Brandon Hilleary Explains How Ecommerce Founders Should Read Paid Media Data

Marketing consultant urges operators to stop chasing perfect attribution and focus on trendlines, contribution, and decision clarity.

Most ecommerce founders want to understand what's working. But with rising platform complexity and reduced visibility, many get stuck trying to interpret daily fluctuations, conflicting dashboards, or metrics that don't match revenue. Brandon Hilleary, a ecommerce growth consultant, helps brands shift from reactive reporting to structured, decision-ready analysis.

Hilleary works with direct-to-consumer companies. His consulting practice focuses on paid media performance across Meta, TikTok, and Google, with an emphasis on first-party data integration, measurement clarity, and systems that support long-term growth.

For these brands, reporting often feels overwhelming. Attribution windows vary. Blended efficiency conflicts with platform ROAS. Small budget changes produce volatile results. In response, many founders start to question whether any of their reporting is reliable.

According to Hilleary, that's the wrong question. He doesn't push for perfect tracking. Instead, he reframes how data should be read: less as a scoreboard and more as a directional tool.

He encourages brands to look for patterns over time, not snapshots. Instead of comparing Monday to Tuesday, teams review 2-4 week trendlines, which smooth out short-term anomalies. These windows reveal whether a creative batch, offer change, or budget increase produced sustained efficiency gains or not.

Another shift involves understanding contribution instead of channel-specific performance. Hilleary works with teams to combine backend revenue with ad platform data to see what portion of total sales can reasonably be attributed to paid media. While attribution may be split or imprecise, contribution is measurable. Founders can then weigh how paid spend supports topline revenue over time.

Measurement also becomes easier when fewer metrics are prioritized. Hilleary recommends selecting a small set of decision-linked KPIs-often one for efficiency (like blended CPA or MER), one for creative health (such as thumb-stop or hold rate), and one for revenue impact (like new customer revenue share).

These numbers, tracked weekly, become the basis for operational planning.

Overcomplicated reporting, in contrast, leads to indecision. Teams spend hours debating which ROAS is "correct" while missing larger signals. Hilleary helps companies reduce this friction by structuring reports around questions, not just data. For example:

"Is this week's drop within expected variance?"

"Are new ads outperforming the last batch on engagement?"

"Has the efficiency trend held steady despite increased spend?"

By tying metrics to business decisions, reporting becomes a tool for planning-not a source of anxiety.

Hilleary also advocates for routine performance reviews, separate from day-to-day operations. In these sessions, teams look at the bigger picture: how testing affected results, what messaging resonated, which channels contributed most, and whether pacing should change. These sessions are often monthly or biweekly and documented for internal continuity.

One of the most valuable practices Hilleary brings to his clients is institutional memory. He encourages teams to log hypotheses, track outcomes, and record insights-even when a test fails. Over time, this builds a reference system that prevents repetition and improves test quality.

Interpretation is treated as a leadership skill. Founders who understand how to read trendlines, accept directional attribution, and connect insights to actions build more resilient brands. In contrast, those who chase daily optimization often burn through creative, budgets, and internal trust.

Hilleary's approach is especially relevant the growing ecommerce sector, where many brands scale from $1M to $5M quickly but struggle to reach $10M+ without tightening their systems. For these companies, the shift from intuition-based decisions to data-informed planning is essential.

As ad platforms continue to evolve-and data access becomes more restricted-brands that rely on raw instinct or overengineered dashboards will find themselves lost. By returning to clear questions, repeatable analysis, and simple reporting architecture, Hilleary's clients are positioned to make faster, more confident decisions at scale.

Rather than asking, "What's my real ROAS?" Hilleary helps teams ask:

"What direction are we moving?"

"What's influencing that movement?"

"What are we doing about it?"

With this mindset, paid media becomes less reactive and more strategic.

Decisions become less risky. Growth becomes more stable.

For ecommerce operators, Brandon Hilleary offers a steady reminder: it's not about having all the answers in your dashboard. It's about having the right questions and knowing where to look.

522. W Riverside Ave, Ste 6961, Spokane, WA 99201

Brandon Hilleary works with growing ecommerce teams seeking stability, accountability, and long-term efficiency in paid media operations.

This release was published on openPR.