August in review — best August on record, on lighter spend
August booked $187K across 182 orders — nearly double last August — while paid media spend came down 17% from July. Year to date, revenue is up 44.7% on 41% more orders. August itself was a light month on our side: 5.25 hours, spent on dashboard setup, a broken Gravity Forms–to–Insightly connection, and the twice-monthly plugin maintenance.
The month at a glance
What drove the month
Booked revenue by month
Growth is still coming from volume
182 orders at a $1,028 average. Order count is up 84% year over year while average order value moved 7% — more customers buying, not one large deal carrying the month. The biggest order was $8,248, under 5% of the total.
91 accounts bought for the first time in August, worth $98K across 96 orders. That is the second-highest month of new-account acquisition on record, behind June's 103.
Repeat accounts were 48% of revenue ($89K across 86 orders), down slightly from 51% in July — not because reorders fell, but because new accounts grew faster.
Return by campaign, August
Less spend, better return
$24,219 in paid media, down 17% from July's $29,204, returning $181K in tracked conversion value — a blended 7.5x, up from 6.7x. Nearly every campaign improved: Furniture went from 2.5x to 9.8x, Wipes/Mops from a combined 2.3x to 7.8x.
Leads were the soft spot. 118 quote and contact submissions against 174 in July, putting cost per lead at $205 (July: $168). July was an unusually strong lead month; August is roughly level with August 2025's 129.
What we worked on in August — 5.25 hours
Dashboard & data 1.75 hrs
Reporting access set up and documented for sharing, then the dashboard metrics themselves corrected — the raw GA4 export repeats revenue across every dimension it slices by, which inflated the totals until the definitions were tightened.
Gravity Forms → Insightly 1.0 hr
Quote and contact forms were submitting on the site but not creating records in Insightly. The cause was an expired licence on the Gravity Forms Insightly Pro plugin; it has been upgraded from 1.12 to 1.18 and is passing again.
Maintenance & plugin updates 2.5 hrs
Two passes, mid-month and end of month: backup, plugin updates, WooCommerce template review after each round.
Two plugins still need attention — Woo Custom Product Add-ons and Quantity Increment Buttons for WooCommerce. Both flagged on the 14th and still open on the 28th.
One ask, one offer
Check August's leads against Insightly
While the plugin licence was lapsed, form submissions were recorded on the site but may not have reached Insightly. The Gravity Forms entries are all still stored in WordPress, so anything missing can be re-sent — we just need to know what your team is actually seeing in the CRM for early August.
A review, whenever it's useful
The offer stands for half an hour on the dashboard — walking the tabs, agreeing what the standing monthly metrics should be, and talking through the two parking-lot items below. Nothing is waiting on it this month, so take it when it suits you. Say the word and we'll set it up.
What the numbers can and can't tell us
Where August's purchases were attributed
Read the dashboard this way
WooCommerce is the number. Aggregated properly, GA4 saw $179K of August's $187K — 96%, which is healthy. But the raw GA4 export, summed naively, reported $274K. Revenue in this brief comes from WooCommerce order records, and the dashboard has been corrected to match.
Attribution is the weak spot, not sales. Every order is accounted for; what is thin is knowing which channel earned it. Tightening that up is the first parking-lot item.
Organic is drifting down. Search Console impressions are down 35% year over year and clicks down 18%. Tracked keywords in the top 10 have gone from 17 in June to 12 now, while keywords showing an AI Overview above the results have gone from 14 to 28 of 41. Two separate pressures on the same channel.
September
Maintenance & support 2 passes
The twice-monthly rhythm continues: backup, plugin updates, template review, mid-month and end of month.
Plus resolution of the two plugins carried over from August, and any support that comes up.
Review on request
Held open rather than scheduled: dashboard walkthrough, agreement on the standing monthly metrics, and a view on whether either parking-lot item becomes real work.
Worth doing while you're there sales-side
46 repeat accounts are sitting 25–45 days past their last order, together worth $372K in lifetime revenue — including your three largest accounts, all at 27–28 days. A reorder nudge to that list is the cheapest revenue available this month, and it's a sales-side action, not ours.
Parking lot
Updates to the data & dashboard
Close the attribution gap so the 54% of orders now landing in Unassigned or Direct can be traced, tie quote requests through to booked revenue rather than stopping at the form, and settle a single agreed definition for each headline metric.
Would make the ROAS and lead numbers in this brief trustworthy at the campaign level, which they are not yet.
Divi replacement / UX / speed separate plan
Mobile is 11% of sessions and 5% of revenue, converting at 0.4% against desktop's 1.5%. Organic impressions are down 35% year over year. Both point the same direction, and both are the kind of thing a page-builder rebuild is meant to address.
Scope, cost and expected return would come as its own proposal, not as line items here.
August spend
Marketing & support hours
A deliberately light month — no development or campaign build, just the dashboard work, the Insightly fix and the two maintenance passes.
Total marketing investment
Paid media is 93% of it. Every dollar invested across media, tools and our hours returned $7.22 in booked revenue — on media alone, $7.72 against July's $5.44.