E-commerce · Integration · Marketing · Anonymized at the client’s request
A direct-to-consumer home goods brand, $40M revenue
Reconciled platform-reported revenue against the order table, then moved budget on contribution margin rather than platform ROAS.
- blended acquisition cost
- −22%
- contribution margin
- +8%
- attribution overcount
- 61% → 4%
One full quarter post-implementation, compared to the preceding quarter.
Situation
Channel-reported revenue exceeded actual revenue by 61%, so every platform appeared profitable while blended acquisition cost climbed quarter over quarter. Budget had been drifting toward the channel with the most aggressive attribution window for eighteen months.
Constraint
Peak season was ten weeks out and no spend could pause. The team had one analyst, and any solution requiring ongoing manual reconciliation would have been abandoned within a month.
What we built
- Server-side event collection with deduplication, replacing four browser pixels that were double-counting
- An order-level warehouse joining platform spend, orders, returns, and cost of goods
- Contribution margin by channel and by cohort, refreshed daily, replacing platform ROAS as the budget input
- A first-purchase cohort model showing ninety-day value by acquisition source, which had never been measured
- A weekly budget recommendation the analyst could accept or override, with the reasoning shown
Stack used
- Shopify Plus
- BigQuery
- dbt
- Klaviyo
- GA4
Duration
9 weeks
Team
One engineer, one analyst, one marketing lead
“We had been optimising toward a number that was wrong by half. Nobody wanted to be the person who said so.”
What we’d do differently
We modelled returns into contribution margin from the start, which was correct but made the first month of numbers look worse than the old reporting and nearly cost us the mandate. We should have shipped both views side by side for four weeks and let the team watch the gap close, rather than replacing the familiar number on day one.
Tell us what isn’t shipping.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Bring the thing that’s stuck and we’ll tell you how we’d approach it, whether or not you hire us.
Or email hello@fusionads.ai · Florida, US