You do not need a project plan to get started. The connection flow is a thirty-minute exercise that most operators complete the same afternoon. This guide walks you through it and tells you what to expect on the other side.
Before you start
Have the following ready: Shopify admin access (or staff permissions for Marketing and Reports), Google Ads admin or standard access, and the email you want connected to your Campaign-IQ workspace. Optional but useful: read access to your Shopify order export from the last 90 days so the platform can ingest a historical baseline.
The two connections that matter
Two integrations get you to your first identity-resolved POAS dashboard. Everything else is incremental.
- Shopify — install the Campaign-IQ app from your store admin, grant the read scopes for orders, products, customers, and discounts. No write scopes required for measurement.
- Google Ads — connect via OAuth at the manager (MCC) level if you have one, or at the account level if not. We pull spend, campaigns, ad groups, and conversion events. We do not place or modify bids until you opt in to agentic automation.
What happens in the first 90 minutes
Within the first 90 minutes after connection, you should see: your last 90 days of Shopify orders reconciled, your Google Ads spend joined to those orders via identity, and a first-cut Yield/POAS leaderboard by campaign. If any of that does not appear, the integrations page tells you which scope or token is missing — there is no support ticket required for the common cases.
What to do in your first week
Two activities pay for the first week ten times over. First, set a POAS floor for your largest spend campaigns in notify-only mode so you start receiving daily flags without changing anything live. Second, schedule a fifteen-minute review of the bottom-quintile POAS report — these are the campaigns you would have paused if you had been looking. Most operators find one or two we-have-been-burning-this-for-months campaigns in week one.
- Onboarding is thirty minutes, not a project.
- Two connections — Shopify and Google Ads — get you to first POAS.
- Start in notify-only with a POAS floor; promote to auto-exclude after a week of trust.