Practical guides on diagnosing ad and store performance — written from the same methodology KPIHelm uses.
Usually because the clicks are not the visits you think they are, or because the people behind them were never in a buying mood — TikTok sells attention cheaply, and a cheap click from someone mid-scroll is worth less than it looks. Check, in this order, that the clicks really reach your store, that the campaign is told to find buyers, that there are enough clicks to judge, and that the page continues what the video promised.
Read the article$20 a day is enough to find out whether an ad can sell — if all of it goes into one campaign and one sale costs you a few days of budget, not a few weeks. Decide when to stop in money, not in days: work out before you start what a customer is allowed to cost you, and judge once the ad has spent two to three times that amount.
Read the articleBecause the two count different things at different moments: Meta counts a tap on your ad, Shopify counts a visit only once its own code has run on a page that actually loaded — and between those two moments people leave, pages stall, and browsers or consent banners stop the counting. Some gap is normal; what matters is whether yours is stable or suddenly grew, and whether your sales moved with it.
Read the articleUsually one of two very different things: people really are leaving between cart and checkout — most often because of a cost or a step they did not expect — or they are not leaving at all, and your checkout event simply is not reaching the ad platform. Check the tracking first, because it decides which of the two problems you are about to fix.
Read the articleNo more than the margin that customer brings you — the first order plus what they buy again — within a window you can finance. Measure it per channel, and count new customers from your store, not from the ad platforms.
Read the articleOpen the ad platform and it reports one number. Open Shopify and it reports another, usually smaller, sometimes by half. The instinct is to decide which one is broken and trust the other — and that instinct is the actual problem, because the two numbers were never measuring the same thing. One answers "did my ad contribute to a sale?"; the other answers "what did the store record?" Both can be right at once, and a store that picks the wrong one for a given decision will misprice, misjudge a channel, or move budget for a reason that doesn't exist. This guide explains where the gap comes from, which number belongs to which decision, and how to tell an ordinary gap from one that just changed meaning. If the underlying problem is that your ROAS fell, start with [Your ROAS dropped on Shopify](https://kpihelm.com/en/blog/roas-dropped-shopify).
Read the articleA blended ROAS is an average, and an average is the one number that cannot show a split. It takes everything you spent across every platform, divides it into everything those platforms say they earned, and returns a single figure that describes no channel you actually run. When one channel is strong enough, that figure sits comfortably above your break-even while another quietly burns cash underneath it. Nothing looks wrong — because the winning channel is paying for the losing one, and the average has no way to say so. This guide is about finding the channel the average is hiding. If your ROAS has visibly fallen, that is a different diagnosis: start with [Your ROAS dropped on Shopify](https://kpihelm.com/en/blog/roas-dropped-shopify). If it looks healthy and the month still leaves no money, the cause may be margin rather than channels — that is [Your ROAS looks healthy. So why is there no money at the end of the month?](https://kpihelm.com/en/blog/break-even-roas-shopify).
Read the articleROAS answers exactly one question: how much revenue an ad brought back for what you spent on it. It says nothing about how much of that revenue you kept. Two stores can run the same campaign at the same 3x ROAS and finish the month in opposite places, because everything that decides profit — what the goods cost, what shipping costs, what comes back as a return — happens where the ad platform cannot see it. This guide works out the ROAS *your* store actually needs, and what to check when sales look active and the bank balance doesn't move. If the problem is that ROAS itself fell, that is a different diagnosis — start with [Your ROAS dropped on Shopify](https://kpihelm.com/en/blog/roas-dropped-shopify).
Read the articleA falling ROAS is not a diagnosis — it's a symptom. ROAS is a ratio between what you spend on ads and what your store earns from them, which means it drops for two very different families of reasons: acquiring a visitor got more expensive, or a visitor became worth less after the click. Fixing the wrong side wastes weeks. This guide walks through the same split-first method KPIHelm uses to find where the money is actually leaking.
Read the article