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Nine categories
The technology we run your account on
Nine categories of tooling, what each one has to do to earn its place, and who on the team actually touches it. The important part is not which brands we use — it is that every account is opened in your name, and you keep all of it if we part company.
CATEGORIES
Nine
ACCOUNT OWNERSHIP
Always yours
PROPRIETARY PLATFORM
None
REVIEWED
Twice a year
A working stack is judged on what it lets you verify, not on how many logos it has in it.
- Why publish it
The stack is not the differentiator
Agencies sell tooling because it is easy to show. What actually matters is who owns the accounts and whether you could verify our numbers without us.
Every competent agency in this market runs broadly the same categories of tool, and most of the important ones are free. Anyone claiming a decisive advantage from their software is usually describing a dashboard that sits on top of the same data you already have.
So this page is not a capability list. It is a statement of two things that do matter: what each category has to do before we will run an account on it, and the fact that every account is opened in your name. If you leave, the history stays with you — which is the only part of a stack that is genuinely worth asking about.
- Accounts opened in your name, not ours, from day one
- No proprietary platform you would lose access to
- Nothing in the reporting you could not rebuild yourself
- The test
Four rules any tool has to pass
Applied before anything is added, and again at the twice-yearly review. Tools that stop passing get removed rather than tolerated.
You own the account
- Opened under your billing and your domain wherever possible
- We are added as a user, and removed by you in one click
- No tool where the data would leave with us
The working is visible
- Any number it produces can be traced back to a source
- No modelled figures presented as measured ones
- If we cannot explain how it calculated something, we do not use it
The data comes out
- Raw export available without a support ticket
- History retained for at least the length of the engagement
- No format that only that vendor can read
It earns its cost
- A paid tool has to replace hours, not add a tab
- Anything billed to you is agreed in advance, at cost
- Most of what runs a good account is free, and we say so
The first rule is the one that costs agencies money, which is why it is rarely published. An account you own is an account you can take somewhere else.
- The stack
Nine categories, and what each has to do
Named tools appear only where they are effectively universal — the platform consoles nobody has a choice about. For the rest, what matters is the requirement, not the badge.
Analytics and measurement
- GA4 and Google Search Console, both in your account
- Server-side or first-party measurement where consent allows
- Must reconcile to platform revenue within about 5%
Search and content
- A crawler that can render JavaScript, run on a schedule
- Rank tracking split by branded and non-branded
- Keyword data we can export rather than screenshot
Paid media and feeds
- Google Ads and Merchant Center, Meta Ads Manager
- A feed tool that can write rules per margin tier
- Disapproval monitoring that alerts rather than reports
Marketplace management
- Amazon Seller Central and the equivalent for each marketplace
- Buy-box and suppression monitoring at listing level
- Repricing that respects a written floor, never unattended
Conversion and experimentation
- Session replay and heatmaps, sampled rather than always-on
- A testing tool that reports confidence, not just a winner
- Every test written up, including the ones that lost
Email and lifecycle
- Flow-level revenue reporting, not campaign totals
- Holdout groups supported natively, or we build them
- Deliverability monitoring separate from the sending platform
Reporting and margin
- Contribution margin per order, with carriage and fees in it
- One view joining store, ads, marketplace and shipping data
- Rebuilt from raw exports, so you can audit any figure
Planning and communication
- A shared board you can see without asking for a login
- Decisions written down where they were made
- No work that exists only in somebody’s inbox
Development and QA
- Version control and a staging environment before anything ships
- Redirect testing on every URL change, not a sample
- Core Web Vitals measured on field data, not lab scores
Where a category needs a paid tool, the licence is bought at cost and named in the proposal. We do not mark tooling up, and we do not bill you for software we would own anyway.
- Ownership
Who owns the Google Ads account, and every other one
The question worth asking any agency before you sign, and the one most contracts leave vague.
You do. Every advertising, analytics, search console, marketplace and email account we work in is opened under your business, billed to your card where billing exists, and administered by you. We are added as a user with the access the work requires, and you can remove us without speaking to us first.
This is not universal. Plenty of agencies run client campaigns inside their own manager account, which is convenient for them and expensive for you: leave, and the campaign history, the conversion data and the machine learning that history trained all stay behind. You start from zero somewhere else, which is a switching cost disguised as an operational detail.
- Ad accounts under your billing, not inside our manager
- Analytics and Search Console properties owned by your domain
- Marketplace seller accounts always yours, never intermediated
- Email and testing platforms on your subscription, at cost
If we already manage an account we opened before this policy applied, we transfer it to you at no cost, on request, at any point in the engagement.
- Limits
Five things we will not do with tooling
Each of these is normal in this industry. That is why they are listed.
Sell you a proprietary platform
There is no Dazzle dashboard you would lose access to. Everything we report is assembled from tools you already own, which is why you can verify it and why you can leave.
Hold reporting access behind us
You get direct logins to every source, not a weekly PDF. If the only way to see your own performance is to ask your agency, that is a governance problem rather than a reporting one.
Mark up software licences
Anything paid is bought at cost and named in the proposal. Reselling tooling at a margin quietly changes which tool gets recommended.
Present modelled numbers as measured
Platform-modelled conversions and attributed revenue are labelled as such in every report. They are useful; they are not the same as an order in your store.
Let a tool make a decision nobody can explain
Automation runs inside rules we wrote and can show you. An unattended repricer or a fully automated bidding strategy with no floor is how accounts quietly lose money for months.
If a tool would break one of the four rules further up this page, we do not adopt it — including when it is the market leader in its category.
- The output
What the stack actually produces
Nine categories of tool exist to generate about five things. If a tool is not feeding one of them, it is a tab nobody opens.
Tooling is only justified by what reaches a human. Everything above converges on a monthly view that puts contribution margin next to the channels that produced it, and a weekly view that is short enough to read on a phone.
- Contribution margin per order, with carriage, returns and fees inside it
- Channel performance measured net of returns, not on gross revenue
- A single constraint for the quarter, and progress against it
- Every test written up, including the ones that lost
- What we got wrong since the last report
The reporting rhythm itself — weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly — is set out on how we work.
- Maintenance
How the stack changes, and how often
Twice a year, in March and September, against the same four rules. A tool that no longer passes is removed rather than tolerated.
Trigger
What happens
Twice-yearly review
Every tool is re-tested against ownership, visibility, data portability and cost. Anything that has moved to a model where the data cannot be exported, or where the account cannot sit in the client’s name, comes out at that review regardless of how good it is.
When a client asks for a different tool
If you already run something in a category, we use yours. Standardising a client onto our preference is convenient for us and costs you the history in the tool you already paid for.
When a category stops being necessary
Tools accumulate. If nothing in the last two quarters of work depended on a tool, it leaves the stack rather than sitting there as a line item and a login.
What never changes
The four rules. A tool that fails rule one — you own the account — does not get adopted no matter what it does, because the cost lands entirely on you and only at the moment you want to leave.
- Questions
Technology stack FAQs
What people ask about tooling before they sign anything.
Who owns the Google Ads account?
You do. It is opened under your business and your billing, and we are added as a user. You can remove our access at any time without asking us. The same applies to Meta, analytics, Search Console, marketplace seller accounts and any email platform we work in.
What happens to the accounts if we stop working together?
Nothing. They are already yours, so there is no transfer to negotiate and no history to hand back. We are removed as users and everything — campaign history, conversion data, audiences, reporting — stays where it is.
Do you have your own platform or dashboard?
No, deliberately. Everything we report is assembled from tools you already own, which is what makes it verifiable. An agency dashboard is a convenient place for numbers to become unfalsifiable.
Do I have to pay for your tools?
Not for ours. Where a category genuinely needs a paid licence for your account, it is bought at cost, named in the proposal, and billed without markup. Most of what runs a good account — analytics, Search Console, the platform consoles — is free.
Can we keep the tools we already use?
Yes, and we would prefer it. If you already run a testing tool, an email platform or a feed manager, we use yours. Migrating you to our preference costs you the history you have already paid for.
Why do you not name every tool you use?
Because the brands change and the requirements do not. What matters when you are choosing an agency is what a tool has to do before it is trusted with your account, not which vendor won that category this year. Ask us on a call and we will tell you exactly what is in use on an account like yours.
How do you handle data and access security?
Named-user access rather than shared logins, the minimum permission level the work needs, and access removed within one business day of somebody leaving either team. Client data is not exported into tools outside the categories on this page.
What if a tool reports a different number to my store?
Then the store is right and we investigate the tool. Reconciling analytics, ad platform and store revenue to within about 5% is the first check in our growth assessment, and nothing downstream is trustworthy until it clears.
- Related
How this connects to the work
The stack exists to serve these three things.
FRAMEWORK
Twelve checks with published thresholds — the first of which is whether your measurement reconciles at all.
RESOURCES
Working checklists you can run on your own account, with the tools you already have.
FREE AUDIT
Five working days across six disciplines, using your accounts rather than ours.
Want to know exactly what would run on your account?
Ask on a call and we will name every tool we would use for your platform, your channels and your catalogue size — including the ones you already have and should keep.