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.
San Diego, CA
Analytics, Tracking & Data in San Diego
Server-side tracking, a clean GA4 event layer and subscription-aware cohort reporting — so the weekly meeting argues about the business instead of the data.
Delivered remotely for brands across San Diego and California.
Scale · San Diego
Why San Diego brands come to us for this
- Subscription revenue attributed back to acquisition cohort, with payback period by month
- Server-side GTM on a first-party subdomain, resilient to ITP and ad blockers
- Meta CAPI and Google Enhanced Conversions targeting event match quality of 8 or above
- CCPA, CPRA and Global Privacy Control handling implemented without over-blocking your own data
- Every number reconciled to Shopify's order data, within 2 percent or we keep working
San Diego has more people who can read a p-value than almost any city its size, and they end up running consumer brands. That produces a specific kind of frustration: a founder from a research background looking at three dashboards that disagree about yesterday's orders, being told by an agency that attribution is an art. It is not. It is an implementation problem, and it is fixable.
We rebuild the measurement layer underneath everything else. Server-side tracking through a first-party endpoint, resilient to ITP and ad blockers. Conversions API with hashed identifiers and event match quality above eight. A documented GA4 event schema that means the same thing in six months. Consent mode wired to your CMP so CCPA opt-outs are honoured without silently deleting a third of your reporting.
Then the part that matters most for this city's economics: subscription-aware reporting. A first-order ROAS number is close to meaningless for a consumable brand. What you need is contribution margin by acquisition cohort with recurring revenue attributed back to the original order, so you can see whether the customers you bought in March were ever going to pay for themselves.
Local context
Cohort math for a subscription economy, and a board that reads it
Two things make measurement work in San Diego different in practice. First, the dominant business model is recurring, so the useful unit of analysis is a cohort with a payback period, not a session with a conversion. We build reporting that ties subscription revenue back to acquisition source and shows contribution margin by month since first order — the view a life-science-adjacent founder or a venture board actually asks for, and the one most Shopify stacks cannot produce without work. Second, California's privacy regime is not theoretical here. CCPA and CPRA opt-out handling, Global Privacy Control signals and consent mode have to be implemented properly, and a lot of local stores are either ignoring the signal entirely or over-blocking and losing data they were legally allowed to collect. Getting that boundary right is worth real reporting accuracy, not just a compliance checkbox.
Scope
What Analytics & Data includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a San Diego 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 San Diego store
We do not work off a rate card. Every San Diego 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 San Diego — your questions
Almost always some combination of client-side event loss, missing deduplication between browser and server events, and platforms each claiming the same order under their own attribution window. We quantify the gap first — a full event inventory reconciled against Shopify order data — so you know how much data you are actually losing before anyone proposes a fix.
Yes, and it is the reporting most consumable brands are missing. We tie recurring revenue back to the original acquisition source and build contribution margin by month since first order, after COGS, shipping, fees and expected churn. That is the view that tells you whether a channel is profitable, which a first-order ROAS number never will.
Consent mode wired to your CMP, Global Privacy Control signals respected, and opt-out handling implemented at the server-side layer rather than by disabling tags wholesale. Most stores we audit are at one extreme or the other — ignoring the signal, or over-blocking and discarding data they were permitted to collect. The correct implementation is narrower than both.
Yes, and we will say so even when it delays a bigger engagement. Every optimisation decision downstream depends on the numbers being trustworthy, and algorithms optimise against the signal you send them. Fixing match quality alone often lifts measured paid performance by double digits before anyone touches a campaign.
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 San Diego 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.