns will keep recommending you spend more on the channel that sells the styles that come back. Fixing that is the single most valuable measurement job in this market.
So we build the returns join first: orders, line items, return reason codes, restocking outcome and the acquisition source that produced the original sale, in one model. That gives you the numbers a merchandising team here already thinks in — sell-through by size, return rate by style and by size, margin after returns by channel — rather than a marketing dashboard sitting beside an operations spreadsheet with nobody reconciling the two. It also feeds everything else we do, because a CRO result, a Meta concept and a Google product group all read differently once returns are attached.
Underneath it is the ordinary infrastructure, done properly. Server-side GTM on a first-party subdomain, Conversions API and Enhanced Conversions with hashed identifiers and clean browser-to-server deduplication, a documented GA4 event schema so a report means the same thing in six months, and consent mode wired to your CMP. Boring, unglamorous, and the reason your paid accounts bid on real signal instead of a partial picture.
Local context
The numbers a planner already asks for
Reporting lands differently in a city where a lot of ecommerce leads came out of a retail head office. These teams do not want a channel dashboard; they want sell-through by size, weeks of cover, markdown exposure and margin after returns, because that is the language they were trained in and it is the language the business decisions are actually made in. So we build the executive layer to answer those questions alongside blended MER and cohort LTV, and we reconcile all of it to Shopify's own numbers so the Monday meeting stops being a debate about which dashboard is right. The seasonal shape matters too: with revenue arriving in bursts around drops, the August campus window and the March strength season, year-on-year and month-on-month comparisons mislead badly. We build like-for-like comparison logic — event week against event week, drop against drop — so a quiet fortnight after a launch is not read as a decline. Everything runs on Eastern Time so the reporting day matches the trading day.
Scope
What Analytics & Data includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Columbus 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 Columbus store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Columbus 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 Columbus — your questions
With two numbers, always shown together: gross revenue at order, and settled revenue once the return window closes. Channel performance is judged on the second. It means the most recent weeks carry a provisional label and that is correct — reporting a paid channel as profitable before its returns have landed is how apparel brands end up scaling the thing that is losing them money.
Yes, and it is usually straightforward once the returns flow is capturing structured reasons rather than free text. We pull returns and their reason codes into the same model as orders and line items, keyed to the variant so size-level patterns show up. The hard part is almost never the pipeline; it is that the returns flow was collecting a comment box nobody could aggregate. We fix the capture first.
It can, and it should, because the disagreements between those two views are where real decisions hide. We model both channels against the same product records so sell-through, stock cover and margin can be read either separately or combined. What we keep distinct is the timing — wholesale revenue recognises differently and on different terms — and we label that clearly rather than letting a blended chart imply a comparability that is not there.
Sometimes not, and we will say so. Off-the-shelf blended dashboards handle spend, blended return and basic cohorts perfectly well. What they generally do not do is join your returns data to acquisition source at variant level, or reconcile against Shopify strictly enough to end an argument. If that gap is not costing you decisions, keep what you have. In an apparel catalogue it usually is.
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 Columbus 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.