The Challenge
A DTC fashion brand was spending $200K/month on paid acquisition but had no visibility into where customers were dropping off. Their 2.9% conversion rate was below industry average, and a 71% cart abandonment rate was hemorrhaging revenue. Leadership needed to understand the full customer journey from first touch to repeat purchase.
Key Business Questions
- Where exactly in the funnel are we losing the most customers?
- Which acquisition channels deliver the highest Customer Lifetime Value?
- How does cohort retention decay over time by channel?
- What is the true ROAS when factoring in repeat purchase behavior?
The Solution
We built a Customer Journey Analytics platform unifying GA4 event data, Shopify orders, and ad platform APIs into a single attribution model:
🔄 Conversion Funnel
Visual funnel tracking 1.25M visits → 312K cart adds → 109K checkouts → 47.5K purchases with stage-by-stage drop-off analysis.
📈 Cohort Retention
Monthly acquisition cohort heatmap showing retention decay from 25% Month 1 to 8% Month 9, identifying where lifecycle marketing should intervene.
💰 Channel Attribution
Revenue by channel: Organic ($1.8M), Direct ($1.5M), Email ($1.2M), Paid Search ($950K), Social ($600K) — enabling data-driven budget allocation.
🎯 CLV Modeling
$892 average Customer Lifetime Value with predictive scoring to identify high-value prospects before first purchase.
Dashboard Views
Technical Implementation
Data Architecture
BigQuery data warehouse with GA4 event streaming, Shopify webhook ingestion, and Meta/Google Ads API integration. Sub-hour refresh cycles.
Key Metrics
- Conversion Rate by Stage
- Average Order Value (AOV)
- Cart Abandonment Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value
Attribution Model
- Data-Driven Multi-Touch
- First-Touch vs Last-Touch
- Time-Decay Weighting
- Cross-Device Stitching
Integrations
Shopify Plus, Google Analytics 4, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Klaviyo (email), and Snowplow for custom event tracking.
The Results
"The cohort analysis showed us that email-acquired customers have 3x the LTV of paid social. We shifted $50K/month from Meta to Klaviyo flows and saw revenue increase 18% in 90 days."