← Northbound Case study · Rivali, Ghent

Two stores, one incomplete picture of online growth.

Alongside the new Shopify store, an older store kept receiving orders. Without a Meta pixel on that old environment, there was no good way to establish what part ads played in those sales. This is how I worked that out — and why my advice was not “more budget”.

01 · The situation

Sales and measurement split across two environments.

Rivali is a family business in luxury household linen and nightwear, with a shop in Ghent. While the new Shopify store was being built, the old store stayed live. Orders still came in there, while that environment had no Meta pixel.

That situation made the ad account hard to assess. A visitor could discover the brand through an ad and order somewhere else later. That was a possible customer journey, but without additional data we could not reconstruct it for every order.


02 · My responsibility

Acquisition, measurement, creative and retention.

I worked on Rivali's e-commerce. To assess the campaigns, I first had to understand why store sales and ad reporting diverged.


03 · What I did

Carried out, and advised.

That distinction is deliberate. Not everything I recommended was put in place.

Uitgevoerd
  • Set backend orders and ad spend side by side to reconstruct the business picture, without automatically attributing all revenue to Meta.
  • Compared the order records of both stores by hand, for as long as consolidation had not been completed.
  • Switched on the Conversions API and used a test checkout to check whether a purchase event came through.
  • Gave ads a fixed UTM structure to tell traffic sources apart more clearly.
  • Examined the product page and checkout for possible drop-off.
  • Took the difference in margin between own products and bought-in brands into account when assessing acquisition costs.
Advised
  • Consolidation into one store with a redirect. I pushed for that; it is not a completed change that I present here as a result.

A successful test event shows that this one test comes through. It is not the same as fully watertight tracking.


04 · What the analysis made clear

Total store revenue is no proof of revenue from ads.

Platform reporting and total store revenue answer different questions. The ad account reports attributed conversions. The backend records orders. Bringing the sales data together gives a fuller picture of revenue, but in itself it does not prove which sales were caused by ads.

Fuller picture of revenue omzet door advertenties

The product mix counted too. An order with bought-in brands could deliver a different contribution than an order with own products. One revenue figure was therefore not enough to set a responsible acquisition budget.


05 · The decision

Not simply scaling further.

My advice was not to simply scale further. First it had to become clearer what costs an order could carry and how reliable the measurement baseline was. More ad spend was no answer to that uncertainty.


06 · What this case shows

An approach, not a promise of results.

This case describes my approach to fragmented sales data, tracking problems and a range with different margins. It is not proof of profitable scale or of an exactly measured rise in revenue from my changes.

The original source exports are not fully available. That is why we do not publish an exact uplift, corrected ROAS or causal saving here that we cannot back up again.


Full breakdown

Want to see how I reached this conclusion?

Get the detailed breakdown: the approach behind the measurement baseline, order reconciliation, margin per product group and the scaling decision.

  • Why platform reporting and backend revenue answer different questions
  • How to set two sales environments side by side without double counting
  • What a test event does and does not prove about your tracking
  • How margin per product group sets your room for acquisition
  • Which questions to answer before you raise the budget
  • Why “more budget” does not solve uncertainty

No exact client figures: the underlying exports are not fully available.

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