E-commerce
How Verdant recovered $1.3M in wasted ad spend with server-side attribution
A DTC skincare brand was scaling paid social blind — Tensor's attribution layer showed exactly where the money was going, and where it wasn't.
PUBLISHED
READING TIME
6 min read
COMPANY SIZE
40–80 employees
PROJECT TYPE
Attribution & Reporting
CLIENT
Verdant
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Verdant is a direct-to-consumer skincare brand selling through Shopify and expanding into retail. As paid social spend grew past $180k a month, in-platform reporting from Meta and TikTok stopped agreeing with actual revenue.
Platform numbers that didn't match the bank account
Verdant's team was making six-figure monthly budget decisions off Meta and TikTok's self-reported ROAS — numbers that, after iOS 14.5, were increasingly disconnected from actual attributed revenue. Campaigns that looked profitable in-platform were quietly losing money, and the team had no way to tell which ones without a week-long manual reconciliation each month.
A server-side source of truth
Tensor deployed first-party, server-side tracking across Verdant's Shopify store and ad accounts, replacing platform-reported attribution with a single reconciled ledger. Budget rules were configured to reallocate spend automatically when a channel's real, verified ROAS dropped below target.
Spend that finally matched revenue
Within the first month, Verdant's real attributed ROAS on Meta came in 40% lower than platform-reported — reallocating that budget to what was actually converting recovered an estimated $1.3M annually. Reporting now takes minutes, not a week.
184%
increase in verified ROAS accuracy
$1.3M
wasted spend recovered annually
11 days
from audit to full deployment
We were flying blind on our own numbers. Tensor gave us a ledger we actually trust — and the budget moved itself once we could see clearly.
Priya Nandakumar
Head of Growth, Verdant
