From install to your first brief, in four steps.
Installing Marginal from the Shopify App Store automatically connects your store -- there's no separate setup step. Marginal requests read-only access to your orders, customers, and products (never write access, and never customer names or email addresses). Once installed, Marginal immediately starts syncing your order history.
Go to Settings and connect the ad platforms you run spend on. Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest connect through Windsor.ai's hosted authorization flow: you sign in on their screen, pick your ad account, then come back and click Finish connecting. Google Ads connects with a short read-only script you paste into your own Google Ads account -- Settings walks you through it in about three minutes. Marginal never sees your ad platform login, and you can connect as many or as few as you actually use.
On the Starter plan, only one channel (Meta) is used for reporting. Growth and Pro blend every channel you connect into one CAC/ROAS figure.
If you want gross margin and profitability reporting (Pro plan), add a cost per item to your products in Shopify, then click Sync product costs in Settings. Without this, Marginal can still show revenue, spend, and ROAS -- margin specifically needs cost data to calculate.
Once orders and ad data have synced, Home shows a written analysis of what changed in your business and why -- not just numbers, but what's behind them. Ad platform data syncs daily, so the picture gets more complete each morning as more history accumulates.
On Growth and Pro, Executive Summary generates a fuller monthly-style report, and Ask Analyst lets you ask follow-up questions about your own data directly.