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How are you handling complex logic in black box platforms?
Posted by on January 13, 2026 at 2:26 pmI have experience with GTM & sGTM but no experience with black boxes like WeTracked, Elevar, Aimerce, Tracklution, etc. When it comes to reporting / attribution logic, how easy (or hard) is it to set up (examples of) the following requirements:
– Customer buys a $200 item which is counted as a conversion but returns the item and gets their $200 refund 7 days later.
– AOV which is actually a series of spread-out upsells, not a single transaction. For example, the customer is sold $5 now, then $10 next, then $20 later within a 24-hour window.
– Excluding / filtering customers who bought using discounts and coupons. Most of the time, you want to train the algo to search for only full-price buyers.
Again, those are just 3 of some examples of complex logic flows that are easy on GTM & sGTM. I'd like to know how you're implementing them in black box platforms as part of my research investigating whether they tick all the boxes.
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7 Replies
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Been wondering the same thing. everyone hypes these black box tools as easier but nobody talks about what happens when you need the complex stuff. Most case studies just show basic setup but what about refunds, multi-step tracking, filtering out discount buyers? seems like you either hack workarounds or accept worse data
Would love to hear if anyones actually made this work because it feels like GTM is still the move if you need real control
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Not gonna lie i avoided these platforms specifically because of this stuff
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For my clients, black box platforms can’t handle those flows without custom dev work… returns require manual API integrations or Shopify webhooks that most platforms don’t support natively, spread-out upsells need custom event aggregation logic, and coupon exclusions require filtering at the data layer before it hits the platform. GTM/sGTM gives you full control to build this logic yourself… black boxes are plug-and-play for basic tracking but break down when business logic gets complex.
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OK so I’m a GTM noob. How do you do that stuff with GTM?
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The real question is once you have this granular data you are looking for, how does it change your decisions? How would you adjust your bids or campaign strategy? This seems like an expensive exercise that sounds nice, but has minimal lift or profitably potential .
I see attribution questions a lot, and honestly a rolling Google Sheet is usually a fantastic option. It pulls KPIs from each client’s true source of truth. Cost comes directly from Google and Meta, sales and orders data from Shopify or an ERP depending on the business, and appointments from tools like Acuity or Calendly. I’m currently building this in n8n now so it pulls the data daily and rolls up cleanly into weekly and monthly views. Having that Google Sheet would answer like 90% of these questions at an aggregated level.
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optimize your conversion funnels and events
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