🚀 What’s New This Week
📦 More accurate reporting for Fulfilled by Amazon
If you sell on Amazon, it's worth checking your numbers this week.
We've shipped two improvements to Amazon reporting that make your metrics more accurate ahead of Q4.
👥 New vs. returning customer breakdowns
Since February, many FBA orders have appeared as Unknown in customer breakdowns.
Why? Amazon stopped providing the buyer email we use to identify whether a customer is new or returning. Rather than make assumptions, we excluded those orders from customer classification while continuing to count them in your overall totals.
We can now recover that email for FBA orders, so those orders are once again classified as new or returning.
That means your:
New customer counts
New customer CAC
Repeat rate
...are accurate again for FBA orders.
💸 FBA refunds now reduce your revenue
Until now, refunds on Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) orders weren't reflected in Northbeam. Merchant Fulfilled returns were included, but FBA returns weren't, which meant Amazon revenue could appear higher than what you actually kept.
That's now fixed.
FBA refunds now flow into Northbeam automatically, so your Amazon revenue, ROAS, and CAC reflect net revenue—not gross sales.
A few things to know:
FBA only. Merchant Fulfilled Amazon orders will still appear as Unknown.
Classification isn't immediate. The buyer email becomes available after an order ships, so expect a short delay before orders are classified.
Canceled orders remain unclassified since they never generate a buyer email.
If Amazon is a meaningful part of your business, take another look at your customer breakdowns. The Amazon performance you've been using to plan for peak season may look different today.
🔁 ICYMI
📊 We ran 18 A/B tests on Apex. Here’s what happened.
Quick refresher if Apex isn't on your radar yet: Meta's delivery system normally optimizes against Meta's own attribution, which only sees Meta.
Apex is the pipeline that sends your Northbeam attribution back to Meta instead, so the bidding engine is optimizing toward the same numbers you judge performance on.
On Meta's side, that capability is called Custom Attribution, and you turn it on at the ad-set level when you build the campaign.
Here's what happened when brands tested it against business as usual, same budget, same creative, randomized cells inside the same account:
Same budget, same creative, randomized cells inside the same Meta account. Across 21 controlled tests and $1.3M in spend:
30% more new customer orders on average
22% increase in new customer ROAS on average
90% of accounts saw lower cost per new customer
Apex takes a few clicks to turn on in the dashboard, then Meta needs about two weeks to train before you can test. If you want test results in hand before BFCM, set it up today.
📈 Optimization Corner
The brands that scale the most and get the fastest learnings are outputting an outrageous amount of creative. At the one to two million a month spend level, top performing ad accounts are launching around 75 ads a week."
🤑 Ad Credit Offers
We've partner with ad platforms to get these exclusive credit offers for Northbeam customers. To claim an offer, reach out to [email protected].
