Prooflytics
Marketing Analytics Blog
Benchmarks, attribution frameworks, and platform guides for performance marketers. How to diagnose, decide, and act — without the dashboard fatigue.
Two Teams, One Metric Name, Two Numbers: Where the Gap Actually Comes From
When two people report different figures for the same named metric, the instinct is to look for a broken integration. Usually nothing is broken. There are three specific definitional gaps that produce this, and each one needs a different fix.
- Operations
Your Tracking Plan Was Written for Product Analytics. Marketing Needs a Different One.
Every tracking plan template you can download specifies event names and properties, because they were all written for product teams instrumenting a feature. A team buying media and attributing revenue has to specify four more things, and none of them appear on those templates.
7 min read - Operations
Why Deduplicating Leads on Email Alone Loses Most of Your Matches
Most deduplication is built on one key: the email address. For a large share of businesses that key is missing on the majority of their contacts, so the dedup silently does nothing. Here is what a second key changes, and why formatting breaks matching more often than missing data does.
6 min read - Operations
No Connector for Your Data Source? Send It as a Webhook Instead
Connector catalogues cover the popular platforms and stop. For the in-house tool, regional ad network, or offline system nobody built an integration for, an inbound webhook is the practical answer - and it has one advantage a connector does not.
6 min read - Creative
When to Kill an Ad Creative: Stages Beat Rules of Thumb
"Give it 1,000 impressions" is not a decision rule - it is a delay. A creative is always in one of five states, and only two of them call for action. Here is how to classify a creative before deciding its fate.
6 min read - Attribution
When GA4's Default Channel Grouping Puts Your Traffic in the Wrong Bucket
GA4 assigns every session to a channel using fixed rules you cannot edit, and any source that does not match them lands in Unassigned. Here is why the default grouping mislabels real traffic, and what a custom grouping actually fixes.
6 min read - Analytics
Email Sender Reputation: Why One Bad Campaign Can Hurt Every Send After It
Sender and domain reputation are scored continuously by mailbox providers based on recipient behavior, and a single high-complaint send can suppress deliverability for every campaign that follows - not just the one that caused it. Here is what actually drives the score and how to recover once it drops.
6 min read - Analytics
GA4 to BigQuery Export: What a Marketer Actually Needs to Know (Without Writing SQL)
BigQuery export solves GA4's two-month retention problem and gives raw, unsampled event data - but marketers usually delegate the technical setup and then can't evaluate whether it's actually working. Here is what to check without needing to write a query yourself.
6 min read - Analytics
Ad Viewability Standards: Why 50% Visible for 1 Second Counts as "Viewed"
The industry-standard viewability bar for a display ad is 50% of its pixels visible for just one second - a threshold most marketers have never checked their own campaigns against. Here is what the standard actually requires and why a high viewability rate still isn't the same as attention.
6 min read - Platform
LinkedIn Matched Audiences: The B2B Targeting Feature Most Accounts Half-Configure
LinkedIn Matched Audiences can retarget website visitors, match uploaded contact lists, and target by company - but each source has its own minimum size threshold and refresh behavior most B2B accounts never fully account for. Here is what actually needs to be configured for each type to work.
6 min read - Platform
Google Ads Auction Insights: What Overlap Rate and Outranking Share Actually Tell You
Auction Insights shows six metrics most marketers glance at without reading correctly - overlap rate and outranking share get confused with each other constantly. Here is what each one actually measures and the specific competitive read each is built for.
6 min read - Attribution
UTM Parameters Are Case-Sensitive in GA4 - Here Is How That Silently Fragments Your Channel Reports
"Facebook" and "facebook" register as two different traffic sources in GA4. No error, no warning - the same real channel just quietly splits into multiple rows in every report. Here is how to catch it and enforce consistent casing going forward.
6 min read - Platform
Meta Advantage+ Trades Reporting Granularity for Performance - Here Is What You Actually Lose
Advantage+ campaigns let Meta's algorithm handle audience, placement, and creative decisions in one consolidated structure, which often improves results - but it also removes the segment-level reporting breakdown marketers previously used to explain why. Here is what that trade actually costs.
6 min read - Operations
Who Actually Owns Your Ad Account? The Agency Handoff Question Most Clients Never Ask
When an agency creates and owns a client's ad account instead of the other way around, switching agencies can mean losing years of conversion history and audience data overnight. Here is how to check who actually owns the account, and how to fix it without disrupting a live campaign.
6 min read - Analytics
GA4's Data Retention Setting Is Probably Deleting Your Data at 2 Months
GA4's event-level data retention defaults to 2 months, and most properties never get it changed to the 14-month maximum. Here is exactly what that setting controls, what it does not affect, and why the gap goes unnoticed until someone needs a year-over-year Exploration report.
6 min read - Analytics
Why Your Marketing Numbers Don't Match Across Platforms (It's the Timezone)
A campaign reporting 50 conversions in one platform and 47 in another isn't necessarily a tracking bug - each platform may be attributing the same conversions to a different calendar day. Here is how to find and fix a timezone mismatch before it wastes an afternoon of investigation.
6 min read - Analytics
Server-Side Google Tag Manager: The Setup Mistakes That Break Tracking Silently
A server-side GTM container fixes real signal-loss problems, but a broken setup fails quietly - dashboards keep showing numbers, they are just wrong ones. Here are the mistakes that cause that, and how to actually verify a server container is working.
6 min read - Platform
What Actually Resets the Smart Bidding Learning Phase (and What Doesn't)
Google does not publish a complete official list of what restarts the Smart Bidding learning phase, which is exactly why teams keep triggering it by accident. Here is what reliably resets it, what usually does not, and how to make a change without losing a week of performance.
6 min read - Platform
Meta Pixel and Conversions API Event Deduplication: How to Set It Up Correctly
Running Meta's Pixel and Conversions API together without deduplication double-counts every conversion both systems capture. Here is exactly which fields have to match, the 48-hour matching window, and how to verify it is actually working.
6 min read - Attribution
Third-Party Cookie Deprecation: The Actual 2026 Status (Not What You Heard in 2021)
Google abandoned forced third-party cookie deprecation in July 2024 and shifted to a user-choice model instead - cookies still technically work, but a shrinking, self-selecting audience keeps them enabled. Here is what that actually means for measurement.
6 min read
