What do the cards on the Summary dashboard mean?
The store-wide cards explained, from Blended ROAS and Total Sales to the Channels chart, Cost Breakdown and Top Creatives.
How to read a card
A card has a title, a big number and, on most cards, a chart of how the number moved over your date range. Some cards also show the value of the comparison period with a green or red percentage. See How do I compare with the previous period?. Hover over the title to read a short explanation. On full-size cards, a small info icon next to the title shows that the card has one. Small cards have no info icon, but hovering their title works the same way, and they show the same number with a smaller chart.
Charts show one point per day. On full-size cards, with a date range of 30 days or more each point covers 3 days, and from 60 days each point covers 7 days. Hover over a point to see its dates, for example Sep 1 - Sep 3 (3 days), and the average per day. On cards that show a ratio, such as ROAS, CPA or AOV, a grouped point adds up the daily values, so it is several times higher than the big number; compare the average per day instead. With one day picked, such as Today or Yesterday, the chart shows hours, and that day's ad spend is spread evenly over them. A dashed line on a chart is the total or the average, and the solid lines break it down, for example by ad platform.
Numbers under 100 show up to two decimals and larger numbers are rounded to whole numbers. On full-size cards, hover over the store icon next to the title, which is the Shopify or WooCommerce logo on those stores, to read Based on your store data.
Attribution is how TrueROAS decides which ad or channel gets credit for a sale. "Blended" and "Total" cards use every order of your store, whatever the channel, but each one adds up a different set of ad spend and costs. See Which ad spend and costs does each Dashboard card add up?. For the cards of one ad platform, see What do the Meta, Google and TikTok cards mean?.
Many of these cards are not on the standard Summary dashboard. You add them from Available Metrics, where some have a different name. See Which cards are on the standard Summary, Meta, Google and Tiktok dashboards? and What is each card called in Available Metrics?.
Store-wide numbers
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Blended ROAS / POAS | Two numbers, both starting with x. ROAS divides Total Sales by your ad spend and your Custom Costs from Cost Manager added together. POAS is profit on ad spend: Total Sales minus your order costs and Custom Costs, divided by your ad spend. POAS is green from 1 and red below. When there are no costs to use, Add cost takes the place of POAS; when the costs are estimated, est. follows it. |
| Blended CPA | Your ad spend and Custom Costs added together, divided by Total Orders and rounded to a whole amount. When some orders came from new customers, the title reads Blended CPA / New CPA and a second number after the slash divides the same amount by new customers only. Without orders it shows 0. |
| Blended AOV | Average order value. Total Sales divided by Total Orders, rounded to a whole amount. |
| Blended Ad Spend | Spend from Meta Ads, Google Ads and TikTok Ads, plus any spend you entered by hand in Cost Manager. See How do I add ad spend from a platform TrueROAS can't connect to?. |
| Total Sales | Revenue of every order TrueROAS tracked in your store in the date range, converted to your store's currency. Whether tax and shipping are included, and whether refunds are taken off, depend on your store settings. See Does TrueROAS include tax and shipping in my sales?, Can TrueROAS take refunds off my sales? and Which currency and time zone do my numbers use?. |
| Total Orders | The number of those orders. |
| Blended CAC | Customer acquisition cost. All ad spend divided by the number of new customers, or 0 when there are none. The chart estimates each day's new customers from the share of new customers over the whole date range. |
| Blended MER | Marketing efficiency ratio. Total Sales divided by your ad spend. Next to it, a Meta icon and a Google Ads icon each show Total Sales divided by that platform's spend alone; hover over them to read Meta MER or Google MER. Each appears only when that platform has spend, and its arrow compares the second half of your date range with the first half, pointing up or down only when the change is 20% or more. |
| Blended Profit | Total Sales minus your ad spend, your order costs and your Custom Costs. |
| Blended POAS | Blended Profit divided by your ad spend. Why it breaks even at a different value than the POAS on Blended ROAS / POAS is explained in Which ad spend and costs does each Dashboard card add up?. |
| Contribution Margin | What your sales leave after order costs, percentage costs and ad spend, as an amount and as a share of revenue. Green from 0 and red below. |
| Marginal ROAS | An estimate of the return on the last money you spent, worked out from how daily sales moved with daily spend. It shows Not enough spend variation when the date range has fewer than 3 days, which is always the case for Today and Yesterday, when the spend barely changed, when sales did not move with spend, or when the estimate comes out above three times your average return on ad spend. The chart shows a rolling 7-day estimate and drops to 0 on days without a reliable one. |
| Events Manager Uplift | A rough estimate of the extra revenue Meta can see because Meta CAPI sends your orders from the server. It is an estimate based on your sales, not a measured number. Without Meta CAPI the card reads Set up your Events Manager to unlock revenue uplift and opens Events Manager. See What is Events Manager and what can I do there?. |
Profit numbers subtract your order costs, which you set in Cost Manager, under Setup in the left menu. Which costs a profit number uses, and what est. and Add cost next to it mean, is explained in How do I set my break-even ROAS and use it instead of product costs?. To enter your costs, see How do I add my product costs in Cost Manager?, How do I import product costs from Shopify or a spreadsheet? and How do I add monthly costs like apps, rent or payment fees?.
Tables and charts
| Card | What it shows |
|---|---|
| The customers ring | A ring without a title, with the share of orders from new customers in the middle. Under it, New and Returning show their share and number of orders, followed by Customers and your dates. Returning counts orders, not people: all orders minus the orders of new customers. It reads Loading... while it loads and No data when the period has no orders. |
| Sales Trend | Sales per source in the comparison period and in your date range, with an arrow, the change in percent, the two amounts and the difference. Only sources above 5% of the larger period's Total Sales are listed, so the rows do not add up to Total Sales. Gains come first with the biggest on top, then drops, and changes under 1% get a flat arrow. When no comparison period is loaded, the card shows only its headers. |
| Channels | A bar per source, longest first, with the sales of each. Sources under 1% of the total are left out. There is no Meta Ads bar: sales from Meta ads are split between the Facebook and Instagram bars, in proportion to their own sales. The bars follow sources, not the channels of the channel table, so they do not match its rows. Known sources show an icon and other names are cut after 14 characters; hover over a bar to see the source and its revenue. With no sales it shows a set of empty bars. |
| The channel table | One row per channel with spend, sales, profit, conversions, new customers, ROAS, CPA and AoV. See How do I read the channel table on the Dashboard?. |
| Cost Breakdown | A table without a title, with Cost Type, Amount and % of Revenue, in three groups: Ad Spend per platform, including spend you entered by hand under its own name, with an Ad Spend Total; Order Costs (Product Cost, Handling, Shipping, Payment Processing) with an Order Costs Total; and your Custom Costs with a Custom Costs Total. Total Costs sits at the bottom. When your order costs are estimated, a single Product costs row with est. replaces the four order cost rows. Without any costs it reads No costs recorded and Set up your product costs and business expenses in the Cost Manager to see a full breakdown here. |
| Recent Orders | Your last orders with where each customer came from. See How do I see the latest orders and where they came from?. |
| Top Creatives | Best performing Meta ads in the selected period: up to 10 creatives with Meta spend. Ads that share a creative are combined into one row under the first ad's name. Under Sales, ROAS and CPP, the TrueROAS figure (TrueROAS icon) sits above the figure Meta reports (Meta icon). The TrueROAS ROAS is green from 1 and red below, and CPP shows a dash without purchases. The list starts sorted by Spend, high to low. Click another header to sort by it, high to low, and click it again to flip the order; the 10 rows are chosen after sorting, so sorting by ROAS shows your 10 creatives with the highest ROAS. Creative cannot be sorted. A row opens Creative Lab on its Ad Performance tab, not that creative. See What is Creative Lab and what can I do there?. Without Meta it reads Connect Meta to see your top performing creatives., without a Meta ad account Select a Meta ad account to see your top creatives., and without spend No creatives with spend in this period. |
| Traffic Sources, Website Users by Traffic Source and Unique visitors and add to carts by ad platform | Visits and users per source, and unique visitors and add to carts per ad platform, from Google Analytics. See How do I show Google Analytics traffic on the Dashboard?. |
| TrueROAS vs Meta Ads, TrueROAS vs Google Ads, TrueROAS vs TikTok Ads | The sales TrueROAS tracked for that platform as the big number, with the sales the platform reports next to it, for example reported by Meta, and both drawn as lines. The green or red percentage compares the TrueROAS figure with the platform's own figure, not with the comparison period: a red -33.0% means TrueROAS tracked 33% less than the platform reports. Incremental Attribution changes the big number but not the lines. What the Meta and Google figures include is explained in Why don't my Dashboard Meta or Google sales match the Ads Manager?. |
Good to know
- Every card follows your date range. Incremental Attribution only moves sales between channels, so the numbers on Total Sales, Total Orders and the Blended cards stay the same with the switch on or off. See What is Incremental Attribution and how does it work?.
- Any card can be added to any dashboard, moved or removed. See How do I add, move, resize and remove cards on a dashboard?.
- Ad spend and other ad platform figures are converted to your store's currency, with a few exceptions. See What do the Meta, Google and TikTok cards mean?.
- A card shows 0 when there is no data, not an empty space.
- On a phone some cards show less. See How do I use the Dashboard on my phone?.
- You cannot change how a card is calculated or rename it.