Getting started with Prism

This is the guide we'd hand you if we sat down with you for fifteen minutes. It walks through everything you need to do in your first session — from creating an account to seeing your first attributed order in the dashboard.

If you only have five minutes, do the Quickstart section. Everything below it can wait until tomorrow.

What you'll need before you start

• Admin access (ideally) to your Shopify store. If you're not the Admin, you would atleast need permissions to install / manage apps, approve charges, amend checkout / thank you pages in theme editor (for post purchase survey installation).
• (Optional, but recommended) Admin / Standard access to your Meta Ads Manager and Google Ads accounts. You'll connect them later in this guide.
• About 5 minutes for the quickstart, 30 minutes for the full setup.

Quickstart (5 minutes)

The goal of the quickstart is to get your store connected and see a single tracked event flow through to the dashboard.

1. Create your workspace

Go to app.theprismapp.com and sign up. After you log in for the first time, you'll land on the onboarding screen. If you have an external invite, the link takes you through this process.

You have two options:

• Create New Store — if you're the first person at your company setting up Prism. This is what most people do.
• Join Existing Store — if a teammate already created the workspace and gave you the Org ID (a long UUID like abc12345-...). Paste that ID in to join. The Org ID can be found in Settings -> Store Settings page.

Pick Create New Store, then fill in:

Click Create Store. You'll see a brief "Setting up your store…" loader, then "Finishing setup…", then you'll land on the Billing page.

2. Connect your Shopify store

On the Billing page you'll see a card titled Shopify with a Connect Shopify button. The plan tiles below it are greyed out — they'll unlock the moment Shopify is connected.

Click Connect Shopify. You'll be redirected to Shopify, where you'll be asked to approve the install. Prism requests these permissions:

• Read your orders and customer data
• Install a web pixel for tracking
• Access checkout extensions (for the post-purchase survey)

Click Install app in Shopify. After the install completes, Shopify sends you back to Prism's billing page — the plan tiles are now active.

3. Pick a plan

On the Billing page, choose monthly or annual (annual saves you 20%), then click the button on the plan tile you want — Upgrade to Growth, for example. You'll bounce to Shopify's billing approval screen.

Approve the charge in Shopify and you'll be sent back to Prism, now on a paid plan.

4. Watch your first event land

Open your storefront in a new tab and click around — view a product, add something to cart. Switch back to Prism and open Attribution in the left nav.

The first events take 10-15 minutes to appear. Two things are happening behind the scenes:

1. Shopify is propagating the pixel install to its CDN. Until that finishes, the pixel doesn't fire.
2. Once events do start flowing, the attribution / orders data, takes 3-5mins to be processed and synced to Prism for each order.

If you don't see events after 15 minutes, jump to Verify your pixel is firing below.

That's the quickstart. You can stop here and come back tomorrow — the rest of this guide is the higher-leverage setup that turns Prism from "tracking" into "useful."

Your first day

These four tasks unlock the bulk of Prism's value. Plan to do them in the same sitting if you can — they all live in Settings.

Connect Meta Ads

Go to Settings → Integrations. Find the Meta Ads card and click Connect Meta Ads.

You'll bounce out to Facebook's OAuth screen. Approve the permissions and you'll come back to the Integrations page. The Meta card now shows a dropdown asking you to Select an account.

Pick the ad account that matches your Shopify store. If you manage multiple brands from the same Facebook Business Manager, you'll see all of them in the dropdown — choose carefully. Click Save Account.

Within a few seconds you'll see a Last Synced timestamp on the card. Prism is now pulling your campaigns, ad sets, ads, and creative data on an hourly schedule. Use Sync Now if you want to pull the latest immediately.

Troubleshooting Meta

• "Account is in restricted state" — Meta is reviewing your ad account. Wait it out and try again. Prism can't bypass this.
• You don't see your account in the dropdown — your Facebook user doesn't have access to that ad account in Business Manager. Get the workspace admin to add you with ads_management role, then come back and reconnect.
• Empty creative data on some ads — Meta's API occasionally fails to return creative metadata on accounts with thousands of campaigns. Prism retries automatically and surfaces a warning on the card if it gave up on a batch. Re-running Sync Now usually fixes it.

Connect Google Ads

Same page, same flow. Click Connect Google Ads, approve, come back, pick the customer account from the dropdown, Save Account.

A couple of Google-specific things to know:

• If your Google login has access to a manager account (MCC), Prism will show the full account tree. Manager accounts are greyed out — pick a client account underneath. If you only see manager accounts, Google won't let Prism pull data; you'll need a real client account on your login.
• Google's OAuth tokens expire every hour. Prism refreshes them in the background — you won't notice. If you ever do see "token expired" errors, hit Disconnect and reconnect; this regenerates the refresh token.

Set up UTMs on your campaigns

This is the single highest-leverage thing you'll do for accurate attribution. Prism classifies traffic from URL parameters, so a poorly tagged Klaviyo email gets reported as direct traffic and quietly inflates your "direct" channel.

We have a separate guide for this — see UTM parameter setup. It covers what UTMs are, the five parameters, naming conventions, per-platform cheat sheets, and the common mistakes.

If you only do one thing today, do this.

Set up your cost structure (for P&L)

Go to Settings → Cost Structure (or Profit → Cost Structure depending on where it surfaces in your nav).

Click Add Item to define each cost in your business. Prism supports four types of cost assumptions:

You'll also assign each item a category: COGS, Fulfillment, Marketing, Overhead, or Other. This is how the P&L groups things.

Monthly overrides

Each cost item has a default value plus optional monthly overrides. If your COGS dropped from $12 to $10 in March because you renegotiated with your supplier, add a monthly override for March = $10. Every other month uses the default of $12.

Use Export CSV / Import CSV if you'd rather edit costs in a spreadsheet.

Your first week

By now you have events flowing, ad spend syncing, and costs configured. This section is about getting more out of the dashboard.

Compare attribution models

Open the Attribution page and use the model selector at the top. Out of the box, Prism gives you six models:

The fastest way to learn what Prism is showing you is to switch between Last Click and Prism View on the same date range. The channels that look more important under Prism View are the ones doing top-of-funnel work that last-click ignores.

Configure post-purchase survey

Prism ships with a Shopify checkout extension that asks "How did you hear about us?" right after checkout. This survey response gets fed into the Prism View model as a soft signal.

The extension installs automatically with the app, but it needs to be activated in your Shopify theme:

1. Settings → Integrations → Shopify card → Install Survey button (this opens your theme editor in a new tab).
2. In the theme editor, go to Checkout → Post-purchase page.
3. Click Add block (or Add app block) and pick Prism Attribution Survey.
4. Drag it where you want it on the post-purchase page.
5. Click Save.

Done. The next purchase a customer makes will show them the survey.

Map your discount codes to channels

If you give influencers, affiliates, or specific campaigns their own discount codes (INFLUENCER10, PODCAST15, etc.), tell Prism which channel each code belongs to.

Go to Settings → Discount Codes. Prism syncs your codes from Shopify automatically — you just need to assign a channel to the ones that matter.

Once mapped, the Prism View model gives a small bonus to the channel when an order is placed with that code, even if the customer's pixel journey doesn't show that channel. This is especially useful for influencer attribution, where customers often hear about you on Instagram but check out from a saved bookmark days later.

Invite your team

Go to Settings → Users and Access and click Invite user.

Roles available:

• Member — read-only access to analytics. Cannot change billing, integrations, or team. Good for marketing analysts.
• Admin — everything an Owner can do, except they can't promote or remove other Owners.
• Owner — full access. Only Owners can transfer ownership of the workspace.

Invited users get an email with a sign-up link. The invite expires after seven days.

Troubleshooting

Verify your pixel is firing

If you've been waiting more than 5 minutes and no events are appearing in the dashboard:

1. Go to Settings → Integrations and click the ? icon on the Shopify card. This opens the full setup guide.
2. The guide has an Open Customer Events button that deep-links to your Shopify admin's customer events page.
3. Find Prism Attribution Pixel in the list. Status should be Active.

If it's not Active, the most common cause is that the pixel registration in Shopify is still propagating — wait another five minutes. If it's still not active after fifteen minutes, hit Sync Now on the Shopify card; that re-registers the pixel.

If the pixel is Active in Shopify but no events appear in Prism, open your storefront in an incognito window and check your browser's network tab. You should see requests going to https://api.theprismapp.com/events. If you don't, your theme may have CSP (Content Security Policy) headers blocking the pixel — check your theme.liquid for <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy"> and add api.theprismapp.com to the connect-src directive.

"App can't be loaded" error from Shopify

This usually means a misconfiguration on Prism's end — please email hello@theprismapp.com with a screenshot. We've seen this when the Shopify app's application_url was set to a path instead of the root domain, which we've fixed, but report it if you see it again.

Orders not attributing

If you see an order in Shopify but it doesn't appear in Prism's attribution table:

1. Wait 5 minutes. Attribution runs on a 5-minute delay by design — we want the full customer journey before assigning credit.
2. Check Settings → Integrations → Shopify and verify the connection status is Connected.
3. If the order was placed before you connected Shopify, it won't be backfilled automatically.

If after 30 minutes an order still isn't in Prism, that's a webhook delivery failure. Email us with the order number and we'll investigate.

"I need to re-authorize Shopify scopes"

Occasionally Prism needs new Shopify permissions (for example, when we add a new feature that requires a scope you didn't approve when you first installed). The dashboard will pop up a re-authorization modal automatically — click Re-authorize and approve the new permissions in Shopify. Takes about 10 seconds.

This doesn't affect any of your data, and it doesn't restart any history.

Why is Prism's ROAS different from Meta's reported ROAS?

This is the most common question we get. Short answer: Meta gives 100% credit to itself for any conversion within its attribution window (usually 7-day click + 1-day view). Prism gives Meta a fractional share based on the customer's actual journey across all your channels.

If a customer saw a Meta ad, then a Google ad, then opened an email, then bought — Meta will claim that conversion in its own dashboard. Prism's last_click model would credit email (the actual last touch). Prism's linear model would split the credit four ways.

Prism's number isn't "wrong" and Meta's isn't either — they're measuring different things. Most operators we talk to find Prism's number more honest and use it for budget allocation; they still keep Meta's number for in-platform optimization.

What's next

Once you have a week or two of data in Prism, these are the things worth exploring:

• Customer Journey (left nav) — a Sankey diagram of how your customers actually find you. Click any path to see the underlying orders.
• Time to Convert — how long different channels take to drive a sale. Affiliate often shows up here as having long conversion windows.
• Funnel — session-to-purchase conversion rates by channel and device.
• Custom Attribution Models — if Last Click and Prism View aren't quite right for your business, build your own. Settings → Attribution Models.

When something is unclear, email hello@theprismapp.com. We read every message.