Cracking the Code: How Analytics Can Drive Your Shopify Store's Success

0:45

In the diligence, we knew that advertising was challenging, but I don't know that we fully appreciated how challenging it was. After months of working with agencies and trying to use the tools, we stumbled across Triple Whale, which is a part of this new category of ecommerce analytics, and it's transformed the performance of our marketing. And as we've learned from the financial standpoint, if your marketing spend is off, your profitability is going to be off, for consumer brands.

1:19

So what I wanted to do today is have our friend here, Grant, at Triple Whale, talk through the solution, what it does. And I'm going to interject periodically and share what it's done for the brand that we bought, as an opportunity to learn and improve our skills here at LedgerGurus, as well as diversify our business portfolio. So I'm going to turn it over to Grant. Obviously, if you want to ask questions, put them in the chat, put them in the Q&A, happy to do that as we go. So Grant, tell us about Triple Whale, what you guys do and how you can help businesses.

1:56 What Triple Whale is and the attribution problem

Grant

Awesome, thanks Stephen. Thanks, everyone, for joining. My name is Grant, I manage partnerships here at Triple Whale, and LedgerGurus is a trusted partner of ours. Really excited to chat with you guys. Basically, Triple Whale is all about Shopify ecommerce data. We were founded in 2020 by two founders who were running an ecommerce store themselves. We now have over 7,000 clients, and so we're always building new things. Everything we build is centered around giving our clients the best possible data to grow their business profitably and scale. And yeah, that's us in a nutshell.

2:34

I have this quick deck, I'll go over a few here. Before iOS 14, data was a lot more accurate in platforms, so there wasn't really a need for an attribution tool. Nowadays, there are all sorts of attribution tools, we are one of them. The purpose of an attribution tool is to know where your money's coming in from, and where you need to put it to help your business. These are our founders, Max and AJ. They founded the company in Columbus, and we are now partners of Shopify. Shopify recently invested in us last year, and yeah, we're growing pretty rapidly, over 7,000 clients.

3:10

Essentially, the problem that we solve. Every platform wants to take credit. They need your budget in order to grow. Klaviyo needs your budget, TikTok needs your budget, Facebook needs your budget, Google needs your budget. They're all going to take credit. You need to know where the revenue is coming in from, and we solve that problem, amongst other things. Essentially, multi-channel data, product analytics data, audience targeting to creative analysis, etcetera. We're able to do quite a few different things with our tool, and each one of our clients, they need our tool for different reasons, various reasons and whatnot. So I'm excited to show you what we can offer.

3:59 The pixel versus platform reporting

Grant

So we have a couple different aspects of our tool. I would say that the pixel is a very important aspect of our tool when it comes to our client base. Essentially, what the pixel does is, for every single Shopify record, we're able to show you the entire customer journey from start to finish. So this Shopify record, this is a real client of ours, we're allowed to show this, and they've been working with us for quite some time. It's a little bit of a larger store, they sell cosmetics, and this is a Shopify record. This is what was purchased. We do have a post-purchase survey, which I think is one of the most important aspects of ecommerce right now. And then this is the entire journey from start to finish, and every single click on a website, what was added to cart, and every single ad click.

4:46

The difference between how we report and, say, Facebook reporting. This is the Facebook reported ROAS, this is what our pixel's seeing. Our pixel is the tracking aspect for attribution within our tool. The main difference between our pixel and what the platforms are going to report: iOS 14 has zero impact on our pixel's ability to track. People opting in or opting out of tracking, none of that impacts our ability to track that journey. We don't have attribution windows. Every platform has attribution windows, and they typically go off a last click attribution. Our platform pulls in real time. If we're showing this ROAS right here, say this 2.58 on Google, compared to a 1.94 that Google's reporting, we have to show you all these Shopify records that add up to this ROAS, and then each journey within that, and how and when Google was involved. This person clicked on multiple text message ads, multiple Google ads right here, all the way to purchase. So no attribution windows, all revenue is accounted for.

5:52

And then we do have seven different attribution models, so you're not having to rely on last click. We have seven different attribution models, depending on the campaign goals or whatnot. You're running on someone TikTok, we have an attribution model for that. You run the prospecting campaigns, we have an attribution model for that. It's not super common now for people to click on a prospecting Facebook ad and buy right away, and that's a big problem that we're solving.

6:23 Stephen Brown

And the value, Grant, is, because of the platforms, where they attribute, they might be giving, not be giving you the best information, because they want you to think that all the purchases came through them. They also hold to that attribution window. Another way to describe it is, they're not retaining data, they're not seeing across multiple platforms. So their perspective is a lot narrower, and as you're managing your marketing spend, you might be getting the wrong indicators of what's actually going on.

7:03 Grant

Yeah, that's exactly right. To clarify, you know, Facebook can't see a click on Google. Facebook has view-through data as well, so even if they didn't click on it, if it thinks that that ad drove a sale, they can claim credit if they want. So only about 25% of people opt in to ads tracking, and then they have a seven day window, they go off a last click attribution. So what Facebook does, they take the sample of the 25% of people that do allow them to track, and they report a ROAS based on what they see two days later. And that ROAS determines how much spend is on their platform. So if the ROAS is lower, people will pull ad spend off. If the ROAS looks a little better, people will continue to spend on Facebook. It's a public company, they need your ad spend. Same with any platform.

8:00

So with us, we can see the entire customer journey, every single ad that was clicked on, cross channel. We don't have those limitations, and we don't need your ad spend, which is the biggest deal, because we have no incentives to report higher or lower. All we need to do is report accurate, and that's the goal of the pixel. It does pull all the way down to the ad level, for any channel. So I can click on this, and it'll pull the actual ads that are running.

8:37

So for instance, Facebook's reporting this to be a 1.73, our pixel's showing a 2.05. Now, are we going to be higher ROAS or lower than Facebook? It totally depends. We are not going to be the company that says, oh yeah, we're going to show you a higher ROAS. That's not us. It's great when it is higher, but it's a lot more accurate. Depending on the attribution model, there are attribution models that will make Facebook look better or worse. So keep that in mind. We're not always going to be higher. It's great when we are, but we are a lot more accurate.

9:19

And then we do have, like, a profit column. So this is what Facebook's reporting, this is what we're reporting, and then here's profit, based on cost of goods sold, shipping, handling fees, etcetera. You can enter a lot of store costs, so that we can get down to profit at the actual ad level. And then we can track new customer metrics. So, like, what's our new customer CPA for an ad, what's our new customer CPA for the whole channel, what's our new customer ROAS. And then you are able to track a lot of other things with this columns button. You can track a number of different things that you may not be able to track, or I know you can't track, in Google Analytics or in platform, things like that. So it is customizable.

10:09 The post-purchase survey

Grant

One of the biggest parts of our tool, though, is this post-purchase survey. So the clicks are one thing. What we've found is, there are a lot of people influenced by ads they're seeing that aren't actually clicking. They aren't clicking on the TikTok ad, they aren't clicking on the Facebook ad as much. It comes with emails and remarketing. So they'll see it, they'll be influenced by it, then they'll go be a direct, or they'll go through Klaviyo, and you'll never know which ads are driving revenue. So we installed a post purchase survey, and I can't stress this enough. If you're not using a post purchase survey, you need to be, as soon as possible.

10:46

For this client, in the last 30 days, we've attributed almost forty thousand dollars to Facebook based on people's answers of what led them to buy. And not a single one of these people clicked on a Facebook ad. So if I click into here, every single one of these people said Facebook is what led them to buy. That's the question, what led you to purchase today? You can also ask the question, hey, how did you hear about us, however you want to customize it. But basically, this is what was purchased for this particular order, they filled out which of the following led you to purchase today, Facebook, and then this is what was purchased, and this was the whole customer journey. So this person saw the ad on Facebook, then they went directly into the website, triobeauty.com, and bought.

11:32

Now, would you ever have any knowledge whatsoever that Facebook was involved with this purchase without a post-purchase survey? Absolutely not. So click based is one thing, but with a 40% response rate, we're sourcing forty thousand dollars that wasn't click based, and you can do the math, that's closer to eighty thousand dollars or more that's being attributed to Facebook that was never click based. So this ad, or this channel, is working tremendously better than what the clicks are going to tell you, and the only way to get to that is with a post purchase survey. And I know there's other platforms, we have a couple platform competitors that say view-through data, you know, we can track view-through data. It's always going to be modeled. No one really knows which ads are influencing the buying decision unless you ask people, unless they click on it as well. Someday someone will figure it out, maybe they're going to be very wealthy. But the post-purchase survey is far and away the most valuable way to track that, in my opinion.

12:39 Sole Toscana's numbers, before and after

Stephen Brown

So let me share some data from my screen, and talk about why this matters from a financial management standpoint. We see a lot of our customers who will, if we go back to the 2020, 2021, even in early 2022 days, just spend without thinking. And I think with heightening consumer demand, less performance in marketing, there needs to be a more efficient marketing spend, or you will spend yourself out of business.

13:19

The business that I was mentioning, so Sole Toscana. This is about a month after we put Triple Whale on. So you can see our ROAS, we're garbage. We were getting 0.6 according to Facebook, and 0.3 in reality, according to Triple Whale. Our new customer ROAS was terrible. And so we really, our operating partner dug in. I'll turn it back to Grant to kind of let him walk through how that works. But you can see now, this month, our new customer ROAS is at 1.16. You can see that Facebook and Google are still giving us a false sense of reality. It's a smaller brand, so we don't have a wide range of channels.

14:08

But my partner, what he said is, by using the data in Triple Whale, and kind of using that as a feedback loop for optimization, he's able to get much better results than trying to use the native tools in Facebook and Google alone. And so as we've been on this journey with this brand that we bought, the light that went on for me as a financial professional, it's like, brands have to be good with their marketing spend, or they will not be profitable and not be sustainable. So an attribution tool is really good. So Grant, why don't you kind of show us, you touched on it, but talk us through here the campaigns, how someone might use that data to decide how to manage their campaigns.

14:54 Campaigns, creatives, and running profit through the tool

Grant

Yeah, yeah. So the key, if you're not using a tool at all, you're using Google Analytics and platform metrics, there are a lot of data points here that you can use to make decisions, like new customer CPA. I mean, if you don't have that, versus if you do have it, that's a game changer. Businesses rely on new customers. But looking at this, if I sort by campaigns, I can see this is a 2.8 return in total impact. This is one of our attribution models that takes into account post-purchase survey data. So what you can do is, you can come in here, Facebook's showing a 2.13. Even more so, the Facebook ROAS here is a 1.42, we're seeing a 2.46 with 105 purchases. So what you want to do is look at that and be like, okay, this campaign's outperforming what Facebook is reporting, let's get more budget into it.

16:03

You can be very simple when you first start using Triple Whale. It's like, well, let's follow what's going on. We had a client, Portland Leather Goods. They made five million dollars last holiday season, because we were showing a ROAS that looked great compared to what Facebook was reporting. This is, you know, a 70 million dollar brand, they have money to play with, but they said, hey, we're going to test this one ad and this one product build over the holiday season. They've made five million dollars. So that's the grand scale, but that's how this pixel works. Because this is a 1.47 here, we're seeing a 2.54, which is profitable for them, you can see how profitable that is. And what they can do is just funnel budget into this, which they would never funnel budget into had they not had Triple Whale. And so you can see the new customer CPA is great, and yeah, that's a very simple starting strategy when using Triple Whale. Let's follow what's driving revenue and see how that works for us.

17:08

We also can look at all your channels together, so how they interact with one another, if you're using a lot of different channels. Email marketing, Facebook, TikTok, etcetera. We have a lot of different integrations. This client uses these ones in particular, but we do integrate with most channels as well.

17:23

And this is great to see, this is our Creative Cockpit here. So what it does is it analyzes the performance of every single creative that you're running. Now, for this creative, for instance, Facebook is reporting that this creative drove forty four thousand dollars in revenue in the last 30 days. Our pixel's showing thirty six thousand dollars in revenue. There's a big difference there. But for every single creative, you're able to see true performance from what our pixel's seeing. What that allows you to do is, I can sort by all my creatives and prioritize specific creatives that are working best in the last 30 days. If I need to see how well a creative performs the last 30 days or longer, whatever time frame you want to look at, you can see that. You can look at ad spend versus pixel ROAS versus CPA, new customer CPA, overall revenue, overall purchases. You can plot that out to see how things perform over time.

18:27

Also, one thing that this customer figured out, this is someone's cosmetics brand, when people are scrolling on Facebook and TikTok, you have a split second to capture their attention. When they use an ad with someone using the product in the thumbnail, it transforms the performance for them, because people right away know what it is. You have such a quick time frame to get these people's attention. So they know which ads perform best. When they go to build new ads, they know what the new ads need to look like. And then if an ad stops performing as well, they know right away, and they can get a new creative and build new ads. So yeah, you can build a lot of filters into this tool as well. So if you need to know which top of funnel ads perform best, you'll be able to find that out. This works for Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter. So this is a great tool here.

19:23

And then we have a lot of business insights. So business insights, there's a lot regarding LTV, or lifetime value of a customer. We look at a lot of audiences, so you can target and build custom audiences. We look at product analytics. Which ads are most profitable, which have inventory, which products drive the highest LTV. So for product analytics, for instance, there's a lot of data between all these, and we can calculate the combined ROAS. So if I add this column here, and I look at pixel ROAS, what it's going to do is take combined ad spend across all channels, and then I can sort by my most profitable products right here, or my lowest CPA, or my highest LTV, contribution margin, inventory, etcetera. We'll be able to see that there.

20:27

Here's a place you can build audiences. So we have our own audiences that you can target on Facebook, or download into a CSV, or you can create your own as well, based on certain characteristics, segments, activity, and you can target those audiences as well. So a lot of these insights are built for lifetime value of a customer, and driving that second order, third order, etcetera.

21:01

Last probably important section for this call, we do have a lot of cost settings per store. So if you really, as a client of LedgerGurus, it's all about profitably growing your business, that's the name of the game, and numbers. This section will be really critical to understand the exact profitability of your store and different aspects of your store. And this is where you can enter a lot of custom expenses and cost of goods sold and handling fees, so that you can be very in the know, or aware, of what's most profitable.

21:40

And the last section is the summary page. Our tool's unlimited usage, it's not like one user can use it, it's unlimited usage. We bill per store. We'll run a demo for anyone, we'd love to run a demo. And then this summary page brings in all channels into one location, so you can have it all in one spot. You're not having to log in to a number of different platforms. And then, yeah, there's a lot of custom metrics that you can build. So, like these stats here, we can look at profit of ad spend, net profit, blended ROAS, Amazon sales, new customer metrics across all channels. And then you can basically build any custom metric you can think up here. People build thousands and thousands of metrics really quickly.

22:31 Stephen Brown

So let me kind of talk about how this is applied with the brand I was mentioning. I am acting as the CFO, with my operating partner who does all the marketing and fulfillment. We took the data from our financials, and we used that to feed our budget. I'll get a little plug in for my budget template, I'm going to release an update. But we feed the budget, and the data, to model our budget. And then we've used this budgeting data, along with the real data of our results from our financials, to model into Triple Whale.

23:10

And what this allows my operating partner to do is not only kind of look at his return on ad spend and all the key metrics that you need with digital marketing, but he also is able to have a sense of what's going on from a profitability perspective. In the last couple of months, we've really made a shift. I'm working on developing a profit advisory service, and he and I have been kind of exploring some concepts of how to implement that, both using Triple Whale as well as the other tools that LedgerGurus provides. So he will use this to get a real-time insight on what's going on, what we think our net profit is, as we look at that against the performance of what's going on.

24:05

And we do this by taking and implementing the different spend expectations in this cost setting. So we use the cost of goods sold information that we have, that comes out of our inventory team. We use kind of some shipping projections on how that's going to look. And then a lot of what we model is in our custom expenses. So we'll go ahead and we'll model in a lot of the different things that we expect. Now, this is a fairly small and simpler business, but we do feel like this model could be applied to a variety of businesses, and that thereby allows us to have a real-time insight on what's going on.

24:52

So as we go about, a lot of our customers will say, I want real-time financial information. And I'm going to break the news to you, that's really hard to achieve. You're not going to get that through your general ledger. What your QuickBooks or other accounting software is providing you is the final source of truth. But when you're operating your business month to month, you're usually using operational systems. So we use Triple Whale, integrated with all of our other systems, our Shopify, with all of our ads, and then modeling the financials that we use from the QuickBooks, from our budget. We use that data to model back into Triple Whale, and it gets a pretty good sense of what's going on, I mean, within a very close margin of error. And so we get a very good sense of how to achieve profitability through our ad spend.

25:46

And then we look at the data, and we're going to push that back into the budget, and take the actual financial data, push that back into the budget, push it back into Triple Whale. It becomes a virtuous circle of insight for us to drive a more efficient spend. And as I noted before, our new customer ROAS was like 0.2, now it's 1.16. We're still like to see that go up. But the bottom line is, we've been able to gradually improve the performance of that business. One, by looking at the data, looking at the numbers, using it to make better decisions. And then my partner actually using the real-time data around the ads to optimize, and decide which ads to put more money into, which ones not to put money into. So there's my little testimonial of how Triple Whale, in conjunction with the other financial processes, has allowed us to significantly improve the profitability of this business that we've purchased. And we expect it will continue to be a key source of information to guide us into continuous profitability.

26:52 Audience Q&A, pricing, Amazon, and wrap

Stephen Brown

What questions do you have? If any, now would be a good point for anybody to hit up your questions.

27:06 Grant

That was pretty impressive, Stephen, looking at all those numbers, it's wild.

Stephen Brown

Well, I'm hoping the next year will be even better. Okay, Rowdy, you've got your hand raised. Feel free to ask it over the audio if you'd like, or you can type it in there, whatever you prefer.

27:24 Rowdy

Hi, can you hear me? Yeah? So, I'm really curious to know, for businesses that are not heavy on ads, for example, we're using only retargeting ads on Facebook, but we have Klaviyo, we have affiliate marketing and so on. How can we use Triple Whale to have a sense of our profitability on a daily basis? And whether there's going to be different packages for different businesses, the ones who are using ads heavily versus the ones who are not?

28:01 Grant

No, that's a great question. Let me show you this. We do have a way to track affiliates, so any influencers or affiliate websites, we can track, if you see value in that. And then, yeah, if you're not heavy on ads, we do have the ability to show you this summary page, where you can just sign up for the summary page. Now, what it's going to do is bring in all your channels into one location, it'll update in real time, etcetera. And it's nice to have, but if tracking and attribution isn't a big priority, you can sign up just for the summary page and get insights here, if that's valuable to you. If you do see value in tracking across the journey, great. If not, you don't have to add the pixel, it's an add-on.

28:52 Rowdy

Okay, so with tracking, for example, are there like different levels of tracking? For example, if we're only using Klaviyo and basic retargeting ads on Facebook, will there be something different than someone who's heavily using ads, in terms of, like, the monthly fee for Triple Whale?

29:19 Grant

Yeah, let me pull this up. If you're not heavily investing in ads, I'd probably recommend just going with the summary page. And pricing, it's based on last 12 months revenue, right here. So wherever your last 12 months Shopify revenue is, that's what determines the price. If it's under a million, it's a hundred dollars a month to use the summary page. If you wanted to add the pixel, it's 300 a month, you've got to add these together. Obviously, if your store is making more money, then the pricing changes a little bit. But yeah, we have different options, this is all à la carte. We can't sell this right now, so.

30:01 Rowdy

Okay. And you mentioned, like, a demo or something. So is there something your team offers to understand how we could make the best out of the platform?

30:12 Grant

Of course, yeah, we'd love to get you on a demo. If you prefer, you can go right to our website and ask to get a demo, triplewhale.com, and then if you select get a demo, you can get on the line with our team. If you don't mind mentioning to our sales team, just so I can track it back to LedgerGurus, either email me, grant@triplewhale.com, let LedgerGurus know, however you can notify us that you're going through the demo process, so I can track it properly. But yeah, if you go to our website, it's like, get a demo, and then just let us know that you booked one. That's a great way to go about it and talk to our team, and they'll see what you need.

Rowdy

Thank you so much.

Grant

Yeah, my pleasure.

31:05 Stephen Brown

On that point, I want to just bring up the integrations page here, and just highlight the different sources of data that you can pull in. So you're looking at the store of the brand that I've been using as a case study here. So we have Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Klaviyo. We haven't dived into some of these other areas, as you can see. So here's all the different data sources you can pull into Triple Whale.

31:33

Grant, I would love to talk a little bit about Amazon, and what Triple Whale does there. Now, we don't have an Amazon store currently, that's on our roadmap for this brand. Why don't you go ahead and bring up an Amazon store and talk about what Triple Whale does with Amazon. And while I kind of wrap up, you can see that a lot of the TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, some of the other things that are very common, as well. So Grant, why don't we talk just briefly about Amazon, what Triple Whale does with Amazon data.

32:11 Grant

Yeah, and we just added a Bing integration while we're on this call, I got the notification via Slack. We can track other channels sending traffic to your website. So if it's labeled with the UTM and it sends traffic to your website, we can track the revenue and all those journeys. Like, this is, say, DuckDuckGo right here. We can track that journey, and when DuckDuckGo was involved. So we're not just limited to our integrations.

32:42

But yeah, Amazon will pull in a lot of metrics into this page. So you can see specific metrics, and you can build custom metrics off of these metrics. So it's not like custom attribution for Amazon, but you are able to do some things with your data. A lot of that happens on the Amazon website. The key for us is, we can track anything on your website and do anything with that. But on other websites, as far as tracking goes, we just don't have that capability, obviously, because they're other websites. But anything on a Shopify site, we've got you covered. And then, yeah, the Amazon data looks like this here.

33:19 Stephen Brown

Now, with Amazon, Grant, correct me if I'm wrong, you're essentially sucking data in from the Amazon platform, but Amazon's kind of self-contained. So the attribution is really based on what Amazon's telling us. There's nothing independent, attribution that you're doing, is that correct?

33:45 Grant

Yeah, it happens on the Amazon site, so we can't really do much with that. So we can improve attribution if a sale comes from your website, all day long. But yeah, Amazon's just its own entity, and they have their own attribution. We're pulling it into ours.

33:56 Stephen Brown

So in the case of Amazon, it's putting it in one place. You have all your data in one place, you get a better perspective of what's going on with your store, but they're kind of a closed system right now. There's not the ability to do some of that independent attribution that you've got, say, on a Shopify with Facebook and Google Ads, etcetera.

Grant

Yep.

34:25 Stephen Brown

Other questions? Hey, Grant, you mentioned it earlier, but maybe, just to wrap up, if somebody wanted to know more about Triple Whale, what's the best way for them to connect with Triple Whale and take the next step?

34:43 Grant

Yeah, you can email me, grant@triplewhale.com, and I'll get you right to the right person to get a demo set up. Or you can go to our website and select get a demo. If you do go through that process, please let the sales team know that you're working with LedgerGurus, or email me at grant@triplewhale.com that you're going through the demo process, so I can track it back to LedgerGurus, so they get referral credit. But yeah, either go through our website or email me, and we'll get you taken care of with a free demo. We'd love to meet with you and determine your needs.

35:20 Stephen Brown

And Grant, maybe just to wrap up, any final success stories? You've mentioned a couple, but you guys are growing very rapidly right now, and you're referred to quite often in the industry. Any way to wrap up why you feel like companies are having such success with you?

35:43 Grant

Yeah, we have 30 new products in the last 60 days. This landscape's ever changing. We do have case studies on our website. What you're going to find, though, is more and more, it's less click based, and more so, we need to get a post purchase survey. I think right now that landscape is ever changing, but having a post-purchase survey, and all that we built off of that, is what's moving the needle the most for our customers right now. You saw that one client, they had about eighty thousand dollars plus in the last 30 days attributed to Facebook. We have three TikTok case studies on our website, I think we have four now. The only reason why is because of a post-purchase survey. So we're in this every day, we're doing ecom every day, we have so many clients, we have very forward-thinking founders. If you do work with us, you're going to be working with a company that's at the forefront of innovation in the ecom space, and we're always rolling out new products to help. So, yeah, there's a lot that we can provide, from resources and things like that.

36:53 Stephen Brown

Okay, well, thank you, everybody, for attending today. Check out Triple Whale, it's a solution we recommend. And thank you, Grant, for the time and assistance.

37:00 Grant

My pleasure. Thanks a lot, everyone. It was awesome to be with you all, and yeah, I look forward to hearing back from some of you. Thanks again.

37:11 Stephen Brown

All right, that will wrap things up. Thank you.