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Getting Started with Trellis

What Trellis does, how your dashboard works, and where to find everything.

Getting Started with Trellis

For · Anyone who just signed up and wants the lay of the land
Time · 5 min read
Next · Account setup checklist

Trellis is an insight layer that connects ad spend to real business economics. Most ad platforms tell you what happened (impressions, clicks, conversions), but they leave you to figure out whether any of it actually cleared contribution margin. Trellis bridges that gap. Its Catalyst Audit interprets your ad data through the lens of your actual margins, targets, and historical performance, then delivers scored recommendations you can act on in your ad platform.

The Short Version

  • Trellis augments your ad platforms, it doesn’t replace them. You won’t find bid controls or keyword editors here. You’ll find the cross-platform contribution-margin analysis and change detection that Google and Microsoft don’t surface.
  • Every recommendation is grounded in your business economics. Break-even ROAS, contribution margin, and cost of goods all come from your real numbers, not industry averages.
  • A Health Score (0-100) summarizes your account at a glance. It rolls up margin, attribution, and platform mix, weighted by spend, so you know where to focus.
  • Change detection tracks what moved and why. Trellis logs budget shifts, bid strategy changes, and new campaigns, then connects them to performance shifts in your audit reports.
  • Cross-platform comparison without the spreadsheet. Every connected ad account is analyzed independently and presented with consistent economics, so you can see all your paid spend in one place.

The Dashboard

When you log in, the dashboard opens on Account health: a single-screen snapshot of how your paid spend is performing, weighted across every connected platform.

Hero KPI Strip

Four metrics anchor the top of the dashboard, each with a period-over-period delta and a link to the audit that backs the number:

  • Attributed Revenue. Revenue from orders attributed to paid ad clicks during the active window.
  • Contribution Margin. Attributed revenue × your gross margin, minus ad spend. The figure Trellis treats as the canonical “did this work” metric.
  • Blended ROAS. Attributed revenue divided by spend, blended across every connected platform.
  • Spend. Total ad spend in the active window, pulled directly from your ad accounts.

The Health Score badge sits alongside these, linking to the Trends page for the longitudinal view.

Longitudinal Chart

A full-width chart shows your account’s trajectory between the first and last audit inside the active window (30, 60, 90, or 180 days). It’s a straight line between anchor points, not a per-audit cadence spike, so a single high-variance audit run doesn’t read as a shift.

Today’s Findings

A condensed strip surfaces the most actionable items from your most recent audit. Each item links back to the rec in the audit report.

Platform snapshot + Next actions

Side-by-side panels:

  • Platform Snapshot. A row per connected platform showing windowed spend, revenue, ROAS, and contribution margin. A period pill above the table lets you change which audit anchors the snapshot.
  • Next actions. The top recommendations from your latest Catalyst Audit, ready for review.

Outstanding gates + Impact

  • Outstanding gates. Confidence gates the audit pipeline flagged but did not auto-resolve.
  • Impact. What happened after each change you recorded, measured against your own account history. Included with Pro.

Audit Cadence + Health Score About

At the bottom of the dashboard:

  • Audit Cadence Strip. Visual cadence of your recent audits and the gap to the next one.
  • About the Health Score. A short disclosure explaining how the composite score is built. Not Google’s Quality Score; Trellis’s own account-health composite.

The left rail is a flat list of seven items:

  • Dashboard. The Account Health view described above.
  • Audits. Your audit history, with filters for platform, date range, and status. Launch new audits and read completed reports here.
  • Campaigns. Cross-platform campaign analytics, classified by strategic role.
  • Changelog. A record of platform changes, account modifications, and prior recommendations linked to their measured outcomes.
  • Datamart. Your first-party order data and attribution health, including upload status and freshness.
  • Trends. Longitudinal Health Score and KPI trajectory across audits.
  • Wiki. You’re here. Documentation and guides.

Settings

Settings open in a four-group side rail:

  • Account. Your personal profile and notification preferences.
  • Workspace. Business Profile (margin, AOV, targets), Members, and audit Schedules.
  • Data. Ad-platform Integrations, Order Data uploads, and Product Costs (your COGS catalog).
  • Billing. Plan & Usage, Credits, and Invoices.

Some items inside Workspace and Data are admin-only or feature-gated (for example, recurring Schedules require a tier that includes scheduled audits). Items you don’t have access to are hidden from the rail.

A Note on What Trellis Doesn’t Do

Trellis is read-only with respect to your ad accounts. It pulls data for analysis but never modifies bids, budgets, or campaign settings. Every recommendation is something you evaluate and execute in the ad platform’s own interface. This is deliberate: letting tools push bid changes without human review has a track record of causing expensive problems.

Trellis also doesn’t duplicate what you can already see in one click inside Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. If a metric is readily available in the platform UI, Trellis won’t repackage it. The value is in the layer above: connecting that metric to your margins, comparing it across platforms, detecting when something changed and what it cost you.

What’s Next