Dashboard view:
* Total sales: This is easy to get in both shopify total sales report and GA4 monetisation > E-commerce purchases report
* Total ad spend: Here Triplewhale seems to have an advantage with getting the data via API's automatically. GA4 supports importing campaign data from other platforms. Also, using few ad platforms, it is easy to just have a sum of the ad spend in a google sheet.
To do the export:
- Go to Facebook Ads Reporting
- Select your report date range. “Last 7 days” if weekly
- Select the “Breakdowns” that you need. Google Analytics have a few required fields to export:
| campaign_id | campaign_name | source | medium | date | impressions | clicks | cost |
Then you can go to settings > data import for the property where you want to upload the data.
* Roas: Real ROAS is really hard to calculate and different systems always try to "cheat" in different ways to look more valuable. For example Google account managers will try to trick you to mix brand search and other types of search to make your results look good. And FBs systems are rigged to try to make FB ads look more effective. You can see each system's estimated ROAS, but to keep things simple: utm everything and use GA4 reports that do breakdown on utm_campaign, source etc. to evaluate effectiveness of campaigns
* MER: Marketing efficiency ratio: Total revenue / Total ad spend. You could easily get this number by summing up marketing spend across channels. If you are using reasonable accounts when book-keeping, it should be easy to get the total ad spend in the accounting system as well, either by a few numbers or by keeping all paid ads under the same account number 7XXX social paid ads for example
* Profit reports depends upon perfect data, if you have that, then it is very simple to just use the profits report in Shopify and then subtract your marketing spend + shipping costs. Returns is a "wildcard" here and makes calculation a lot more complicated by adding extra shipping cost + human labor, unsellable items etc.
One interesting thing to note from the Triplewhale dashboard is the symbols: There is a Shopify symbol for most of the numbers, meaning that basically all the numbers can be retrieved from Shopify analytics report, and there you can see more data and create custom reports which is more powerful than what you can do in Triplewhale.
The added value from triplewhale as far as I can see is only the blended ad spend + the numbers they get from combining ad spend + data from Shopify: MER etc.
They also have support for influencer+affiliates(affluencer), but there is no value in those numbers, the sales by discount report in Shopify is much more powerful.
The "insights" reports are mostly bad replicas of the reports / insights that is already native in Shopify.
Summary: I think using Triplewhale is a total waste of time and that you should stick with reports in Shopify and GA4. Combine also with data from inventory planner if the company is using that and all needs are met. It is "cool" to try something new and fresh, but in this case brings basically no value.