Web Analytics Sandbox

Digital Analytics

GlowRoute's analytics account, with two years of real traffic behind it. Every figure here is counted from the same underlying sessions, so the numbers reconcile — and so do the problems hiding in them.

Your brief You are GlowRoute's first analyst. $120,000 a month runs through this account, the CMO wants a channel cut by Thursday, and nobody has ever checked the numbers she will cut it on. Open the brief

You joined GlowRoute three weeks ago as its first analyst. It is a direct-to-consumer skincare brand in Los Angeles: a vitamin C serum that carries the brand, a barrier repair cream, an SPF 30 daily, and bundles of the three, sold through its own site and nowhere else. Orders ship from one warehouse in Nevada to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany; three visitors in four are American. Until you arrived the numbers belonged to nobody. Ravelston Digital, the agency that built the current site and still runs the paid accounts, sends a monthly PDF. Jess forwards it. The CMO reads the ROAS column.

The business Roughly 118,000 sessions a month, about 2.8% of which end in an order, and the orders run a little under a hundred dollars. Gross margin is 55%, which is where Ruben Ferraro's rule comes from: a dollar of ad spend has to bring back $1.82 of revenue just to break even. He quotes it in every meeting.

The spend $120,000 a month, more in the run-up to the holidays and less in the spring: Google Ads $42K (brand terms always on, non-brand serum prospecting, a Shopping campaign and one bidding on competitors' names), Instagram $30K (Reels, plus a cart-retargeting line), TikTok $18K (Spark Ads and a creator collaboration), programmatic display $18K (lookalike prospecting and 30-day retargeting) and email $12K, which is the Klaviyo platform fee for a list of about 212,000 subscribers: a welcome series, the weekly edit and a 90-day win-back.

Who finds new customers TikTok, the Instagram Reels, display prospecting and non-brand search are the lines that reach people who have never heard of GlowRoute. Brand search, both retargeting lines and every email reach people who already know it. Ruben's $1.82 is applied to all of them alike. Whether it should be is part of your job.

The people in the room Delphine Arceneaux, the CMO, decides from dashboards and is impatient with caveats; she has told the leadership team that one channel is dead weight and "the dashboard already knows which". Jess Tanaka, your Growth Lead, owns the channel numbers and presents the quarterly review on Thursday. Ruben Ferraro, the CFO, asks what a channel is worth, not what it reaches. Anika Sethi, Head of Brand, runs the creator programme and will defend TikTok to the last slide.

The ask Jess needs one page from you by Monday: which channel you would cut on today's numbers, the figures that support it, and whatever she must say out loud before Delphine cuts anything. She will stand behind it in the room, so it has to survive Ruben's questions as well as Delphine's.

What nobody mentioned This account has never been audited. The tracking was set up by the agency that built the site, and no one has checked it since. Jess has heard there were "a couple of tracking blips" this year; nobody wrote down when. The platforms' own figures (spend, impressions, clicks) sit in the Advertising report. The platforms count clicks. This account counts sessions. Nobody has put the two side by side.

Hold three questions while you work: Which channel would you cut on today's numbers? What would you need to see before you were willing to defend that? And what is sitting in this account that would embarrass you if the CMO found it after you presented?

Where this sits This account is GlowRoute's history. The UTM Campaign Tracking Lab tags the Summer Glow launch that comes after it; that launch is not in this data, because the ledger ends before it starts. If you have done the lab, you have seen untagged traffic land in Direct from the inside; here you will find the agency doing it from the outside. If you have not, nothing here depends on it.

Field notes Ten findings are waiting in this account. 0 of 10 logged Open your notes

Jess needs findings, not screenshots. There are at least ten in this account worth a line in her memo, and they come in three kinds. Log each one as you find it: what you saw, where (report, breakdown, date range) and the number that gives it away. Notes stay in this browser and are never sent anywhere.

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