How a 12-person e-commerce team cut reporting time by 60%

The problem: four channels, four spreadsheets, zero clarity

Fenwick & Root sells hand-finished ceramic kitchenware online. Twelve people, a lean ad budget, and a marketing team of three — Petra (paid social), Hamid (email), and their head of growth, Yuki. In late 2025, Yuki spent every Monday morning doing the same thing: pulling CSV exports from Meta Ads, Klaviyo, Google Ads, and their affiliate dashboard, pasting them into a shared sheet, and trying to reconcile which link drove which click.

It took her between four and six hours every week. That’s one full workday per month — just to answer the question “what’s working?”

The deeper issue wasn’t effort. It was that each platform defined a “click” differently. Meta counts link clicks including link previews. Klaviyo counts unique clicks. Google counts ad clicks. The affiliate network counts redirected sessions. By the time Yuki had normalized everything, she’d introduced her own inconsistencies.

“We had three different answers to ‘how many people clicked the spring sale email.’ None of them matched.” — Yuki Tanaka, Head of Growth, Fenwick & Root

What they did: standardizing on Shortifi’s UTM layer

Fenwick & Root started a Shortifi trial on January 3rd. The migration took roughly one week of setup — not because anything was technically hard, but because the team had to agree on naming conventions for the first time.

Step 1: Define the vocabulary once

Shortifi’s source, medium, and campaign fields are workspace-scoped controlled vocabularies, not free-text inputs. Before creating a single link, Yuki sat down with Petra and Hamid for 90 minutes and mapped every channel variant they’d been using:

• facebook, fb, FB, Facebook → unified to facebook
• email, email-blast, klaviyo, nl → unified to email
• google, google-ads, gads → unified to google

This sounds trivial. It wasn’t. The audit turned up 31 distinct source strings that referred to eight real channels.

Step 2: Rebuild the campaign taxonomy

Their spring 2026 campaign had been launched with different utm_campaign values across channels: spring-sale, springsale26, SS26, and spring. In Shortifi they created a single campaign record — Spring 2026 — and generated all channel-specific short links from inside it. Every link automatically inherited the correct, normalized UTM tuple.

Step 3: Replace all outbound links

Hamid updated the email templates. Petra swapped the landing page URLs in Meta and Google campaigns. The affiliate manager got a Shortifi-generated link with the correct utm_source=affiliate parameter baked in. Total time: four hours across the team.

The results: three weeks in

By January 28th — three weeks after going live — Yuki ran her first Shortifi-native weekly report. She didn’t touch a spreadsheet.

The 60% reduction in reporting time is the headline, but Yuki points to a subtler win: confidence. “Before, I’d present numbers and someone would ask ‘but are those real clicks?’ Now I can say yes, because all our links go through one system with one definition.”

What surprised them

Hamid noticed something unexpected: their affiliate channel had been dramatically undercounted. Because affiliates were manually appending UTM parameters — inconsistently — attribution was leaking to (direct) in their analytics. With Shortifi links, affiliate traffic was correctly identified for the first time. The channel’s attributed revenue jumped 38% in the first tracked month — not because they sold more, but because they were finally counting correctly.

What Fenwick & Root would do differently

Yuki’s one regret: not running the vocabulary alignment session with the whole team earlier. “We brought in the affiliate manager late. They had their own naming habits and we had to re-clean some of their historical data. Do the vocabulary session first, before anyone touches links.”

For a 12-person team with no dedicated analytics engineer, that 90-minute alignment meeting was the highest-ROI thing they did all quarter.