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How Trellis Works

Catalyst Audit vs. Platform Dashboards

Why a Catalyst Audit gives you a clearer picture than Google Ads or Microsoft Ads dashboards alone.

For · Operators wondering what Trellis surfaces that Google or Microsoft Ads doesn’t
Time · 5 min read
Next · Testing timelines and evaluation windows

Ad platform dashboards show you what happened. A Catalyst Audit tells you what it means for your business, factoring your actual margins, your historical baseline, and verified conversion data into every finding.

The Short Version

  • Dashboards report revenue. Catalyst Audit adjusts for COGS, so you see which campaigns generate real margin, not just top-line sales.
  • Dashboards show the current period. Catalyst Audit compares against a historical baseline, flagging trend shifts you might otherwise miss.
  • Dashboards report conversions as the platform counted them. Catalyst Audit verifies those counts against your actual order data.
  • Dashboards are per-platform. Catalyst Audit normalizes data across every connected ad account into a consistent format while keeping each platform’s analysis independent.
  • Dashboards show current settings. Catalyst Audit tracks what changed over time, when it changed, and what impact the change had.

Revenue Tells Half the Story

When you open Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, the dashboard shows revenue, ROAS, and cost per conversion. These are useful numbers, but they leave out a critical variable: what those products actually cost you to produce and fulfill.

A campaign generating $5,000 in revenue at 3x ROAS looks healthy in the dashboard. But if that campaign is primarily driving sales of low-margin products (say, 30% gross margin), the actual gross profit after ad spend is thin. Meanwhile, a smaller campaign generating $2,000 at 2.5x ROAS on high-margin products (70% gross margin) could be contributing more real profit.

Catalyst Audit factors in your COGS to calculate profitability at the campaign level. Every campaign gets classified into a profitability tier: from strong performers worth scaling to unprofitable campaigns that need to be fixed or paused. This classification uses your actual margins, not an assumption.

Verified Conversions

Ad platforms self-report their conversion numbers. In most cases, these numbers are directionally accurate, but they’re not perfect.

Platform conversion tracking can over-count certain order types. For example, a platform may count both paid and organic shopping clicks as conversions when the attribution window overlaps. The actual over-count varies by platform and tracking configuration, but the gap is real and can distort CPA and ROAS calculations.

Catalyst Audit addresses this by reconciling platform-reported conversions against your actual order data. The audit compares what the ad platform says happened with what your store confirms happened. When there’s a meaningful gap, the audit flags it and adjusts the analysis accordingly.

When the gap is large (below 80% accuracy), the audit still produces its full set of recommendations but tags each affected one with the measured tracking accuracy so you can weigh how much to trust the underlying numbers. The report also raises a tracking-accuracy banner that walks through the most likely sources of the gap, so you can fix the root cause while acting on the analysis.

Baseline Comparison

A dashboard shows you this month’s numbers. It doesn’t tell you whether this month is better or worse than your historical norm.

Catalyst Audit compares the current audit period against a historical baseline, typically a prior year or quarter of performance data. This comparison surfaces trends that raw numbers miss:

  • A $25 CPA looks fine in isolation. But if your CPA was $18 six months ago, the 39% increase signals a problem worth investigating.
  • A 2.5x ROAS might seem below target. But if it’s steadily climbing from 1.8x three months ago, the trajectory is positive and a drastic intervention could derail the recovery.

Baseline comparison turns static metrics into a performance trajectory, making it easier to distinguish real problems from normal variance.

Change Tracking

Ad accounts are constantly evolving. Bid strategies change. Budgets shift. Keywords get added or paused. Match types are adjusted. Each of these changes can affect performance, but platforms only show you the current state, not the history of how you got there.

Catalyst Audit maintains a structured record of account changes over time. Each change entry includes what changed, when it changed, who initiated the change, and the measured impact on key metrics. That last piece is the one that makes the record useful.

This tracking serves two purposes in the audit:

Context for current performance. If a campaign’s CPA spiked last week, the changelog might show that a bid strategy change was made five days ago. The audit connects the dots: the spike is likely a learning period effect, not a permanent degradation.

Stabilization awareness. After a significant change (like a new bid strategy), the account needs time to stabilize. Catalyst Audit respects these stabilization periods and avoids recommending additional changes on top of recent ones that haven’t had time to settle. Layering changes on top of changes makes it impossible to know what’s working.

Cross-Platform Normalization

If you run ads on more than one platform, you’re looking at separate dashboards with different column names, different metric definitions, and different reporting structures. Comparing performance across platforms requires manual work.

Catalyst Audit normalizes the data from every connected ad account into a consistent format. Campaign names, spend, conversions, and revenue use the same structure regardless of where the data came from. This makes it possible to see your total advertising performance in one place.

Importantly, normalization is about readability, not about blending the analysis. Each platform is still analyzed independently. Recommendations for Google Ads are based on Google Ads data. Recommendations for Microsoft Ads are based on Microsoft Ads data. Auction dynamics, audience behavior, and cost structures differ between platforms, and mixing them produces misleading conclusions.

What Catalyst Audit Doesn’t Do

  • Catalyst Audit produces periodic performance reviews, not a real-time feed. It surfaces insight at audit time, not moment-to-moment.
  • It does not make changes to your ad accounts. It recommends actions; you decide when and whether to act.
  • It interprets performance data through your business economics, rather than replicating the raw metric views you already have access to.

The analogy: the dashboard is the instrument panel. Catalyst Audit is the performance audit that surfaces what the readings mean for your business, what’s changed over time, and what to do next.

What’s Next