At a Glance
Challenge: Alchemy Merch relied on GA4 for performance reporting but suspected significant under-reporting of returning customers and revenue. Despite consistent traffic, confidence in attribution and optimization decisions was eroding due to GA4's fragmented view of customer journeys.
Solution: Implemented Incendium alongside GA4 to independently track sessions, user continuity, and revenue attribution. This parallel deployment enabled direct comparison using identical traffic inputs and exposed critical gaps in GA4's measurement methodology.
Impact: Uncovered 28.7% more returning visitors and 22.6% additional revenue ($4,349.25) that GA4 failed to attribute. This restored confidence in performance data and revealed stronger customer loyalty than GA4 suggested, enabling more accurate forecasting and paid media optimization.
About
Alchemy Merch
Alchemy Merch is a Phoenix-based custom merchandise company specializing in branded products for artists, creatives, and brand owners. Founded in 2015, the company has produced over 5 million customized products including enamel pins, patches, tote bags, acrylic charms, and apparel.
Operating with a collaborative approach and maintaining a 5.0-star customer rating, Alchemy Merch works directly with clients from concept through delivery. As a digital-first ecommerce business, their online storefront serves both as a product showcase and transaction platform for quote requests and direct orders.
This reliance on digital channels makes accurate analytics critical for understanding customer behavior, optimizing marketing spend, and guiding strategic decisions. When discrepancies emerged between traffic volumes and GA4's reporting of returning customers and revenue, the need for independent measurement validation became essential to maintaining confidence in their performance data.
Challenge
Alchemy Merch used GA4 as their primary analytics platform to track customer journeys, identify returning visitors, and measure revenue across channels.
However, despite stable traffic volumes, the team noticed concerning patterns:
- Returning customer rates seemed artificially low
- Revenue attribution felt incomplete
- Confidence in performance reporting was declining
The core issue wasn't traffic quality—it was measurement accuracy.
GA4's session recreation logic, limited lookback windows, and fragile identity resolution were suspected of:
- Breaking user journey continuity
- Reclassifying returning visitors as new users
- Failing to attribute revenue to the correct sessions
Without accurate visibility into who was returning and what they were worth, Alchemy Merch couldn't trust their data for optimization or scaling decisions.
Solution
Incendium was implemented alongside GA4 to create an independent measurement layer tracking:
- Total users and sessions
- New vs returning visitor classification
- Pageviews and engagement patterns
- Revenue attribution across sessions
This parallel deployment allowed Alchemy Merch to directly compare both platforms using the same traffic, same date range, and same conversion events—isolating measurement methodology as the variable.
Incendium's session-level identity resolution preserved user continuity across visits without relying on short attribution windows or cookie-dependent assumptions, providing a clearer view of true customer behavior.
Impact
1. Traffic Measurement Was Consistent—Journey Tracking Was Not
Both platforms reported virtually identical total users (0.3% variance) and new users (0.2% variance), confirming the issue wasn't traffic volume or quality.
The divergence occurred in how each platform maintained user identity over time, pointing directly to measurement methodology as the root cause.
2. GA4 Under-Reported Returning Visitors by 28.7%
Incendium identified 242 returning users compared to just 188 in GA4—a difference of 54 users.
This matters because returning visitors typically:
- Have higher purchase intent
- Convert at better rates
- Drive greater lifetime value
GA4's session fragmentation caused many returning customers to be misclassified as new, obscuring the true strength of customer retention and creating a misleading picture of acquisition dependency.
3. Revenue Under-Attribution Exceeded $4,300 (22.6%)
The most commercially significant gap was revenue:
- GA4: $19,220.75
- Incendium: $23,570.00
- Difference: $4,349.25 additional revenue visibility
This wasn't "new" revenue—it was revenue GA4 failed to attribute correctly, primarily due to:
- Session recreation breaking purchase paths
- Limited attribution windows losing delayed conversions
- Returning visitor identity loss disconnecting prior engagement from final conversion
Incendium captured conversions tied to returning sessions that GA4 treated as disconnected or incomplete journeys.
Business Outcome
Before Incendium, GA4 suggested:
- Weaker customer retention than reality
- Lower revenue performance
- Underperforming channels and campaigns
With Incendium, Alchemy Merch gained:
- 28.7% more visibility into returning customer behavior
- 22.6% more accurate revenue attribution
- Greater confidence in reporting, forecasting, and optimization decisions
- Clearer performance signals for scaling paid media
Most critically, strategic decisions were no longer constrained by GA4's structural measurement limitations. Alchemy Merch could now optimize based on what was actually happening—not what GA4 could see.
