What we measure, and what we don't

This is not because the founder doesn't care about the numbers. It's because the report is structured for the agency to look thorough rather than for the founder to actually understand what's happening. Too many KPIs, too many dashboards, too many caveats.

So here's what we measure, and what we don't.

For paid media, one number per channel: blended ROAS. Not last-click ROAS, not platform-attributed ROAS. Blended, calculated against total revenue from Shopify divided by total ad spend across all channels in the same period. It's the only number that survives privacy changes, attribution shifts, and platform self-reporting drift. We track it weekly.

“The founder should be able to recite the five numbers from memory.

For email, two numbers: revenue per recipient on flows, revenue per recipient on campaigns. That's it. Open rate is gone since iOS 15 made it unreliable. Click rate is interesting but doesn't pay the bills. Revenue per recipient is what the channel is producing.

For organic search, one number: clicks from non-brand queries, sourced from Search Console. Brand-query traffic is a vanity metric. Most people searching your brand name would have come anyway. Non-brand clicks are the SEO program working.

For organic social, one number per platform: saves on Instagram, completion rate on TikTok, qualified profile clicks on LinkedIn. Reach is irrelevant. Likes are irrelevant. Saves and completes and clicks are the actual signal.

What we don't measure: impressions, brand sentiment scores, share of voice, follower growth, time on site, bounce rate. Most of these are metrics that look meaningful in a deck and tell you nothing actionable.

The founder should be able to recite the five numbers from memory. If the report has more numbers than the founder can remember on a Monday morning, it has the wrong numbers.