Setting Up Your Business Profile

For · Operators with platforms connected, before their first audit
Time · 6 min read
Next · What’s required for optimal audits

Your business isn’t generic, so your audit shouldn’t be either. A Catalyst Audit reads your actual margins, targets, and seasonal patterns before writing a single recommendation. The difference between useful advice and noise is whether the system knows that your break-even CPA is $34 or $72, that Q4 is your peak season, or that your repeat purchase rate changes the math on acquisition cost.

The Short Version

New users walk through a guided onboarding wizard that captures your business economics, platform connections, and financial targets in one flow.
Platform connections give Trellis API access to your ad accounts and let you set per-platform financial targets.
Your business profile defines company-level economics and customer lifetime value inputs.
COGS data (admin) takes your audit precision from “good enough” to exact: product-level cost data means margin calculations use real numbers, not estimates.

The Onboarding Wizard

When you first sign in, Trellis walks you through a structured onboarding flow. This isn’t a formality; the data you enter here directly shapes every audit recommendation you’ll receive.

The wizard has six steps.

Business Profile. Your company name, business model, and industry context. Gives Trellis baseline framing for your vertical. An outdoor gear retailer with $120 average orders operates differently from a pet products shop averaging $28.
Product Economics. Your average order value and blended gross margin. The blended margin is the fallback Trellis uses for every campaign when product-level COGS isn’t uploaded, so getting it close to correct matters even if you plan to add SKU-level data later.
Financial Targets. Your target CPA, target ROAS, and primary scoring metric (CPA or ROAS). These are the numbers Trellis evaluates campaign performance against. A campaign returning 2.1× ROAS reads as underperforming if your target is 3.0×, profitable if your break-even is 1.5×.
Platforms. Connect your Google Ads and/or Microsoft Ads accounts via OAuth. You can skip and connect later in Settings > Integrations.
Reporting. Audit frequency, report format, and notification preferences. Seeds your initial audit schedule, which you can adjust anytime.
Review. A summary of everything you’ve entered. Confirm and save. You can change any of these settings later. Nothing is locked in.

Connecting Platforms

Navigate to Settings > Integrations to manage your ad platform connections.

Click Add Platform and choose Google Ads or Microsoft Ads. You’ll need your account ID (visible in the platform’s UI) and will authorize Trellis through the platform’s OAuth flow.

Once connected, you configure per-platform financial targets. These can differ from your company-level defaults because platform economics often vary. Your Google Ads campaigns might target a $25 CPA while Microsoft Ads runs at $32 due to different audience composition. The per-platform fields include:

Average Order Value: Platform-specific AOV if it differs from your company average.
Gross Margin: Platform-specific margin percentage.
Target CPA: What you’re aiming for on this platform.
Target ROAS: Your return target for this platform.
Monthly Budget: Your planned monthly spend, used for pacing analysis.
Primary Metric: Whether this platform is scored against CPA or ROAS.
Max CPA Ceiling: The absolute maximum you’ll tolerate per acquisition. Anything above this gets flagged as critical.

These per-platform settings override your company-level defaults for audit analysis on that specific platform. If you leave a field blank, the company default applies.

Business Profile Settings

Navigate to Settings > Business Profile for company-level configuration. This is where you maintain the economics that apply across all platforms.

Company Economics

Your baseline financial metrics: average order value, blended gross margin, break-even CPA, and target ROAS. These serve as defaults when per-platform values aren’t set, and they’re used in cross-platform comparison views.

CLV Calculator

Two inputs drive the customer lifetime value calculation:

Repeat purchase rate: What percentage of customers buy more than once. For example, a pet products store might see 60% repeat rates on consumables, while a home decor shop might sit at 25%.
Average order frequency: How many times a repeat customer orders over their lifetime. Combined with repeat rate and AOV, this produces a lifetime value estimate that changes how Trellis evaluates acquisition costs.

A customer worth $150 lifetime justifies a very different first-order CPA than a customer worth $45.

Product Costs (Admin)

Navigate to Settings > Product Costs to upload your COGS data. This section is available to admin users.

COGS data is what takes your audit from “approximately profitable” to “here’s the exact contribution margin on that campaign.” Without it, Trellis uses your blended gross margin for everything. With it, Trellis can tell you that your best-performing campaign is actually your least profitable because it’s selling low-margin products.

Upload Formats

You can upload cost data as CSV, JSON, or Excel. The file maps product SKUs to their cost of goods. Shopify customers can also opt into a monthly automatic COGS refresh via the Shopify connection (which reads inventory unit cost). CSV uploads are one-time snapshots that persist until re-uploaded.

How Trellis Picks Which Margin to Use

Catalyst Audit resolves margin through a fallback chain; the most precise source available wins. From most precise to least:

SKU-level COGS: A per-product cost file (CSV or Shopify GraphQL refresh). Trellis joins this against your order data on SKU, giving you exact contribution margin per campaign, ad group, and keyword.
Per-platform override: A gross margin you’ve set on Settings > Integrations for a specific ad account. Useful when one platform’s product mix structurally differs from your blended company average.
Company blended margin: The single percentage you entered in the Business Profile. The default fallback when no platform override or SKU-level data is present.

Without SKU-level COGS, Trellis still produces audits, but the margin lens is the blended one, and contribution-margin claims are tagged as such. Adding the SKU-level data is what takes the audit from “approximately profitable” to “exact contribution margin on that campaign.”

Coverage Tracking

After uploading, Trellis shows you what percentage of your products have COGS data. If 80% of your SKUs have COGS data but the remaining 20% account for 40% of revenue, your margin calculations still have a significant gap. The coverage display helps you prioritize which SKUs to add next.

Why This Matters

Without accurate business metrics, audit recommendations are based on assumptions, and assumptions compound. A 5% error in your margin estimate shifts your break-even CPA, which changes which campaigns look profitable, which changes every recommendation that follows.

Trellis is built to prevent this. It requires configured metrics before generating recommendations. It won’t silently fall back to industry averages or default values. If a required metric is missing, the audit tells you what’s needed rather than guessing. This is a deliberate design choice: no recommendation is better than a wrong one.

What’s Next

Running Your First Audit: Now that your profile is configured, run your first Catalyst Audit and see how your economics shape the analysis.
Reading Your Audit Report: Understand the report structure, quality scores, and how to act on recommendations.