If your campaign name in Shopify analytics reads as a 17-digit numeric ID, you're flying blind. Here's what real UTM hygiene looks like for Meta Ads — and the three upgrades that actually show you the consumer journey.

7 numbers that fooled me before I learned to double-check them Quick story. I was looking at a retargeting campaign that had fired 15 "Purchase" events in 10 days. Solid number, right? Then I checked Shopify. Only 4 of those orders had actually been paid. The other 11 were cash-on-delivery orders nobody had paid for yet, plus one that got cancelled. The tracking wasn't broken. The pixel was healthy. The number was just... measuring the wrong moment. "Purchase" fired the secon

Every D2C founder I know has the same three tabs open at 11pm: Shopify analytics, the ad platform dashboard, and a spreadsheet that's trying to reconcile the two and failing. Everyone talks about using AI to write captions or generate product shots. Almost no one talks about the much less glamorous use case that's actually changed how I run the business: using it to read the numbers I already have, before I act on them. This isn't about dashboards or automation. It's about ha