Monthly Marketing Analytics Checklist

Pull last month's blended Marketing Efficiency Ratio (total revenue / total ad spend) and per-channel ROAS from Triple Whale or Northbeam. Compare to the prior 3-month rolling average — a single-month dip on Meta or Google often masks an attribution shift after the latest iOS / browser tracking change rather than real performance erosion.

Record the headline MER below for trend tracking.

Open Meta Ads Manager and segment by campaign objective (ASC, prospecting, retargeting). Flag any campaign whose CAC has drifted more than 25% above the contribution-margin breakeven. Audit creative fatigue (frequency > 3.0, CTR halving) before assuming the audience is exhausted.

Pull the PMax asset group report and the search terms report. Common gotcha: PMax cannibalizes branded search and inflates ROAS — exclude branded queries via campaign-level negatives or run a brand-only Search campaign alongside to keep attribution honest.

Use Helium 10 or the Sellerise dashboard to review TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) per ASIN. Anything trending above 20% on a mature ASIN warrants a bid review; new launches under 90 days can run hot intentionally to seed organic rank.

Use Lifetimely or Polar Analytics to calculate the share of new customers acquired 30, 60, and 90 days ago who placed a second order. Consumable categories should see 25%+ at 60 days; durable goods will be lower. Trend matters more than the absolute number.

Pull revenue per recipient for welcome, browse abandonment, cart abandonment, post-purchase, and winback flows. A welcome series under $1.50 RPR or a winback under $0.30 RPR usually means the segment definition or send-time logic is off — not the creative.

Pull active subscribers, cancel reasons, and dunning recovery rate from the Recharge analytics dashboard. Healthy CPG subscription churn lands 5-8% monthly; above 10% almost always traces to passive payment failures (expired cards) rather than active cancellations — which means the fix is smart-retry and account-updater, not retention offers.

Build a cohort table by acquisition channel and first product. Subscription churn is rarely uniform — the spike usually concentrates in one acquisition source (often a discount-led promo cohort) or one starter SKU. Identify the worst-performing cohort and document a hypothesis before changing the offer or onboarding.

Tag last month's reviews by issue (sizing, quality, shipping, expectations vs. reality). A cluster of three or more 1-2 star reviews on the same SKU citing the same defect is a manufacturing or PDP-image problem, not a CX problem — route to product before responding individually.

In GA4, walk the funnel from session → view item → add to cart → begin checkout → purchase. Segment by mobile vs. desktop — a recent theme or app update commonly tanks one device class while the blended number stays acceptable.

Run PageSpeed Insights against home, collection, top 3 PDPs, and cart. Watch INP (interaction to next paint) — Google replaced FID with INP and many Shopify themes that passed FID now fail INP because of bloated app embeds. LCP > 2.5s on PDPs typically traces to unoptimized hero images or third-party review widgets.

Compare Klaviyo's cart abandonment flow recovery rate against last quarter's baseline. Confirm the flow's exit conditions actually filter out completed orders — a race-condition bug where customers receive a 'you forgot something' email 30 minutes after they checked out is a recurring complaint we want to catch before customers do.

Review Microsoft Clarity session replays and heatmaps on the highest-traffic PDP and the cart page. Pick one element with both observable friction and enough traffic to reach 95% significance inside 14 days — anything lower-traffic produces ambiguous reads and burns the test calendar.

Write the test brief: hypothesis, primary metric, guardrail metrics, minimum detectable effect, and target sample size. Hand to the Shopify developer to implement in VWO or Convert. Pre-register the success criteria so a borderline result doesn't get reinterpreted after the fact.

Compare organic landing-page sessions in GA4 against tracked keyword positions in Ahrefs or Semrush. After Google's HCU (Helpful Content) updates, rank loss tends to concentrate on thin commercial pages — flag any page that lost > 10 positions for a content audit rather than a backlink push.

Pull TikTok and Instagram Reels analytics: average watch time, completion rate, follower vs. non-follower reach. UGC-style hooks consistently outpace polished brand cuts; flag the top-performing organic video for paid amplification via Spark Ads or Partnership Ads.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection makes open rate unreliable as an absolute metric, but CTR and click-to-conversion are still trustworthy. Segment by engaged 30 / 60 / 90 to confirm list hygiene — sending past 90 days of disengagement risks deliverability and triggers spam-folder placement across the file.

Run Screaming Frog against the storefront. Watch for: 4xx/5xx on indexed URLs, missing canonical on tag/filter pages (Shopify generates infinite faceted URLs by default), broken hreflang on international stores, and orphaned product pages from discontinued SKUs that should 301 to a category.

Reconcile Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart gross sales down to net (less returns, marketplace fees, payment processor fees, chargebacks). Marketplace gross often masks 15-30% in fees; comparing channels on gross alone overstates marketplace contribution.

Build a per-SKU contribution view: net price minus COGS, freight, picking, packaging, and SKU-attributable ad spend. The 80/20 rule almost always applies — flag the bottom 20% by margin contribution for kill, repricing, or repositioning before next quarter's PO.

Compare AOV and UPT against the prior month and the same month last year. Quantify incremental lift on each promo run — many 'successful' BOGO and sitewide-discount events show high gross revenue but negative incrementality once you back out the cohort that would have purchased anyway at full price.

The Director of E-commerce reviews the consolidated report, captures the headline decision, attaches the PDF or deck, and notes any cross-functional asks (inventory, finance, dev, creative) that should land on next month's planning call.