Analytics

I used to see the same pattern at every company I worked with: paid channels would take credit for the majority of conversions, budgets would flow to the shiny platforms, and product or organic teams would be left wondering why true growth stagnated. Most of the time the root cause wasn’t “paid magic” — it was measurement that conflated engagement signals with causal impact.In this article I’ll walk through a practical way to map your...

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I often get asked by product and marketing teams: “Can we map first-party events to revenue without touching our analytics code?” Short answer: yes — but it requires a shift in where you stitch data together. Instead of editing front-end tracking or changing the analytics SDK, you build an event-to-revenue mapping layer downstream, using server-side enrichments, order webhooks, and a persistent identifier that ties behavioral events to...

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I’ve spent a lot of my time helping SaaS teams get analytics out of the messy parts of subscription businesses — upgrades, downgrades, failed payments and the small events that predict churn. GA4 gives us a flexible event model that’s perfect for subscription SaaS, but that flexibility is also a problem: without a clear schema you end up with fragmented events, duplicate revenue, and LTV numbers you don’t trust.Why a strict event schema...

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I get asked a lot: which GA4 events actually map to revenue for ecommerce, and how do you implement them in Shopify so the numbers you see in Analytics actually match your platform? There’s a lot of noise here — partial integrations, missing parameters, double-counting — so I’ll walk through the events that matter, the data you must send, how to implement them on Shopify (client and server-side), and the common mistakes that throw...

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Creative fatigue is a slow burn — impressions decline, CTR slides, CPM creeps up and before you know it your campaign that used to hum is barely sputtering. I’ve run enough ad tests to know that guessing when to pause, tweak or scale creatives costs time and media spend. What I want to walk you through here is a causal creative fatigue test you can run in your own ad accounts that proves the impact of creative decay and tells you which...

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Onboarding is where customers decide whether your product belongs in their stack or not. Over the past decade I’ve seen teams obsess over signups while missing the small, repeatable moments that actually predict retention. This playbook focuses on tracking those moments — not for the sake of dashboards, but to give you levers you can pull to cut churn.Why focus onboarding analytics on moments, not screensMost analytics setups track pages...

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I build and test analytics implementations for a living, and one problem that keeps coming up for marketing teams is simple but costly: revenue not attributed in GA4 because tracking calls never fired or were blocked. I’ve put together a tiny validation script that runs on page and checks the essential signals GA4 needs to record conversions and revenue. It’s lightweight, non-invasive, and focused on the specific checks that prevent lost...

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I’ve built dashboards that executives ignore, and dashboards that become the single slide CEOs refer to in boardrooms. There’s a clear difference between the two: one tries to surface every possible metric, the other is designed to answer the questions the C-suite actually asks — and to do it in under 60 seconds. Here’s the pragmatic approach I use to get there.Start with the questions, not the dataIf you design a dashboard around...

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I remember the first time I had to migrate an entire event tracking setup from Universal Analytics (GA3) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4): it felt like defusing a bomb while trying to keep the lights on. The key to getting it right is planning, mapping and running both systems in parallel until you're confident the new implementation is capturing everything you need. Below is the step-by-step plan I use with clients to migrate event tracking without...

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On subscription products, the onboarding flow is where you win or lose customers. I’ve spent years instrumenting flows for SaaS and content subscription businesses, and one thing keeps coming up: teams either track too little (so they can’t diagnose churn/handoff points) or they track too much (raw data with no action). Below I share the exact analytics events I recommend for subscription onboarding on Next.js sites — what to capture, when...

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