A funnel youcan actuallysee.
A direct-to-consumer supplement brand on Shopify, running paid media with no reliable way to tell what was working. We ran the programme: project management, the campaigns across Meta and Google, and the measurement underneath them.
Engagement complete. The store is no longer online.
- Platform
- Shopify, hosted checkout
- Channels
- Meta, Google Display, Performance Max
- Measurement
- GA4, GTM, Looker Studio
- Creative
- Directed; produced by a partner studio
The store was taking orders and the ads were spending. What nobody could answer was which spend produced which order, because the session broke at the hop into Shopify's hosted checkout and the analytics property had never been set up to follow it.
A store that cannot tell you where its funnel leaks is a store running on opinion. The measurement work is the half of this engagement we would defend hardest, and it is also the half that looks configured and silently is not.
What we ran
Four workstreams, run together rather than handed between suppliers.
The engagement itself: a plan with stages, weekly written reporting, and a standing decision record.
- Marketing project breakdown and scope
- Weekly written status reports
- Campaign adjustment plans between cycles
- Meeting preparation and decision records
- Vendor and platform coordination
A GA4 overhaul so the funnel could be read end to end, including across the checkout boundary.
- GA4 property rebuilt with named key events
- purchase, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, add_payment_info, view_item
- Custom dimensions for funnel stage and page type
- Google Tag Manager on the store, pixels firing through it
- Cross-domain tracking into the hosted checkout
- Funnel audiences for top, middle and bottom of funnel
Full-funnel campaigns across Meta, Google Display and Performance Max, organised by stage before platform.
- Meta feed, stories and reels placements
- Google Display Network across standard sizes
- Performance Max asset groups
- Full-funnel structure: TOF, MOF, BOF
- Merchant feed for product ads
- Looker Studio reporting on the whole funnel
The ad creative itself was produced by a partner studio. What we built was the system it ran through: the size specification, the funnel-first organisation, and the scripts that turned one concept into every required export.
- Specification of 13 exact artboard sizes per concept
- Organised by funnel stage before platform
- Linked smart objects so one edit propagates
- Scripted artboard creation and concept duplication
- Scripted batch export at the end
- Creative direction and review, not authorship
Why the checkout hop matters
Shopify's hosted checkout sits on a different domain. Without cross-domain tracking the session ends at the boundary, the purchase is attributed to nothing, and every channel looks worse than it is while direct traffic looks impossibly good.
It is the single most common silent failure in a Shopify analytics setup, and it never announces itself. The dashboards keep rendering. They are simply wrong, and the spend decisions made from them are wrong in the same direction every month.
Stack
- GA4
- Google Tag Manager
- Cross-domain tracking
- Advertising pixels
- Merchant feed
- Looker Studio
- Meta Ads
- Google Display Network
- Performance Max
- Full-funnel structure
- Audience segmentation
- Photoshop artboards
- Linked smart objects
- JSX production scripts
- Scripted batch export
- 13 sizes per concept