If you run a store spending real money on paid media, you have probably seen Northbeam come up as the "serious" attribution tool. Below is a plain-language breakdown of what its dashboards actually show, what they cost, and the one question they leave you to answer yourself.
What Northbeam's ecommerce analytics dashboards are
Northbeam is a marketing-attribution and intelligence platform built for ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands spending seriously on paid media, according to SMB Guide's review. Its dashboards exist to answer one hard question: when a customer buys, which ad touch actually earned the credit?
To do that, Northbeam stitches together first-party site data with spend and conversion data from your ad channels. The dashboards then run multi-touch attribution (MTA) models — linear, clicks-only, and clicks-plus-views — to spread revenue credit across the touchpoints in a buyer's journey, per the same review.
The point is to replace three ad platforms all claiming the same sale with one shared view. That is a real problem worth solving, and it is why mid-market and larger brands reach for a tool like this instead of eyeballing Meta's and Google's own dashboards.
What the dashboards actually show
Northbeam's dashboard set clusters into a few views. Knowing which does what saves you from buying for a feature you will never open.
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) views
These are the core. An MTA dashboard shows each channel's attributed revenue and a Northbeam ROAS that usually sits below the inflated number the ad platform reports for itself. It also surfaces first-touch versus last-touch and halo effects — where, say, a Meta prospecting ad gets partial credit for a sale that closed on a branded Google search.
Media mix modeling (MMM)
MMM takes a top-down view: it models how total spend across channels moves total revenue, rather than following individual clicks. It is meant to catch the impact that click tracking misses, especially after signal loss from privacy changes. It is a forecasting and budget-planning lens, not a per-order one.
Creative analytics
This view ranks your actual ads and creatives — which hook, which image, which video held attention and drove conversions. For a store refreshing creative weekly, this is often the most-used dashboard.
Custom and saved dashboards
Northbeam lets teams build saved views and shared dashboards with role-based access, so a media buyer and a founder can standardize the metrics they look at. Useful when more than one person touches the ad accounts.
What Northbeam's dashboards cost
Pricing is tied to your site's traffic, not a flat seat fee. Northbeam runs three tiers: Starter at one thousand dollars a month for up to one million monthly pageviews, Professional at twenty-five hundred dollars a month for larger brands, and Enterprise at custom pricing for brands spending more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month on ads, according to SMB Guide's pricing breakdown.
That same review flags the trade-offs: there is no mobile app, support is email-only, and the pricing sits above competing tools, per SMB Guide. For a store doing a few thousand orders a month, a thousand-dollar monthly floor is a real line item — worth weighing against what the dashboards do and do not answer.
If you are comparing this category more broadly, our guide to ecommerce analytics and reporting platforms walks through how attribution tools, BI suites and operator tools divide the work.
Where attribution dashboards stop short
Here is the gap every attribution dashboard shares, Northbeam included: it is built around revenue and ad spend, not profit. ROAS is a top-line ratio. It says nothing about the blank garment, the print charge, the shipping label, the payment fee, or the return.
Attribution also fights a counting problem it can only partly solve. Ad platforms routinely over-report ROAS by two to three times compared with first-party click-based measurement, Polar Analytics found in its teardown of Shopify attribution. The biggest driver is cross-platform double-counting — their example: Meta claims 847 conversions and Google claims 623 for the same period, which looks like 1,470, but if 412 are the same customers your real count is closer to 1,058, per the same analysis.
A good attribution model narrows that gap. It still does not net out your costs. And a dashboard, however accurate, waits for you to do the math and then the work.
A worked example: reading the dashboard down to profit
Say you run a POD apparel store at 1,100 orders a month, a $38 average order value, so $41,800 in monthly revenue, with $11,000 split across Meta and Google. Your blended ROAS is $41,800 ÷ $11,000 = 3.8. On the dashboard that looks healthy.
Now walk one order down to the floor:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue (AOV) | $38.00 |
| − Product cost (blank + print) | −$15.00 |
| − Shipping | −$4.50 |
| − Payment processing (4%) | −$1.52 |
| = Contribution margin before ads | $16.98 |
| − Ad spend per order ($11,000 ÷ 1,100) | −$10.00 |
| = Profit per order after ads | $6.98 |
So that 3.8 ROAS is really about $6.98 of contribution profit per order — roughly 18% of revenue — before any fixed costs like software or your own pay. Translate ROAS to profit-on-ad-spend and the honesty shows: POAS = ROAS × gross-margin ratio = 3.8 × ($23 ÷ $38 = 0.61) = 2.3 on a gross-profit basis.
Your break-even ROAS here is 1 ÷ your contribution-margin ratio. At a 45% margin before ads that is 1 ÷ 0.45 = 2.2 — so a channel printing a 2.0 ROAS on the dashboard is quietly losing money, even though 2.0 looks like "twice my spend came back." That is the number attribution dashboards cannot color red for you, and it is the one that decides whether you scale or kill a campaign. Our breakdown of ecommerce performance analytics goes deeper on reading these ratios per channel.
From dashboards to decisions
This is the real divide: an analytics dashboard shows you the gap; it still leaves you to close it. You read the losing ad set, then you go into Meta and pause it. You read the thin-margin SKU, then you log into the store and reprice it.
PodVector AI closes that loop with Victor, an AI employee who does the work rather than drawing another chart. Victor connects to Shopify, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Printify, Printful, Gelato and Klaviyo, so he sees every order, every ad dollar and every supplier cost together — which lets him compute the true per-order profit behind each product, not just its ROAS. Because the product cost from Printify, Printful or Gelato is known before the first sale, that profit number is right from order one.
Then Victor acts inside those accounts. He pauses the ad set bleeding below break-even, shifts budget toward the campaigns clearing your target margin, reprices the thin-margin SKUs, and builds and sends the Klaviyo flow that lifts repeat revenue. He delivers the profit report to your Google Drive and drafts the customer-support email when an order goes sideways. Victor is not a dashboard — he is the operator who reads the numbers and makes the change.
For the bigger picture on how these pieces fit, start with our hub on ecommerce business intelligence.
If you want the profit math and the follow-through handled instead of charted, see what Victor does with your store.
FAQs
What is Northbeam used for?
Northbeam is a marketing-attribution and intelligence platform for ecommerce and DTC brands. Its dashboards pull ad data from channels like Meta, Google and TikTok and use multi-touch attribution to credit each channel for revenue, according to SMB Guide. The goal is a single, de-duplicated view of which ads actually drove sales — instead of each platform claiming the same conversion.
How much does Northbeam cost?
Northbeam prices on traffic, not seats: one thousand dollars a month for up to one million pageviews (Starter), twenty-five hundred a month for larger brands (Professional), and custom Enterprise pricing for stores spending over two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month on ads, per SMB Guide's review. For most stores that puts the realistic floor in the low thousands monthly.
Does Northbeam show my profit?
Not directly. Northbeam is built around attributed revenue and ad spend, so its headline metric is ROAS, not profit. To get to profit you still have to subtract product cost, shipping, payment fees and returns yourself. A 4.0 ROAS on a thin-margin product can still be a losing order once those costs land.
Why don't Northbeam's numbers match Meta's and Google's?
Because the ad platforms each claim credit for the same sales. Platforms routinely over-report ROAS by two to three times versus first-party click measurement, driven mostly by cross-platform double-counting, Polar Analytics found. Northbeam's job is to de-duplicate that into one attributed number, which is usually lower — and closer to reality — than the platforms' own.
What's the difference between an attribution dashboard and a tool like Victor?
A dashboard reports; Victor acts. Northbeam shows you which channel earned the revenue. Victor computes the true per-order profit across Shopify, your ad accounts and your POD suppliers, then goes in and pauses the losing ad set, shifts the budget, reprices the SKU and builds the Klaviyo flow. One hands you a chart to act on; the other does the acting.