Analytics
Fixing attribution before fixing anything else
Two months of decisions had been made on broken data.
- Client
- Loom & Larder
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Tracking audit, implementation
- Stack
- GA4, GTM, server-side tagging
- ±3% Platform vs. books
- 2 Fake winners found
- 3 wk Of plumbing
01 The brief
Platform-reported conversions were roughly double what the accounting software could see.
02 The brainstorm
Everyone wanted a creative strategy. It would have been irresponsible to give them one, because every decision would have been made against numbers we already knew were wrong.
The audit found the boring, common causes: a duplicate tag firing on the thank-you page, no UTM convention, and a checkout redirect losing the session. None of it clever. All of it decisive.
Spending three weeks on plumbing when the client is paying for growth is an uncomfortable conversation. It is also the only honest sequence.
03 The build
Deduplicated events, server-side purchase tracking with an order ID, and a UTM naming convention short enough that people actually follow it.
04 The result
Reported and actual revenue now agree within a few percent, which changed which campaigns looked profitable — two "winners" turned out to be losing money.
