Marketing Acquisition: every metric that matters in one view

Which lens + model should I use?

Sources & Attribution has two big switches: the lens (which dataset is feeding the row) and the attribution model (how credit is split across touches in a path). Pick the wrong combination and ROAS will read $0.00 even when the orders are flowing.

The 4 lenses

Each lens answers a slightly different question. The numbers will not match across lenses — that is by construction, not a bug.

Default for first-time users: the /marketing-acquisition surface ships on the All lens so you can see the diagnostic surface up-front. Switch to a single lens once you trust the numbers.

Which attribution model?

Switching models is non-destructive — the underlying touch data is the same; only the credit-allocation rule changes. The default is Last Click — the dashboard and drill-down both open on it. For multi-touch credit on most DTC 5–21 day funnels, switch to Time Decay (H=7d) (the same model GA4 calls Time Decay).

Full formulas and source-additive guardrails for every model live in the Attribution Models deep-dive. Markov gets its own page at /documentation/markov-attribution.

FAQ: Why is my ROAS 0.00×?

Three most likely causes — work through them in order. The data is almost always there; one of these knobs is just turned wrong.

1. Your pixel was just installed. Pre-install dates structurally return $0 because no UTM-attributed sessions exist before the snippet was on the page. Move the date range forward 24 hours after install and the rows populate. Check the install timestamp on /documentation/install.
2. Your URL Builder is producing inconsistent UTMs. The channel match key is case-sensitive (e.g. utm_source=facebook ≠ utm_source=Facebook) — half your revenue is credited to one row and the spend to another, so ROAS reads as $0 on both. Open /url-builder, pick a canonical lowercase convention, and re-tag every paid link.
3. You are on the Pixel lens but your traffic is heavily ad-blocked. Ad-blockers and Safari ITP suppress 30–60% of pixel events on most DTC traffic. Switch to the Shopify lens — the Shopify Custom App connection feeds Shopify's customer-journey ledger, which does not depend on the pixel and is not suppressed by ad-blockers. Numbers usually populate immediately.

Still stuck after walking through all three? Open the Why drawer on any row in the unified table — it shows what each lens saw and explains the gap in plain English. The same explanation backs the in-product chat agent at /api/v1/analytics/chat.

What this page tells you

Four questions every operator asks every Monday. /marketing-acquisition answers all four on one screen.

The unified Sources & Attribution table

The unified table replaces three older surfaces (Attribution Drilldown, Source Reconciliation, Sources/Sessions) with one premium table that answers every channel question on one screen.

Row structure

Top-level rows are source / medium parents: Meta paid, Google paid, TikTok paid, Klaviyo email, organic search, organic social, direct, referral, and the long tail. Paid sources are expandable; click the chevron to drill into the next layer.

Expanded structure for paid rows: parent → campaign → adset → ad. Each child carries the same column set as the parent — spend, sessions, orders, revenue, ROAS, deltas — at the same fidelity. Organic and referral rows do not expand — there is no underlying campaign hierarchy to drill into.

Sort by any column; the chevron expanders persist across sorts so an expanded campaign tree stays expanded when you re-sort by ROAS.

Columns

Controls

Column picker. Show or hide any column from a single dropdown. Hidden columns persist per user across reloads. Useful when you want a focused view (just spend + ROAS + delta) or a wide-screen everything view.

Density toggle. Compact / comfortable row density. Compact gives you ~50% more rows on screen; comfortable adds breathing room around money columns. Default is comfortable.

CSV export. Click Export at the top-right to download the active view as a CSV. Hidden columns are excluded; expanded children are flattened into the export with parent identifiers preserved so you can pivot in Excel or Google Sheets.

Sort + filter your data

Every numeric column header in the unified Sources & Attribution table is click-to-sort. Default order is Spend descending; click any numeric column header (Spend, Sessions, Orders, Revenue, Pixel CV, Pixel Gap, ROAS, CPA, AOV, NC ROAS, Δ vs prior) to sort by it. Click the same header again to flip ascending/descending. Click a third time to clear the sort and return to the default Spend-desc order. The chevron expanders persist across sorts so an expanded campaign tree stays expanded when you re-sort.

Date-range chips above the date inputs offer eight common presets: Today · Yesterday · 7d · 14d · 30d · 90d · MTD · Custom. Click any chip to set both the start and end date in one action. To pick non-standard dates, use the two date inputs directly — Admaxxer auto-switches to the Custom chip the moment you edit either input. The active chip stays highlighted so the comparison-period filter (next to the date range) has a clear anchor.

Tips

• Sorting by Δ vs prior in descending order is the fastest way to find what has moved fastest in the last comparison window — pair it with the 7d chip for a weekly operator scan.
• Sorting by Pixel Gap in descending order surfaces the rows where Platform CV is most over-claiming pixel orders — the classic "where is my iOS 14.5 view-through over-claim?" view.
• Sorting by ROAS ascending surfaces underperforming campaigns to consider pausing; sort by Spend ascending first to filter out long-tail rows with negligible spend.
• When sort is active, the column header shows an up or down chevron next to the label so the active sort key is always visible. Reload preserves your sort + active chip + date range in the URL — share the URL with a teammate to land them on the same view.

Pixel vs Platform reconciliation

Platform numbers (Meta CV, Google conversions) almost never match pixel numbers, and that is by design. Each measures something slightly different. The Pixel Gap column on every row quantifies the difference; the Reconciliation popover labels the most likely cause.

iOS 14.5 view-through. Meta uses a 7d-click + 1d-view default attribution window; pixel is last-click. View-through attribution is something Meta’s graph can do that a first-party pixel cannot replicate — expect Meta to over-claim by 10–25% post-iOS 14.5 even with identical click data.

Untagged campaigns. When ad URLs miss utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign, the pixel cannot attribute the resulting order back to the source. Pixel under-claims; Platform CV over-claims by the same amount. The fix is on your ad-URL side — use the URL Builder at /url-builder.

Post-click delays. Meta’s Marketing API ships insights data with a 24–72 hour settlement window. Conversions that happen late on day N may not show in Meta’s data until day N+1. The pixel sees them immediately; the row temporarily shows a negative gap that closes overnight.

CAPI match rate. Below 60% match rate, Meta leans hard on modeled conversions. Pass email + phone + fbc + fbp + a clean external_id from the Conversions API to push match rate higher and tighten the gap. See attribution discrepancies for the full reconciliation methodology with a worked example.

Attribution models

Seven models, switchable from a single dropdown at the top of the table. Switching models is non-destructive — the underlying touch data is the same; only the credit-allocation rule changes.

For the full algorithm, formula, and source-additive guardrails behind every model, see /documentation/attribution-models (last-click / first-click / linear-all / linear-paid / time-decay / position-based) and /documentation/markov-attribution (the seventh, removal-effect model).

Google sync schedule

Google Ads has two sync paths feeding the Sources & Attribution surface — a fast channel-level loop and a deeper per-campaign loop. They run on different cadences by design, so the channel total can be current while the drill-down is still indexing.

• Per-campaign breakdowns sync daily at 04:30 UTC. The cron that populates the chevron-expanded campaign / ad-group rows under the Google channel parent. Offset 15 minutes from Meta’s 04:15 UTC per-ad sync so the two fan-outs do not spike analytics ingest simultaneously.
• New Google connections appear in the drill-down within 24 hours of connecting. Until the first 04:30 UTC sync fires, the per-campaign drill renders an explicit “indexing” empty-state — not a misleading “no campaigns” message. The coachmark links back to this section so the user knows the surface is healthy and just waiting for the first sync.
• Channel-level totals are current within ~1 hour. The hourly account-level Google Ads sync (separate from the per-campaign cron) keeps the parent row’s Spend / ROAS / CV columns fresh while the deeper drill is indexing. A user landing on /marketing-acquisition within minutes of connecting Google Ads sees their channel-level numbers immediately, even though the campaign rows below need until the next 04:30 UTC tick.
• For per-campaign data before the first scheduled sync, an operator can run a one-shot backfill via scripts/backfill-google-per-campaign-vitatree.ts. That populates the last 30 days of per-campaign rows immediately, idempotent on re-runs. Used for white-glove onboarding of early customers who do not want to wait the 24-hour first-sync window.

See Google Ads setup for the connection walkthrough and Sources & Attribution for the full lens semantics behind the channel total.

Comparison periods

Every metric on every tile carries a delta against a comparison period. Pick the comparison from the global dropdown next to the date range; deltas refresh instantly without re-fetching the active window.

• Previous period. Same calendar length immediately before the active window. Last 7 days vs the 7 days before that. Best for week-over-week operator workflow.
• Previous year. Same calendar window one year earlier — accounts for seasonality and recurring promo cadence. Best for stores with strong YoY patterns.
• Previous month. The full prior calendar month vs the active window. Best for monthly reporting and finance hand-offs that align to the calendar.
• Off. Hides every Δ chip and frees screen real estate when you are doing pure absolute-number analysis (e.g. closing the books).

Cost-style metrics (CPA, CPM, CPC, CAC, bounce rate) carry inverted delta semantics: a falling number is a green chip, a rising number is a red chip. This is purely presentational — the underlying math is the same percent-change formula.

UTM coverage

UTM coverage is the percentage of paid sessions that arrived with at least utm_source + utm_medium populated. The coverage banner at the top of /marketing-acquisition surfaces a single number; below 90% the banner turns amber and links to the URL Builder.

Why coverage matters. When ad clicks land without UTMs, the smart-referrer classifier can usually still resolve the source from the referrer header (facebook.com, ads.google.com). But the medium becomes a guess, and worse, the campaign / adset / ad layer is completely lost — the row collapses into the parent source with no drill-down. ROAS for that source is artificially inflated because the spend is correct but the revenue per campaign is unattributable.

Cost of bad coverage. Operators running 50% UTM coverage typically see ROAS calculations off by 10–30% per channel because the (direct) and untagged buckets absorb revenue that should belong to specific paid campaigns. The fix is mechanical: tag every ad URL once using the patterns at /documentation/utm-best-practices, then verify the coverage tile climbs above 95% over the next 7 days.

Use the URL Builder to generate fully-tagged URLs in seconds for Meta, Google, TikTok, Klaviyo, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and Amazon.

Multi-currency

Workspaces commonly run a Shopify store in one currency (CAD, EUR, GBP) while their Meta or Google ad accounts bill in another (USD, EUR, etc.). Without normalization, a CAD store with a USD-billed Meta account would report ROAS in mixed currencies — a number that means nothing.

How Admaxxer normalizes. Every money value (spend, revenue, AOV, ROAS, MER) is converted to your selected reporting currency at query time using ECB reference rates from frankfurter.dev, cached 4 hours in our job queue. Per-row historical accuracy — the rate applied to a row dated 2026-04-01 is the rate from 2026-04-01, not today’s rate.

FX rate badge. Hover any money tile and the tooltip shows: native amount in source currency → converted amount in reporting currency → the applied rate and the rate’s effective date. Conversions are never opaque.

Set the reporting currency at Settings → Exchange rates. See the multi-currency architecture deep-dive for the full provider chain (our primary database + our job queue 4h cache, frankfurter.dev fallback, per-row historical lookup).

Edit dashboard

Click Edit dashboard at the top of /marketing-acquisition (or press E) to enter edit mode. Three editable layers:

• Section reorder. Drag the handle on any section header to move the entire section up or down. Sections collapse to a drag-handle row in edit mode for easier sorting.
• Tile reorder. Inside any section, drag any tile to reorder within that section. Reordering is local to the section — tiles do not jump between sections.
• Hide / show. Click the eye icon on any tile or section header to hide it. Hidden items move to a Hidden tray at the bottom of edit mode; click any item to restore.

Saved views. Save the result as a named view from the chips bar above the table. Each view has a default scope: a personal lock-icon view (visible only to you) or a workspace-shared people-icon view (visible to every member). Promote / demote a view from its kebab menu. Each user picks one default per dashboard surface; that view loads on every login.

Reset. Click Reset to layout default in edit mode to restore the factory section + tile order. Reset clears your per-user customization but does not delete saved views.

Keyboard. E toggles edit mode, focus a handle and use ↑/↓/←/→ to nudge the section or tile, Esc exits, Ctrl/⌘+Z undoes up to 10 steps. All animations respect prefers-reduced-motion.

See the dashboard customization deep-dive for the full keyboard cheatsheet, view-promotion semantics, and a 3-way comparison with Triple Whale + Datafast.

Pinned tiles

Click the pin icon on any tile to pin it to the Pinned section at the top of the page. Pinned tiles survive section reorder, view-switching, and sign-out; they are scoped per page (the pin set on /marketing-acquisition is independent of the pin set on /dashboard).

Pinning is orthogonal to layout — the original tile stays in its native section so visitors landing on a saved view do not see a phantom hole. Click pin again on either copy to remove it.

Recommended pins for ad operators: blended ROAS, MER, blended CPA, top-channel ROAS, top-campaign ROAS, CAPI match rate, the Pixel Gap delta. Aim for ≤ 6 pins so the row stays glanceable.

Frequently asked questions

Fourteen common questions, written so AI search engines can quote them cleanly.

Which lens should I use — Pixel, Shopify, Platform, or All?

Start on the Shopify lens for total-revenue truth (it's the same lens Shopify's own "Top marketing channels" admin page uses). Switch to the Pixel lens for per-campaign breakdowns when your URL Builder is correctly tagging every paid link with utm_source / utm_medium / utm_campaign. Switch to the Platform lens when you need numbers that match Meta Ads Manager or Google Ads UI directly — that's the number the platform's optimizer is using, so it's required for in-platform pacing decisions. Use the All lens when you're diagnosing a tracking gap and want to see all three lenses side-by-side on the same row. Pixel + Shopify will read materially lower than Platform — that's not a bug; Platform includes view-through attribution while the other two are click-based.

Why is my ROAS 0.00×?

Three most likely causes. (1) Your pixel was just installed — pre-install dates structurally return $0 because no UTM-attributed sessions exist before the snippet was on the page. Move the date range forward 24h after install and the rows populate. (2) Your URL Builder is producing inconsistent UTMs (e.g. utm_source=facebook on some ads and utm_source=Facebook on others) — the channel match key is case-sensitive, so half your revenue is being credited to one row and the spend to another. Open /url-builder, pick a canonical lowercase convention, and re-tag. (3) You're on the Pixel lens but your traffic is heavily ad-blocked or Safari-ITP'd — switch to the Shopify lens (the Shopify Custom App connection feeds Shopify's own customer-journey ledger, which doesn't depend on the pixel) and the numbers usually populate immediately.

Why is my Meta-reported ROAS higher than my pixel ROAS?

Meta uses a 7d-click + 1d-view default attribution window with modeled conversions for iOS 14.5+ traffic plus cross-device attribution from its logged-in graph. Admaxxer's pixel ROAS is deterministic, first-party, and last-click by default. A 10–25% gap is normal post-iOS 14.5; below 60% CAPI match rate the gap widens. Use Admaxxer for headline reporting and Meta for in-platform bidding signal — not the other way around. Open the Reconciliation popover on any row for a per-row labeled cause.

What does Pixel Gap mean?

Pixel Gap is Platform CV minus pixel orders for that row in the same window. Positive numbers mean the platform is claiming more conversions than your pixel sees — usually iOS 14.5 view-through, cross-device attribution, or modeled events the pixel cannot replicate. Negative numbers mean the pixel sees more — usually untagged links that the platform cannot attribute back to itself. Hover the gap value to see the labeled cause; click through to the Reconciliation deep-dive for a step-by-step methodology.

Can I see attribution down to the ad level?

Yes. Click the chevron on any paid source row (Meta, Google, TikTok) to expand it into Campaign → Adset → Ad children. Each child row carries the same column set — spend, sessions, orders, ROAS, deltas — at the same fidelity as the parent. Sort children by ROAS to find the winners and losers, sort by Δ vs prior to find the movers.

How does Admaxxer handle multi-currency?

Admaxxer FX-normalizes every money value to your selected reporting currency using ECB reference rates via frankfurter.dev, cached 4 hours in our job queue. Per-row historical accuracy: each row uses the rate from its own date, not today's rate. The FX badge next to every money tile shows the native amount, the converted amount, and the applied rate so the conversion is never opaque. Set the reporting currency at Settings → Preferences. See the multi-currency architecture deep-dive for the full chain.

How do I save a custom dashboard layout?

Click Edit dashboard at the top of /marketing-acquisition. Drag any section to reorder it; drag any tile inside a section to reorder within that section; click the eye icon to hide a tile or section. Save the result as a named view from the chips bar — a personal lock-icon view by default, or promote it to a workspace-shared people-icon view via the chip's kebab menu. Each user picks one default per dashboard surface; that's what loads on every login. Press E to toggle edit mode, Esc to exit, Ctrl/⌘+Z to undo up to 10 steps.

What's the difference between Linear All and Linear Paid?

Linear All splits credit equally across every touch in the path — paid AND organic. A 5-touch path with 2 paid + 3 organic touches gives each touch 20%. Linear Paid splits credit equally across PAID touches only; organic touches get 0%. Use Linear All for the question 'where does revenue actually come from?' and Linear Paid for 'where should I allocate next week's ad budget?'. Pair them — when Linear Paid ROAS is high but Linear All ROAS is lower, you are over-rotating budget into paid.

Why does my Conversion Rate look different from Google Analytics?

Three reasons: (1) Admaxxer's denominator is sessions; GA4's default denominator can be either sessions or active users depending on the report. (2) Admaxxer's pixel uses fingerprint-hashed visitor_id without IP fallback; GA4 uses cookieless modeling that can over- or under-count uniques on Safari. (3) Different definitions of a session boundary — Admaxxer is 30 min idle gap; GA4 default is 30 min plus a per-day reset. Numbers will differ; trust the trend direction more than the absolute value.

How recent is the data?

Pixel data is real-time: a session that just landed shows up within seconds. Shopify orders arrive via admin webhooks (real-time + refund-aware) plus a +24-hour daily-poll backfill, so an order placed 30 seconds ago is on the dashboard immediately. Meta Ads Insights are pulled every 15 minutes from Meta's Marketing API; Google Ads via GAQL the same cadence. The Reconciliation columns refresh together — no stale-state mid-row. The Currency / FX rate cache is 4 hours.

Why might my Meta spend look inflated?

Two patterns explain almost every "my Meta spend looks 7-17× too high" report. First (most common): the daily ad-spend rollup in our analytics warehouse accumulated duplicate rows from re-syncs of the same date range. The warehouse deduplicates asynchronously, so a re-sync of the same 14 days writes 14 new rows that sit alongside the older rows until the background merge collapses them — and the consumer query summed all of them. Fixed in 2026-05-07's deploy by reading only the latest deduplicated row at query time (or, on older warehouse versions, switching to a daily idempotent rewrite worker keyed on workspace+date+platform+account). Second: cross-currency summation. If your workspace is set to CAD but your Meta ad account reports in USD, the platform-aggregator used to GROUP BY currency and sum each currency separately, then label the total as CAD. The fix is to convert at the write boundary using the per-day ECB rate and stamp every row with the workspace currency, so the consumer sums one currency only. If your Meta spend still looks wrong after this fix, open the per-row Reconciliation popover on the Sources & Attribution table — it shows the raw platform spend, the FX rate applied, and the final converted value for each row.

Why does my Shopify revenue lag behind reality on today's date?

Shipping a daily-cron polled-data snapshot at 02:00 UTC means a west-coast Pacific merchant captures "today" at 19:00 PT yesterday — when the day has 0-2 orders. Mid-day Pacific the merchant has 11+ orders, but the dashboard's revenue reducer (which prefers the highest-confidence source per-day across pixel orders, polled Shopify, and pixel visitor payments) was reading the morning-stale 02:00 UTC snapshot. As of 2026-05-07 we run an hourly re-poll cron during merchant business hours (gated by the workspace's timezone, debounced via a 30-min a cache lock so manual refreshes and the cron don't double-fire). Today's Shopify-reported row now refreshes at most one hour stale, every hour, while the merchant's storefront is open. Webhook-driven orders are unaffected — those land in seconds. The combined result: the dashboard's "today" revenue tile tracks real-time within a 60-minute lag in the worst case, dropping to seconds for any merchant with the Shopify Custom Pixel snippet installed (which captures checkout_completed events directly).

Why does the same campaign appear twice in the drill-down?

If your Shopify journeys captured two slightly-different utm_campaign strings for the same ad — for example one with an extra trailing space, or one in mixed case — each variant produced a separate row pre-2026-05-15. As of GL#486 we normalize whitespace + case on both sides of the JOIN key before aggregating, so one campaign = one row. If you still see duplicates after that date, file a ticket with the campaign name + workspace ID and we will inspect the underlying journey rows.

Why doesn't my Google Ads drill-down show campaigns yet?

Per-campaign Google breakdowns sync daily at 04:30 UTC. If you just connected Google Ads, your campaigns will appear within 24 hours. The channel-level total is current — it uses the hourly account-level sync. See the Google sync schedule section.

Why does the date range show 'Pixel data starts {date}' instead of my selection?

When you select the Pixel lens for a date range that starts before your pixel was installed, we clamp the visible data to the pixel install date — otherwise the days before install would render as $0 and the page would look broken. Click 'Show full range' to see the structural zeros if you want, or switch to the Shopify lens to see your full historical revenue (Shopify's data goes back further than your pixel).

Related documentation

• Install the pixel — first step before /marketing-acquisition has data to render.
• Analytics — the broader analytics dashboard that complements /marketing-acquisition.
• Meta + Google connections — how to connect ad platforms so the unified table populates the paid rows.
• Attribution models — full algorithm + source-additive guardrails for the seven models.
• Markov attribution — the seventh, removal-effect model in detail.
• Attribution discrepancies — full reconciliation methodology with a worked example.
• UTM best practices — how to push UTM coverage above 95%.
• Multi-currency architecture — the full FX-normalization provider chain.
• Dashboard customization — the full keyboard cheatsheet + saved-views semantics.
• Open Marketing Acquisition — the live dashboard.