Four creators. One of them lost money.
Ridgeway Coffee is fabricated data, not a real account — and so are these numbers. The arithmetic is not: every figure below is produced by the same code that runs a real Yonto account.
What they spent
In March, Ridgeway paid four creators to post about their coffee. Four briefs, four fees, £1,080 in total. Between them the posts sent 1,120 people to the shop.
Most analytics stops there. A thousand clicks is not an answer to was that worth eleven hundred pounds?
What came back
The best of the four, and not the biggest audience. Tom's followers were already buying coffee — the offer matched them.
- Fee
- £400
- Revenue
- £1,230
- Customers
- 41
- Cost each
- £9.76
Comfortably worth the fee. Worth booking again — but look at what the same creator did on a different brief.
- Fee
- £250
- Revenue
- £660
- Customers
- 22
- Cost each
- £11.36
Positive, but thin. £130 kept on a £180 fee is inside the margin where a couple of refunds would flip it.
- Fee
- £180
- Revenue
- £310
- Customers
- 9
- Cost each
- £20
The same creator as Spring Reel, paid the same fee, and it lost £175. This is the line the whole page is about.
- Fee
- £250
- Revenue
- £75
- Customers
- 3
- Cost each
- £83.33
Three things this tells Ridgeway.
The best creator wasn't the biggest.
Tom sent 512 people and kept £830. Maya sent 340 and kept £410. Booked on follower count, Ridgeway would have ordered these two the other way round.
The same creator did both the second-best and the worst.
Maya appears twice, on the same fee. Spring Reel returned 2.6×; Cold Brew Launch returned 0.3×. So the question was never “is Maya good?” — it was “does this brief work?”. Attribution per campaign answers that. A ranking of creators does not.
One campaign lost £175, and nothing hid it.
Cold Brew Launch cost £250 and returned £75 from three customers — £83 to acquire each one. Blended into a monthly total it disappears completely: the four together still look like a good month at 2.1×. On its own line it is an obvious mistake not to repeat.
The losing line is the one worth paying for. A tool that only ever shows you wins is a tool you cannot use to make a decision.
How Yonto knew.
Each campaign gets one creator, one tracked link and one discount code. A sale is matched back three ways, and any one of them is enough.
- The tracked link
- A click is remembered for 30 days, so a shopper who browses now and buys on Thursday still counts.
- The discount code
- Typed at checkout. Where the store reports the order to us — Shopify here — it counts even when the shopper refused cookies.
- The store itself
- On Shopify, orders arrive server-side from the store. No browser involved, nothing to block.
Ridgeway is on Shopify. The same three paths work on WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, BigCommerce, Webflow, any site you can paste a script into, or straight from your own backend.
What this example can't show
Ridgeway's real March was probably better than £2,275. Some shoppers refused cookies, some bought on a different phone from the one they clicked on, some just remembered the name and searched for it a week later. None of those are provable, so none of them are counted.
Those sales happened. We can't prove the creator caused them, and we'd rather undercount than invent. That's why a Yonto number is safe to pay a creator on.
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