Prooflytics
Marketing Analytics Blog
Benchmarks, attribution frameworks, and platform guides for performance marketers. How to diagnose, decide, and act — without the dashboard fatigue.
- Analytics
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.
6 min read - 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
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 - 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 - 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
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
