The Ecomm Analyst

Mostly through deterministic matching, which means tying sessions together using something the customer supplies directly, usually an email address at checkout. Everything before that identification point gets stitched with first-party cookies and click IDs, which work within a single browser but not between them. The result is that cross-device tracking is real but partial, and understanding where it breaks is more useful than assuming it either works perfectly or not at all. Why this matters for a Shopify store The pattern is familiar. Someone sees an ad on Instagram on their phone during the day, does not buy, then sits…

No, not for most stores. If you are running a single Shopify store somewhere between $1M and $20M in revenue, a data warehouse will add cost and engineering time without making your attribution meaningfully better. A purpose-built attribution tool gets you to the same decisions faster and for a fraction of the total spend. The warehouse conversation becomes worth having later, and the trigger is usually not attribution at all. What a warehouse actually gives you A warehouse is a central place to land raw data from every system you use, so you can join it however you want. Orders…

This pairing confuses people because both tools show you revenue next to ad spend, and from a screenshot they can look like they do the same thing. They do not. One is a net profit accounting layer for your store. The other is an attribution layer for your marketing. Understanding which problem you have makes the choice fairly easy. What TrueProfit does TrueProfit is a Shopify app built around one number, which is net profit. It pulls your orders, then layers on cost of goods, shipping cost, transaction fees, taxes, and any custom costs you define, and syncs ad spend…

These two get shortlisted together often enough that it is worth pulling apart, because they sit at different points in the same pipeline. One of them is mostly about getting clean conversion data out of your site and into your ad platforms. The other is mostly about reading that data back as revenue against spend. If you pick based on the feature list alone you can end up with the wrong one. What AnyTrack is AnyTrack describes itself as a conversion data layer. You place one tag, connect your conversion sources, and it routes events out to Meta, Google, TikTok,…

This question comes up almost every time I look at a new store’s stack. Google Analytics is already installed and it costs nothing, so why pay for a dedicated attribution tool on top of it? It is a fair thing to ask. The honest answer is that GA4 and ThoughtMetric are not really competing for the same job, and most of the frustration I see comes from asking one of them to do the other one’s work. What GA4 is built to answer GA4 is a behavioral web analytics platform. It is designed to tell you what people did on…

The number people quote is around 1.4 percent. That comes from Littledata’s Shopify benchmark, which also puts the top twenty percent of stores above roughly 3.2 percent and the top ten percent above 4.7 percent. Other sources land elsewhere. IRP Commerce reports cross-industry figures closer to two percent, and Dynamic Yield’s benchmark runs higher still. None of them are wrong. They are measuring different store populations with different definitions. Before you compare yourself to any of them, check the denominator. Most e-commerce benchmarks are sessions to orders. Some are unique visitors to orders, which produces a meaningfully higher number for…

Most stores do not have a UTM problem. They have a UTM convention problem. The parameters get added, they just get added five different ways by four different people over two years, and by the time anyone looks at a channel report there are entries for facebook, Facebook, fb, meta, and paid-social all describing the same spend. No tool fixes that after the fact. The convention has to exist before the links do. Here is the structure I set up on new stores, and the reasoning behind each choice, because the reasoning is what stops people from breaking it later.…

Direct is not a channel. It is a default. When a visit arrives without a referrer and without campaign parameters, the analytics tool has nowhere to file it, so it goes in the bucket labeled direct. That label reads like a finding, which is the problem. People see twenty-eight percent direct in GA4 and conclude they have strong brand recall, when what they actually have is twenty-eight percent of their traffic that the tracking could not resolve. The distinction matters because those two readings lead to opposite decisions. If direct is brand demand, you fund brand. If direct is measurement…

Looker is not really priced for stores our size, and Google does not pretend otherwise. The pricing page lists three platform editions, Standard, Enterprise, and Embed, and every one of them says call sales. Cost splits into a platform fee for running the instance and a per-user license that varies by whether someone is a viewer, a standard user, or a developer. Each platform includes ten standard users and two developer users, and subscriptions come in one, two, and three-year terms. There is no monthly option and no free tier. The bigger cost is not the license anyway. Looker runs…

SegMetrics prices on active contacts, which tells you most of what you need to know about who it was built for. Coaches, course sellers, and lead-gen businesses running long nurture sequences. Plans run $57 a month for Launch, $197 for Grow, and $397 for Scale, with an Enterprise tier aimed at companies past $10M in revenue. Every tier is priced against how many contacts you are actively engaging in a 30-day window, and there is a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund window behind it. If you run a Shopify store, that model can quietly work against you. Your contact…