You've been spending good money on ads. The reports look impressive. But somehow, at the end of the month, it doesn't feel like it's showing up in your profit. This audit finds out why — and what to do about it.
No marketing jargon. No agency sales pitch at the end. Just an honest look at where the money's actually going — and what it's actually making you. You built this business without a marketing degree. We'll talk to you like that.
We connect Meta and Google to Shopify at the transaction level, reconcile attributed vs incremental ROAS, audit CAPI and Enhanced Conversions implementation, and map every Klaviyo gap against its revenue opportunity. Platform-reported metrics don't tell you if you're making money. This does.
Profit per order after fees, returns, COGS and ad spend — by channel, by campaign, by product category. That's the audit. Everything else is a vanity report.
For businesses spending $10,000 or more per month on advertising.
You've probably noticed that the more you spend, the more they seem to want you to spend. Here's why — and it has nothing to do with what's best for your business.
Four separate fee structures, each with a different misalignment — and each one designed to compound the others. Here's the full picture.
Charged every month regardless of results. Best month you've ever had? Same fee. Worst month in three years? Same fee. They get paid whether the ads work or not.
Fixed retainer decoupled from outcomes. Zero downside exposure for the agency. Paid regardless of revenue performance, CPM inflation or creative fatigue.
→ You carry the risk. They collect the fee.
On top of the monthly fee, they take a percentage of whatever you spend on the actual ads — typically 5 to 10 cents in every dollar. The more you spend, the more they make — whether the ads are working or not. There is no version of this where they benefit from spending less of your money.
Percentage of media spend — 5–10% — structurally incentivising budget growth over efficiency improvement. Efficiency gains that enable spend reduction are penalised by this model. The optimal outcome for the agency is maximum spend at acceptable ROAS, not minimum spend at maximum profit.
→ Every dollar they save you costs them money.
Some agencies also take a percentage of every sale the business makes — including your regular customers who've been buying for years, people who found you on Google, and customers who came from your email list. Sales that had nothing to do with their ads. They count all of it.
Revenue share on total Shopify revenue — not incremental, not new-customer-only, not channel-isolated. Returning customers, organic, direct and email-assisted all included. No incrementality testing applied. Every transaction that can be claimed is claimed.
→ They clip the ticket on customers they didn't find.
Meta claims credit for every purchase made by someone who saw an ad in the last week — even people who were already on their way to buy. The agency puts that number in your report. Nobody connects it to your actual Shopify sales. The number looks great. Nobody asks questions.
Platform-reported ROAS presented without Shopify reconciliation. 7-day click windows, view-through conversions and cross-device overlap systematically inflate returns. No CAPI means iOS conversion gaps compound the distortion in both directions simultaneously. The report is designed to justify the retainer, not inform decisions.
→ The report flatters the agency. Not your P&L.
"That's not performance marketing. That's a toll road with no destination — and they've built four booths along the way."
The question we start with isn't "what's your ROAS?" It's: after your agency fees, your ad spend, your returns, and your cost of goods — how much profit did you actually make from running ads? Most founders can't answer that. Most agencies are hoping you don't ask.
The audit starts with one question: what is the true incremental profit contribution of paid marketing, net of all fees, across all channels, after COGS and returns — isolated from what was already going to happen organically? Not ROAS. Not revenue. Profit per acquired customer by channel. That's the number worth optimising toward.
Your agency will tell you about sales. We want to talk about what's left after you've paid everyone — including them. Because that's the number that actually matters, and it looks very different to the one in the report.
You didn't build this business by confusing sales with profit. Don't let anyone convince you your marketing is any different.
ROAS is a ratio that tells you nothing about profitability. A 5× ROAS on a 15% gross margin product with 10% returns, 15% agency fee on revenue, and a 20% media management fee is a loss. The audit builds the real P&L by channel.
Channel contribution = Revenue − COGS − Returns − Ad spend − Agency fees (all of them). That's what we calculate. For each channel. By campaign where data permits.
The agency reported 4× ROAS on that sale. You kept $6. On a good day. That's the conversation we start with.
Reported ROAS: 4×. Actual contribution margin: 6%. This is not uncommon. The audit surfaces this by channel, campaign and product category — before any scaling recommendation is made.
One channel leaking is expensive. Two channels leaking is a serious problem. Three or more — which is most businesses — and the losses compound in ways that don't show up in any single report. Each one looks manageable on its own. Together they explain why the profit never quite matches the revenue.
Attribution distortion compounds across channels. Waste in one masks opportunity in another. Isolated channel reviews miss this. We audit all five simultaneously, reconcile against Shopify, and calculate contribution by channel before making any recommendation.
When Apple changed iPhone privacy settings a few years ago, Meta's tracking stopped being able to see a significant chunk of purchases made on iPhones. CAPI is the fix — instead of relying on a tiny piece of code in the browser, it sends purchase information directly from your Shopify store to Meta's servers. The result: Meta can see more of your actual buyers, which makes it much better at finding more people like them. Most agencies don't set it up because it requires real technical work, not just clicking buttons in Ads Manager. Without it, Meta is half-blind — and you're paying full price for it.
Server-side CAPI implementation is audited first. Post-iOS 14, browser-pixel-only accounts are missing 15–25% of conversion signals — meaning Smart Bidding is optimising on materially incomplete event data. Event Match Quality score, deduplication logic, and Shopify-native CAPI vs custom GTM implementation all determine algorithmic signal quality. Downstream effects: degraded lookalike audience quality, inflated CPMs from reduced audience size, and bidding strategy performance below potential. Most agencies haven't implemented CAPI because it requires engineering, not media buying — and the gap compounds every month it's absent.
Google has the same tracking problem as Meta. When someone buys from you after clicking a Google ad — especially on an iPhone, or when they switch between their phone and their laptop — Google's standard tracking sometimes misses it entirely. Enhanced Conversions fixes this by sending encrypted purchase information directly from your store to Google. Without it, Google's automatic bidding is making decisions about where to show your ads based on an incomplete picture of who's actually buying from you — which means it's spending your budget less efficiently than it should be.
Enhanced Conversions and server-side GTM implementation assessed as part of the audit. Cookie deprecation and cross-device attribution gaps mean gtag-only accounts have degraded Smart Bidding signal quality. Enhanced Conversions — hashed first-party data sent server-side to Google — directly improves tCPA and tROAS bid strategy performance by recovering lost conversion signal. In most accounts we audit, Enhanced Conversions is either absent, unconfigured, or incorrectly implemented — with meaningful impact on campaign performance that compounds over time.
When we connect your ad account to your actual Shopify sales, those two numbers almost never agree. The gap between them is what your agency has been quietly relying on you not noticing.
Attributed ROAS without Shopify reconciliation, incrementality testing and CAPI gap assessment is not a meaningful performance metric. It's a number optimised to justify the retainer.
Everything we find goes into a list ordered by what's worth the most money to fix first. Plain English. No acronyms. Specific enough to hand to whoever runs your marketing — or to do yourself.
All findings ranked by estimated revenue impact. Action plan sequenced for partial implementation to still capture the majority of available opportunity. Specific enough to brief an implementation team without further scoping.
Every place your marketing budget is going that isn't making you money — in order of how much it's costing per month. Budget in the wrong places. Emails not being sent. Tracking gaps. Each one with a specific fix.
Ranked spend efficiency analysis — placement waste, audience cannibalisation, CAPI and Enhanced Conversions gaps, Klaviyo flow absences. Ordered by monthly revenue cost. Each finding with implementation brief.
What your business is actually making from its marketing — channel by channel, with what Facebook claims checked against what Shopify recorded. The real picture, not the agency picture. Including what it cost you per new customer.
Platform-reported vs Shopify-recorded reconciliation. Incremental ROAS by channel. True new-customer CAC. Klaviyo contribution isolated from paid attribution. Contribution margin by channel where data permits.
Where the untapped revenue is — markets you're not advertising in, emails you're not sending, customers in your database doing nothing. Most businesses have more opportunity sitting dormant than they're generating from active campaigns.
Untested geo markets, lifecycle automation gaps, channel whitespace, untapped segmentation opportunities. Prioritised by estimated revenue opportunity against implementation cost.
A specific list — not "improve your ads" but which campaign, what to change, what result to expect. Plain enough to hand to whoever runs your marketing, or to do yourself without needing to ask anyone what it means.
Campaign-level changes, audience restructures, CAPI and Enhanced Conversions implementation briefs, Klaviyo flow specs. Specific enough to brief a developer or media buyer without further scoping conversation.
A complete picture of what your email marketing should look like — which automatic sequences to set up, what to send to which customers, and how to turn the database you've already built into a revenue stream that runs without you.
Complete lifecycle automation architecture — flow specs, segment definitions, trigger logic, campaign calendar. Revenue projection by flow based on list size and category benchmarks.
Take the audit and do what you like with it. Give it to your current agency. Do it yourself. Come back to us. We're confident enough in what we find that we don't need to pressure anyone into anything.
The deliverable is self-contained. Implement internally, brief your current agency, or engage us. The findings stand on their own. We don't need a follow-up conversation to make the audit useful.
Fill in your details below. We review what's publicly visible, then reach out to arrange the three accesses we need to run the full audit — your Meta ad account, your Google ad account, and your Shopify store. Nothing gets changed, nothing gets touched. We look, we calculate, we deliver. The full audit is with you within four business hours of getting access. No cost. No obligation. No pitch. Just the honest picture — in plain English.
Fill in your details. We review publicly available data, then arrange the three access points required — Meta Business Manager, Google Ads and Shopify collaborator access. Read-only. No changes made. Audit delivered within four business hours of access confirmed. Platform-specific, profit-first, ranked by revenue impact. Self-contained — no follow-up required to act on it.
We guide you through each access step after you submit — it takes about 10 minutes and nothing gets changed in any of your accounts. Read-only, always.
Or call and ask for Amber — 02 5944 1133