01
Optimise for profit
Profit is the metric every decision runs on. Not vanity ROAS, the number that actually moves the business.
Ecommerce data agency
Ad platforms report growth the P&L never sees. V3 Signal reconciles every channel to real orders and margin, then runs paid social, search, SEO and CRM on the numbers that hold up. Built for DTC brands doing £1m to £10m a year.
FIG.01 · noise to signal
Why V3
01
Profit is the metric every decision runs on. Not vanity ROAS, the number that actually moves the business.
02
Measurable lift you can attribute. Every change tested, so the growth is real and repeatable.
03
A named analyst, backed by the V3 system, answers for every number. Accountable judgement, not a black box.
04
Data clean and structured enough to automate on. Ready for AI, not scrambling to catch up.
The problem
Your tools disagree by design.
Shopify records the sale, GA4 models it, and Meta and Google each claim the credit. A 15 to 30 percent gap between them is normal and permanent, the product of privacy rules, different attribution windows, and lost consent. Around one in five orders never reaches GA4 at all.
Budget still gets set on those numbers every week. Independent research puts the spend misallocated by platform-only attribution at close to a fifth of digital budget. The gap is not a bug to be fixed once. It is a distance to be measured, and stood behind.
The other half of the problem sits inside the ad accounts: campaign sprawl, inconsistent naming, missing UTMs and budgets that do not add up to what you were invoiced. You cannot allocate spend you cannot trace.
The concept
V3 is the three V's of big data, brought to ecommerce.
V3 brings enterprise big-data discipline to a growing ecommerce business: your first-party data engineered, warehoused, modelled and activated the way a corporate data team would, made usable and affordable for a £1m to £10m brand that cannot hire that team, with a named person translating it into profit and then acting on it. The name says it. Variety, volume, velocity, resolved into one Value.
The V3 framework · one decision system, marketing to operations
What V3 does
01
Meta, Google, GA4 and the CRM reconciled to real Shopify orders and margin. A fixed-fee written read on what to trust, and what the gaps cost.
02
Orders, spend, COGS, returns and shipping joined in a BigQuery warehouse the brand owns. Profit by channel, read monthly by a named analyst.
03
Paid social, search, SEO and CRM rebuilt to one account standard, then run against contribution margin. Or advised, alongside an agency.
04
Clean history turned into a sales, stock and cash forecast, with customer lifetime value setting what a new customer is worth paying for.
How the work flows
Collected, modelled, connected, run, measured.
The restructure
Tracking is half the problem. The other half is how accounts are built: mixed naming, missing UTMs, new and returning customers in one campaign, budgets that never match the invoice.
V3 rebuilds each account to one written standard, so every pound of spend maps to a line on the P&L. An existing agency can work to the same spec, and the numbers show whether it happened.
38→8
Sized to the budget, so every ad set gets enough sales each week for the platform to learn.
4→1
One convention, checked automatically every day, so every report groups spend the same way.
70%→100%
Every ad carries its tags at source. Consent still hides some clicks; that gap is measured.
Illustrative figures, typical of an account at the start of an engagement.
How it works
Built in layers, raw data to decision.
Every engagement builds the same stack. A clean first-party data foundation at the base, processed and connected through the middle, until the top layer is an insight you can act on. You own every level, in your own Google Cloud infrastructure, not rented back to you through someone else's tool.
Pricing
01Before any commitment
Step 1 · Free
£0
Thirty minutes. Last month's Shopify revenue next to what the platforms claimed, and the gap between them.
Book the free checkStep 2 · Fixed fee
£2,750
Two to three weeks. A written read on what to trust and what the gaps cost. Credited in full against onboarding.
Book the audit02Then a monthly retainer, at one of three depths
V1
from £1,200/mo
Clean data and a profit view. An existing agency keeps running the channels.
Includes
V2 · most chosen
from £2,500/mo
The data, plus Meta and Google run by V3 against margin. Where most brands start.
Everything in Foundation, plus
V3
from £4,000/mo
Every channel run on the numbers, plus a forecast for sales, stock and cash.
Everything in Growth, plus
Prices exclude VAT. Extra channels and markets are priced per channel.
For agencies
V3 builds and runs the data, tracking and reporting layer behind your client work, under your brand. An independent audit you can offer as reassurance, and a data operation you do not have to hire for. In a partner account V3 never takes the channels, so your client stays yours.
The deliverable, under your brand
Net profit
£128k ▲ 37%
nMER
4.2x ▲ 0.6
Contribution margin
38.4% ▲ 4.1pt
Revenue vs profit · 12 weeks
Engagement funnel
Where V3 sits
A data agency that also runs the channels.
| V3 | Channel agency | Data agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starts with | The P&L, reconciled to real orders | The ad accounts | The tracking |
| Runs the channels | Yes, on reconciled numbers | Yes, on platform-reported numbers | No, data and reporting only |
| Core metrics | Profit, POAS, nMER, contribution margin, LTV | ROAS, CPA, CTR | Attribution and data quality |
| Account structure | Rebuilt to one standard, mapped to the P&L | Set by the agency's own process | Usually out of scope |
| Marketing + trade data | Joined: marketing tied to stock, sales and operations | Mostly kept separate | Joined where the brief asks |
| Measured on | The P&L, including the channels V3 runs | Campaign performance | Data accuracy |
| Raw data and logic | In the brand's own warehouse | Inside platform and agency tools | Varies by provider |
| Who does the work | One senior lead, backed by the V3 engine | An account team | A data team |
Results
Fashion DTC · US paid media
+204%
DTC gross revenue
−76%
Acquisition cost
Brought in to find out why growth had stalled. Rebuilt US tracking and attribution, then ran the US paid channels on it.
Beverage DTC · CRM, social, search
+37%
Net profit, year on year
+97%
Repeat purchase rate
Hired to make marketing profitable. Joined CRM, paid social and trade data, then ran social and search against profit.
Why this matters now
As AI agents take on more of the doing and media buying automates, the edge is no longer who buys media best. It is who holds the cleanest, most accurate first-party data, and who can read it for profit.
Machines are fast, tireless, and have no idea when they are wrong. The scarce thing is the judgement to tell whether the data can be trusted, and a named person to answer for it when the budget moves. That is what V3 is built to do.
The human behind V3
V3 Signal is run by Phil McKeith, in ecommerce since 1999. Fourteen years agency-side, then nine as Head of Ecommerce: six at a London fashion brand, three at a health food brand in Germany. Since then, independent consultancy for DTC brands. He has sat on both sides of the table, so he knows how agencies present results, and what the person who owns the P&L actually needs.
It is why every number V3 hands you is reviewed by a named person, with its limits stated, not hidden. How V3 works →
Who V3 is for
£1m–£10m
Big enough for the data to matter, small enough for one senior person to make the difference.
£10k+
Where recoverable waste starts to cover the fee. Below it, the Data Audit alone is often enough.
2+
Two or more paid channels claiming the same sale is where the numbers start to drift apart.
5
A hard cap on retained clients, so the person on the first call is the person doing the work.
Questions
Not necessarily. Foundation works alongside an agency: V3 fixes the data, builds the profit view and hands over a written account spec. What happens next is up to the brand.
A 30-minute call. Bring last month's Shopify revenue and what Meta, Google and GA4 each reported. We show the gap, the likely causes and a rough cost. The number is yours either way.
Budget decisions run on the numbers. If they over-claim by 20 to 30 percent, optimising the ads optimises the wrong thing. The audit is fixed fee and credited if you carry on.
The brand does. Everything is built in its own Google Cloud and BigQuery, and ad accounts stay in its name. If the work ends, all of it stays put.
It can reset platform learning for a few weeks and break year-on-year comparisons. So it is phased channel by channel, with what to expect set out in writing first.
One senior lead answers for every number, backed by the V3 engine: automated pipelines, monitoring and a written standard, plus vetted specialists for overflow.
Shopify and Shopify Plus, GA4, Google Tag Manager including server-side, Meta, Google Ads, Search Console and BigQuery. CRM: Klaviyo, Omnisend and Mailchimp.
Each retainer starts with a one-off onboarding: the accounts rebuilt to the standard, the data pipelines built, and a 12-month profit baseline. It is scoped after the Data Audit, and the audit fee is credited against it in full.
Start here
Thirty minutes, one number: the gap between what the ad platforms claimed last month and what Shopify actually banked.
About a minute. No logins or access needed.
A reply within one working day, with a few slots.
Thirty minutes on a call. The number is yours to keep.