Shopify makes it easy to start spending and easy to spend badly. Below this floor the store cannot generate the purchase volume that Advantage+ and Performance Max need, and you are better off putting the money into product photography and email.
These are the four failures we find most often, and every one of them makes the numbers look better or worse than reality while everything appears connected.
Shopify moved custom tracking into Customer Events, which runs pixels in a sandboxed context rather than letting arbitrary script onto the checkout. Older hand-installed tracking that used to work silently stopped, and a lot of stores never noticed because the sales channel app kept firing something. We verify what is actually being sent from checkout rather than trusting the app’s own status light.
A theme-level pixel plus the sales channel app plus a tag manager container is three sources for one purchase event. Without matching event IDs they do not deduplicate, your conversion count inflates, your ROAS looks excellent and you scale into a loss. This is the single most common thing we find in a Shopify account that "used to work".
With Shopify Markets, a customer in Australia pays in AUD while your store currency is USD. If the purchase value is sent in the presentment currency but the platform assumes your account currency, every ROAS figure for that market is wrong — sometimes flattering, sometimes disastrous. It is quick to check and almost nobody does.
Server-side events matter more on Shopify than on most platforms because so much of the buying happens in-app and on Safari. We set up CAPI with proper event deduplication and then look at event match quality, because a CAPI that is sending events with no matchable customer data is doing very little for you.
Whatever Shopify exports on day one is generic by design. On Google Shopping and Performance Max, that export is the single biggest lever you have.
Shopify product titles are written for your storefront — short, brand-led, often clever. Shopping titles need the attributes people type: brand, product type, material, colour, size, for whom. Rewriting titles through feed rules, without touching what customers see on the site, is frequently the cheapest performance win available in the first month.
Not every product deserves the same bid. Custom labels let you separate high margin from low, bestsellers from long tail, and in-stock from nearly gone. Without them Performance Max will happily spend your budget on the item with the best conversion rate and the worst margin.
Variant-level feed problems and missing identifiers cause quiet partial disapprovals — the campaign runs, just without half your catalogue. We audit Merchant Center diagnostics properly rather than looking at the account-level status.
The store reports revenue. Your acquisition decisions need contribution, repeat rate and payback, and those take a little assembly.
Post-purchase upsells, bundles and free-shipping thresholds change your average order value, which changes what you can afford to pay for a click. These are store-side changes, not media changes, and they are often a faster route to a workable CAC than anything we can do in the ad account. We will tell you when that is the case even though it is not work you are paying us for.
Apparel returns concentrate in specific SKUs and sizes. A product with a high return rate can be the star of your ROAS report and a net loss. Feeding return data back into which products get promoted is unglamorous and it moves profit more than bid tweaks.
Shopify has the order history to tell you the real repeat rate and interval per cohort. Once you know it, you can decide deliberately how long you are prepared to wait to recover acquisition cost, instead of capping spend at first-order break-even out of nervousness.
A real audit of your live campaigns — structure, tracking, creative and where the budget is leaking. Free, no obligation, and yours to keep even if you never work with us.
No. Most of what matters — Customer Events, Markets, feed rules, CAPI — is available without Plus. Plus helps with checkout customisation and scripts, but it is not a prerequisite for the account being set up correctly.
It is enough to start and not enough to trust. It gets a pixel firing quickly, which is why so many stores never audit it. We check event deduplication, match quality and currency handling, which the app's status light does not tell you about.
It breaks reporting more often than it breaks selling. The common fault is purchase value reported in the customer's currency while the ad platform assumes yours, which makes some markets look far better or worse than they are. It is one of the first things we check.
Yes, and we would rather brief them than touch a live theme ourselves. Tracking changes get written as a spec with the exact events, parameters and firing conditions, so your developer can implement and you have a record of it.
Just the ads, unless you ask. But if the bottleneck is on the store — page speed, a checkout leak, an offer that does not convert — we will say so in the audit. It costs us nothing to tell you and it is usually the highest-value thing in the document.
No. We run paid acquisition. Retention is a different discipline and we would rather tell you to hire someone good at it than pretend it is the same job.
Send us the store and the ad account. The audit tells you what your numbers are really saying.