During Black Friday week I stop caring about most of the reports I read the rest of the year. What I want is one screen I can check at 9am, 2pm, and 10pm that tells me whether the weekend is on plan and whether any channel is quietly burning money. Every platform has a dashboard. None of them shows the whole picture, and the ad platforms in particular report late and grade their own work.
So before getting into tools, here is what the dashboard needs to show. Revenue against the daily plan you set before the sale. MER, meaning total revenue divided by total ad spend, so you see efficiency without trusting any single platform’s attribution. New customers versus returning, because a BFCM that only sold to existing buyers was a discount, not growth. Spend pacing by channel. And cost per new customer, which is the number that tells you whether the extra spend bought anything. I went through the pre-sale prep in what to fix in your attribution before Black Friday.
Shopify Live View and reports
The free option you already have. Live View shows visitors and sales in close to real time, and Shopify’s reports split new and returning customers. For the revenue-against-plan line, nothing is faster or more trustworthy, because it is your order log. What it cannot do is show spend, so there is no MER, no cost per new customer, and no way to see which channel is pulling its weight. Use it as the top row of your dashboard, not the whole thing.
ThoughtMetric
ThoughtMetric puts spend from your ad accounts next to your own order attribution, so MER, new-customer ROAS, and cost per new-customer order sit in one view by channel, campaign, or ad. (Disclosure: ThoughtMetric sponsors this site.) It also breaks results out by discount code, which is useful when you are running separate BFCM codes by channel. Pricing is on monthly pageviews, starting at $99 a month for 50,000, with every feature on every plan and a 14-day trial. The timing caveat applies to any new tool here. A pixel installed now gives you a few weeks of baseline before the sale, which is enough to compare against, but do not plan to install anything during the week itself.
Triple Whale
Triple Whale is already installed at a lot of Shopify brands, and if it is at yours, its summary view is probably where your team will look by default. The free plan includes the Triple Pixel, first and last click attribution, and ten users. Paid plans start at $219 a month for Foundation on its Shopify listing, scale with annual GMV, and run as 12-month subscriptions. If you are not already on it, do not sign a year-long contract to get through one week. If you are, spend an hour before the sale stripping the default view down to the five numbers above.
Looker Studio with Supermetrics
The build-it-yourself route. Looker Studio is free, and Supermetrics pulls ad platform data into it, with the Looker Studio Starter plan listed at $44 a month billed yearly or $55 billed monthly, covering three accounts per data source. You get exactly the layout you want, including a plan-versus-actual line most tools do not have. Two warnings. The numbers are whatever the ad platforms report, so your MER is honest but your channel ROAS is not. And check how often your connectors refresh, because a dashboard that updates every few hours is not much use at 2pm on Black Friday.
Polar Analytics
Polar Analytics is the option for teams that want custom dashboards on top of governed metric definitions, so MER means the same thing to the founder and the media buyer. Pricing is not listed on the website, so you will need a demo to get a number. With BFCM seven weeks out, factor in the sales cycle and onboarding before you count on it this year.
How I set it up
I keep it to one screen with five numbers and a date selector, and I agree before the sale which source wins when two of them disagree. Shopify is the source of truth for revenue. The attribution tool is the source of truth for channel efficiency. The ad platforms are for pacing and nothing else. I also set the comparison period to the same days last year rather than last week, since every week in November looks strange next to October. If you want the evergreen version of this setup, custom dashboard tools for Shopify operators covers it.
Decide your intervention rules in advance too. If MER drops below a set floor for six hours, someone cuts the weakest channel. If new-customer share falls under your target, prospecting gets more budget. A dashboard nobody acts on is just a nicer way to watch the weekend happen.
Picking one
- Small store, tight budget? Shopify for revenue plus a spreadsheet for spend.
- Want MER, new-customer CAC, and channel attribution on one screen? ThoughtMetric (our sponsor).
- Already on Triple Whale? Trim the summary view rather than switching tools in October.
- Have someone who likes building reports? Looker Studio with Supermetrics.
- Need governed definitions across a larger team and can move fast on a demo? Polar Analytics.
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