Methodology — Diagnose, Fix, Prove It

Why read-only comes first

Most tracking failures aren’t visible from a dashboard — GA4 and Meta can both look “fine” from the inside even while under- or over-reporting relative to what Shopify actually sold. The only way to know what’s really broken is to compare every platform against the order data itself, without changing anything while you measure. Editing a pipeline before you understand it means you’re now diagnosing a system you’ve also just altered.

So every engagement, whatever its size, starts with read-only access — a GA4 viewer role, Google Ads read-only, Meta Events Manager, and a Shopify staff account with read-only permissions. Nothing gets edited until the diagnosis is done and you’ve seen it.

Stage 1 — Health Check ($395, 48 hours)

A fast, read-only pass: a 30-day order-level reconciliation across your active platforms, an estimate of what’s being lost or duplicated, and a written verdict — what’s likely wrong, whether it’s worth fixing, and roughly what fixing it would cost. If nothing’s actually wrong, that’s the answer, and it’s a good outcome — you’ve bought certainty instead of a fix you didn’t need.

Stage 2 — Full Audit ($950–$1,500, 3–5 days)

If the Health Check surfaces real problems, the Full Audit maps them completely: a full event matrix across every platform in use, root causes ranked by impact rather than just symptoms, and a priced, scoped plan for the Fix Sprint. You get a document specific enough to hand to another developer if you chose to.

Stage 3 — Fix Sprint (from $1,500, 14-day warranty)

This is the stage where changes actually ship, and it’s the one most rushed jobs skip the safeguards on:

• Parallel-run builds. The new implementation is built and tested alongside the existing setup, not instead of it — the old tracking keeps running while the new one is proven.
• Test-order verification, in order. Before any event is allowed to go live, it’s checked against a real test order, in the sequence it needs to fire in — a purchase event that fires correctly but out of sequence with consent or deduplication is still broken.
• Rollback paths on every change. The old implementation is only retired once the new one has proven itself against live traffic, not on a deploy-and-hope basis.
• 14-day warranty. If something in scope breaks in the two weeks after delivery, I fix it at no extra charge.

The reconciliation evidence pack

Every engagement — Health Check, Audit, or Fix Sprint — ends with the same artifact: an order-level table, each platform’s reported orders and revenue lined up against Shopify as ground truth, with the delta shown plainly. That’s the deliverable, not an email that says “should be fixed now.” If the numbers still don’t line up after a fix, that’s visible in the table too, and the engagement stays open until they do.

Optional: ongoing monitoring

Tracking breaks silently — a theme update, a checkout change, a new app someone installs without telling you. For stores that want that caught before it costs a month of misattributed spend, there’s a retainer from $1,000/month: monthly reconciliation against Shopify orders, and priority response when something breaks.

What this isn’t

This isn’t media buying or campaign management — I stay out of ad strategy so the diagnosis stays neutral. It’s also not a same-day $50 GA4 install; this process is built for stores where getting the data wrong is expensive enough that verifying it properly is worth the time.

Start here

Most engagements start with the Health Check — $395, 48 hours, read-only. Or email me your store URL and what looks wrong, and I’ll tell you honestly whether it’s a Health Check, a bigger problem, or nothing at all.