Lots of paid media attribution conversations recently.
High-growth DTC brands spending £3-5k/day across 2 channels – Meta & Google.
Many making large strategic decisions on their ad spend based on in-platform metrics or a third party multi-touch-attribution/pixel platform like Triple Whale/Northbeam.
Take a step back for a second.
Assume you’re launching a completely new market, blind with no tracking capabilities.
You turn the ads on, sales come in, but results in-platform/in your attribution tool don’t match up with the sales you’re seeing.
In fact, they report to be significantly lower.
What do you do?
You keep investing, monitoring the relationship between spend, revenue and profitability.
When you spend more does revenue increase? Are you still profitable?
If yes, you spend more. If no, you reduce spend and assess your levers.
You don’t just turn the ads off because Meta/Google/Triple Whale told you to.
You can see the sales coming through and realise you’re doing very little else to generate them.
Common sense dictates the tools you have are not giving you the full picture.
So you use them as a reference point, with a large pinch of salt, not your source of truth.
For 95% of high-growth DTC brands – those spending less than £5-10k/day across just 1-2 channels – this is what you should be doing.
Not chasing your tail trying to line up flawed tracking mechanisms with your actual business results.
Everyone will be clear. Singing from the same hymn sheet. You’ll make better decisions.
