Tier 1: DIY Attribution
Four free plays to get your foundation honest. No tools to buy, no email to leave. Watch the video, then run the plays in order.
The YouTube explainer for this lesson drops here. You can already step through the plays with the Next button below.
Picking up from The Silent Killer
Lesson 1 showed you the problem: attribution debt. The way out is 12 plays across 3 tiers, run in order. This is the first tier.
Get your foundation honest.
Before any clever model, four things have to be true: you know the real economics of an order, you trust one revenue number, your tracking is clean, and you judge the business on blended reality, not platform-reported ROAS. Get these right and half of your “attribution problem” disappears.
Know your real unit economics
Know your real unit economics
You can’t divide up a budget you can’t price. Most store owners know their AOV and blended ROAS, and almost nothing about what an order actually earns after all its costs.
- Build a one-line P&L per order: revenue − COGS − shipping − fees − ad cost.
- Track contribution margin % and CAC payback in days, not “ROAS.”
- Set a floor: the blended return your margin can actually survive.
One tracking convention, enforced
One tracking convention, enforced
Messy UTMs and duplicate pixels are why your reports fight each other. Fix the input and everything downstream gets more honest for free.
- Adopt one UTM naming convention and lock it in a shared sheet.
- Move to server-side tagging to recover the signal cookies drop.
- Audit your “(direct)/(none)” bucket. A big unknown share is a leak, not a channel.
A weekly numbers ritual
A weekly numbers ritual
Measurement that isn’t a habit decays. A short, fixed weekly review beats a beautiful dashboard nobody opens.
- One page, same day each week: MER, nCAC, CM%, spend by channel.
- Record one decision the numbers drove, or admit you made none.
- Flag the biggest week-over-week swing and ask “why,” not “who.”
Judge the business on blended MER
Judge the business on blended MER
Platform ROAS is graded by the platform. Blended MER, total revenue divided by total ad spend, is the one number nobody can inflate for you. If you only run one play from this tier, run this one.
- Track MER (blended ROAS) and new-customer CAC as your two lead numbers.
- Stop making spend calls on a single channel’s in-platform ROAS.
- Reconcile revenue to your store. The store is the ledger, not the ad account.
Tier 1 at a glance
All four plays on one page. Got an afternoon? Run them in order. Got 10 minutes? Run the starred one.
Know your real unit economics
You can’t divide up a budget you can’t price. Most store owners know their AOV and blended ROAS, and almost nothing about what an order actually earns after all its costs.
- Build a one-line P&L per order: revenue − COGS − shipping − fees − ad cost.
- Track contribution margin % and CAC payback in days, not “ROAS.”
- Set a floor: the blended return your margin can actually survive.
One tracking convention, enforced
Messy UTMs and duplicate pixels are why your reports fight each other. Fix the input and everything downstream gets more honest for free.
- Adopt one UTM naming convention and lock it in a shared sheet.
- Move to server-side tagging to recover the signal cookies drop.
- Audit your “(direct)/(none)” bucket. A big unknown share is a leak, not a channel.
A weekly numbers ritual
Measurement that isn’t a habit decays. A short, fixed weekly review beats a beautiful dashboard nobody opens.
- One page, same day each week: MER, nCAC, CM%, spend by channel.
- Record one decision the numbers drove, or admit you made none.
- Flag the biggest week-over-week swing and ask “why,” not “who.”
Judge the business on blended MER
Platform ROAS is graded by the platform. Blended MER, total revenue divided by total ad spend, is the one number nobody can inflate for you. If you only run one play from this tier, run this one.
- Track MER (blended ROAS) and new-customer CAC as your two lead numbers.
- Stop making spend calls on a single channel’s in-platform ROAS.
- Reconcile revenue to your store. The store is the ledger, not the ad account.
Run the plays, then keep going
Your foundation is only as honest as your habits
Run the four plays this week. When Tier 2 drops, you’ll be ready for it.