procedure

Connect your analytics

Connecting is easy. Verifying is the part that matters.

The responded verb reads outcomes from analytics you already own — Plausible or GA4 — through a token you supply, matched to the campaign on an immutable UTM key. Connecting takes minutes. What takes longer, and what determines whether the data can be labelled observed rather than merely present, is verification: a human-verified dossier bound to the site and revision, and a known goal and revenue total reconciled before the source counts.
steps
5
roughly
Thirty minutes, plus verification
things needed first
3
before you start

What you need first

  • Admin access to your analytics property
  • A stats API token, and for Plausible the site identifier and its timezone
  • A landing page URL that will not change, because it becomes the campaign's immutable click destination
the procedure

5 steps

Every step carries the thing that goes wrong at it, in its own block. That is the part worth reading.

  1. step 01

    Save the credentials

    Enter the site identifier, the timezone and the stats API token on the connections screen. Credentials are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and are never returned by an API read.

    what goes wrong here

    For Plausible the timezone must be exactly Europe/London for the current reporting contract. A mismatch produces silently wrong day boundaries.

  2. step 02

    Fix the landing page before approving the plan

    The plan's landing page becomes the campaign's immutable HTTPS click destination and its analytics identity. It cannot be changed afterwards.

    what goes wrong here

    URLs containing embedded credentials are rejected outright rather than passed to a provider or a browser.

  3. step 03

    Let the campaign key be appended

    One non-blank campaign UTM key is preserved if you supply it; otherwise the campaign identifier is appended before the fragment without rewriting existing query bytes.

    what goes wrong here

    Blank, duplicate or brand-reused keys block approval, because two campaigns sharing a key make both unmeasurable.

  4. step 04

    Verify the goal exists, independently

    Check in your analytics that the goal display name you configured actually exists, before interpreting any number that comes back.

    what goes wrong here

    The stats API cannot enumerate configured goals. Its query echo proves only that your exact display-name filter ran, so a zero may mean no conversions or may mean no such goal.

  5. step 05

    Reconcile before trusting it

    Reconcile a known period's unique visitors, an exact configured goal display name, and revenue through the campaign selector's immutable key.

    what goes wrong here

    Until that reconciliation is done and bound to the site revision, the source is connected but not verified, and the distinction is the whole point of the provenance labelling.

what you end up with

Brand response measured on data you own and can audit, labelled observed rather than attributed.

other procedures

What else you might need to do

45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.

Talk it through

Questions

Does connecting analytics prove the media worked?

No. It produces observed response: something that genuinely happened on a property you own, correlated with the campaign by an immutable key. That is one of four measurement verbs and it is explicitly not a causal claim — the payload says so in its own note. Establishing that the media caused the response requires a powered geo-lift test, which is a separate verb with a separate gate.