Where your numbers come from

Every number starts with what your store actually sold.

Updated October 31, 2026

1. Sales are what your store recorded. Not what an ad platform, a pixel or a model estimates.
2. A claim stays a claim. Each platform's credit is shown on that platform's own rules, and put against your store's sales, never summed into them.
3. One definition per number. The same one on Pulse, on its own page, and in what your AI reads.
4. Recent days are marked as still moving. Each number says when it's final.
5. A gap is a gap. Missing data never becomes a zero.

Your store is the ground truth

Sales, orders, new customers and refunds come from Shopify, the same figures Shopify Analytics shows. Olympus adds no tracking pixel and builds no attribution model of its own, so there's no second version of your sales to argue with.

Ad platforms see the same sales differently. Meta, Google, Reddit and TikTok each credit themselves with the purchases their ads touched, on their own rules, and a sale two platforms touched is claimed by both. Add their claims up and they often come to more than the store sold. Olympus shows each platform's spend and claims side by side, then puts all the claims against what your store took in, so you can see the gap instead of guessing at it.

That's why the one efficiency number Olympus reads across every platform, MER, is all your store's sales divided by all your ad spend. No platform's attribution can inflate it. It's a broad check, not a verdict: email and repeat customers raise it too, and the easiest way to improve it is to spend less.

Each platform, on its own rules

A platform's claims keep moving after the day: a purchase made a week after a click is credited back to the day of the click. Olympus re-collects each platform's recent days until its window has passed, and marks those days as still settling.

Spend is final within a day on every platform. It's only the credit that keeps moving.

One definition per number

Every metric in Olympus has a written definition: what it means, its formula, where each piece comes from, which day each piece is counted on, when it stops moving, and what to know before quoting it. Click any number for its history and that explanation in plain words. Your AI reads the same definitions before it answers, so it can't describe a number differently than your dashboard does. Every formula is checked automatically against the stored figures before a release ships.

Which day a number lands on

• Orders and sales: the day the order was placed, in your store's own time zone.
• Refunds: the day you issue them, the day the money goes back out, whichever day the order was placed.
• Ad spend: the day it was spent.
• Shipping labels: the day they were bought, usually the ship day. That's why margins are read by the week, never the day: a single day's labels swing with the shipping schedule, not with the business.

When a number is final

Store sales and refunds settle in a day or two, since Shopify can take a day to count a refund. Margins settle after two days, once the labels have posted. Ad platforms' claims take as long as the table above says. Until then, the days are marked. A trend still counts them, corrected for the purchases your store's own history says are still to come, so a rise shows this week instead of next.

Margins: what's in and what isn't

The number Olympus judges ad spend by is what the store kept after ads, called CM2: contribution margin after ads.

• Sales tax comes out first. You collect it for the state; it was never your money.
• It's read in dollars over four weeks. A percentage can improve while the business shrinks, and a single week swings with when labels post.
• It only counts what Shopify can see, so it reads higher than your true margin when shipping is bought outside Shopify, a payment method other than Shopify Payments charges fees, or a product sold without a cost. Olympus lists every product sold without a cost, and every cost that looks like a typo, so you know how close the figure is.
• Break-even is set on the platforms' terms. Ad platforms count tax and shipping in the revenue they report, so the return your ads need to break even is total sales divided by CM1 dollars, compared like with like.

What Olympus leaves out instead of guessing

• A missing day stays empty. If an ad platform was running but its data for a week is missing, that week's CM2 is left blank, not overstated by counting the spend as zero.
• Long periods only when every day is covered. When your ad history is shorter than your sales history, figures built on ad spend aren't shown for any period reaching before it. An ad account opened after your store isn't a gap: before the day it was created, it spent nothing, and counts that way.
• Free orders aren't customers spending less. Exchanges and replacements are left out of the average a paying customer spends, and never count as a returning customer's second order.
• A bundle isn't a discount. Discounts are sorted by kind, so a quantity break that raises your order value never reads as discounting.
• Visits that start at checkout are counted apart, so more recovery emails never look like a broken checkout.

How the numbers check themselves

• Every night, Olympus compares each day it holds with what Shopify says for that day and re-collects any that differ, such as a day an outage left empty or an order deleted months later.
• When Olympus counts something better, your stored history is recounted the new way, so this year and last year are always measured with the same rule.

What we don't claim

Olympus doesn't decide which ad caused a sale, and it doesn't promise a lift. It shows you what each platform says, what your store took in and what you kept, and leaves the decision on what you kept, the number every platform's claim has to answer to.

Questions about a number? Email support@oldbones.ai, or see every feature.