UK subscription supplements brand
67 days with GA4 recording nothing while the store traded; renewal median click age 119 days against 0 for new orders.
Read the case: 67 Days of Zero Purchases in GA4, and Nobody NoticedTracking & attribution engineeringClient work
Subscription Renewals Counted as New Customers: Tracking Audit for Subscription Brands
A read-only audit that separates subscription renewals from new customers, because ad platforms bid on renewals as if they were acquisitions.
- For
- Subscription DTC brands
- Checked
Sounds familiar?
Tick what applies to you
How I solve it
What I build
I build a read-only audit that answers one question: of the conversions your ad platforms are counting, how many are genuinely new customers and how many are renewals. It starts with reproducible collectors against GA4, GTM, Meta, Google Ads, the Shopify orders and the storefront, and it produces a finding register where every claim has a re-verify command rather than a number you have to trust.
This is diagnosis, not a rebranding of a rebuild. The rebuild is a separate engagement, and the audit stands on its own — you can take it to your team or another specialist.
For how I would classify renewals from contract and payment evidence before deciding what GA4, Meta and Google Ads receive, read subscription renewals in GA4, Meta and Google Ads.
The process
How it works
6 steps. Scope and a fixed price are agreed before the first one.
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Read-only access, scoped
One store, one agreed problem, up to three agreed systems. The Health Check kickoff is at most 30 minutes.
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Collect reproducible evidence
Collectors pull from the platform APIs and write only derived facts, never secrets.
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Separate renewals from new
Compare the click age of renewals against new orders, and the share of new orders that carry no click id at all.
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Register the findings
Each finding gets a claim, the evidence, the impact and the command that re-proves it.
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Written verdict
The confirmed cause, or what stays unknown and how to verify it — kept apart from unconfirmed hypotheses.
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Options, not a single sales path
A vendor-independent database, a self-deploy route, or product analytics — priced separately if you want one built.
Handover
What you get
- A written verdict on how renewals are being counted as new acquisitions, with the evidence attached.
- A finding register where each finding carries its own re-verify command — 47 of them on the last subscription audit of this kind.
- A renewal-versus-new analysis, including the median click age on each side.
- An architecture answer you can hand to any team: vendor-independent, self-deployable, not locked to me.
- The audit as a standalone document. Implementation with me is optional.
Built with
- Shopify and its subscription app
- GA4
- GTM
- Meta
- Google Ads
- Node collectors
- Playwright
Proof
Done before, with dates and numbers
Client work Done for real clients. Client details are anonymised.
Before → after
On a UK subscription supplements brand, GA4 had recorded nothing from the store for 67 days while the store kept trading, with no alert anywhere; renewals showed a median click age of 119 days against 0 on new orders, and 44% of new orders carried no click id — audit delivered August 2026.
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Subscription-supplements audit, anonymised
the same renewal-versus-new analysis, redacted and reusable; it links from this page once rebranded.
He provided a fantastic audit with real insights and easy to understand terms for those of us who aren't as technical.
What you can look at
An anonymised subscription-supplements sample audit is prepared as a PDF, and a redrawn renewal-versus-new diagram accompanies this page. The sample is rebranded to this site before it links from here; both are rebuilt on synthetic or redacted data, and the figures below come from live platform reads.
Client details anonymised. Figures read from live platform APIs in August 2026. This is technical implementation, not legal or medical advice.
Price and timeline
What it costs and how it runs
The audit is a Tracking Health Check: USD 395, read-only, one store, one agreed problem, up to three agreed systems, with a written verdict two working days after the kickoff and confirmed access. The rebuild — if you want one — is a separate engagement: a Focused Fix from USD 450, or a Custom Engineering Project from USD 1,500. A licence or a diagnosis is never a discount on the other.
QuoteFixed before work starts
- Price
- Tracking Health Check USD 395 — read-only, one store, one agreed problem, up to three agreed systems. The rebuild, if you want it, is a Focused Fix from USD 450 or a Custom Engineering Project from USD 1,500.
- Timeline
- Health Check verdict: two working days after the kickoff and confirmed read-only access, Europe/Madrid, weekends excluded.
- First step
- Describe the task. I reply within one working day, free, and tell you which option fits — or that you can fix it yourself.
A note from Daniilbefore you decide
When you don’t need this
If your subscription app already separates new from returning cleanly in every platform you bid on, and someone would notice a week of zero purchases, you do not need this audit. Note also that tracking health and wellness brands has to work within Meta’s policies, not around them; where the problem is policy or media buying rather than measurement, this audit is the wrong tool. Health providers should take legal counsel first — this is technical implementation, not legal or medical advice.
— Daniil
Questions
What people ask about this
Is this only an audit, or do you fix it too?
The audit is the purchase. If you want the rebuild, that is a separate quote — and you are free to take the audit to your own team.
What access do you need?
Read-only: GA4, GTM, the ad platforms, Shopify orders and the subscription app. No passwords, and access is revoked at offboarding.
Which subscription apps does this cover?
The audit reads the orders and the events, so it is not tied to one app. What matters is whether the app or the theme tells the platforms apart from a new purchase.
How is a renewal different in the data?
Usually by click age and by whether the order carries a click id at all. A renewal credited to a 119-day-old click is the pattern this audit is built to expose.
Do I need a developer?
For the audit, no. For a rebuild, only if you choose to run it yourself — I can deliver and hand it over.
More like this
All situations
Have a task like this?
Describe your taskThe first answer is free, within one working day. Or write directly: next@taskfordaniel.com