About Gardening Express
Gardening Express is one of the UK's largest independent online garden centres. Founded in the late 1990s, the company started with a straightforward observation. The plants available through mail order at the time weren't good enough, and there was room to do better.
What started as a small operation grew steadily through a focus on quality, service, and value. By 2005 the business had expanded into a large premises with its own nursery and a growing team. Today, Gardening Express ships thousands of plants every week across the UK and Europe.
The company sells everything from bedding plants, perennials, and shrubs to fruit trees, houseplants, compost, and garden tools. Their customers range from hobbyist gardeners to professional landscapers, and they've supplied plants to designers exhibiting at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
Why Platform-Reported Numbers Weren't Enough
Before ThoughtMetric, Gardening Express was running into a problem familiar to most e-commerce brands running paid ads across multiple platforms.
"Every platform uses its own attribution model and tends to over-attribute success to its own campaigns. This meant all our platforms, especially Google Ads, were reporting significantly more revenue than what actually landed in our bank account. The situation with Google Ads became particularly frustrating around Q1 2025; our ROAS kept climbing, which looked great on paper, but we eventually realized there was no actual uplift in total sales. We knew we needed an independent source of truth that could provide advanced attribution across all channels. We needed a tool that could accurately guide our decisions on which campaigns and product types were truly performing at the bottom of the funnel."
ThoughtMetric gave Gardening Express a single, independent view of performance across every channel, so budget decisions could be based on real revenue instead of inflated platform numbers.
ThoughtMetric Was an Easy Decision
"We were first introduced to ThoughtMetric by the agency that manages our tracking. We were searching for a simple, cost-effective system that still offered sophisticated attribution modeling. Our agency recommended ThoughtMetric based on their own positive experience, which gave us the confidence to start the conversation."
After implementing ThoughtMetric, Gardening Express gained clearer visibility into which channels were driving sales, without the overhead of an enterprise-priced platform or a long-term contract.
Hands-On Support When It Matters
When questions came up, the Gardening Express team didn't have to answer them alone.
"The ThoughtMetric Customer Support team has been absolutely fantastic to work with. They are extremely responsive and always manage to pinpoint the root cause of any tracking issues. It has been a pleasure to work with them, and it is great to see the tool evolving so quickly."
Responsive, hands-on support is something ThoughtMetric customers consistently highlight. You can read more about what that looks like in practice here.
How Gardening Express Uses ThoughtMetric Day to Day
The Gardening Express team didn't just adopt ThoughtMetric for one use case, it became part of their daily workflow.
"As heavy users of the platform, we utilize almost every feature available. We spend the majority of our time within the channel reporting and filtering options. ThoughtMetric really listened to us when we asked for Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising labels as a filter, and they built that out in less than two months. Custom Reports have also been a game changer because we can now see all our essential day-to-day data in a single view. This includes everything from channel breakdowns and product insights to LTV and order volume."
The Custom Reports feature lets the Gardening Express team skip the manual filtering and see everything that matters in one place, cutting down the time spent pulling data across multiple views.
How Better Attribution Reshaped Their Ad Strategy
With an independent source of truth in place, the Gardening Express team started making changes to how they allocated budget across campaigns and channels.
"Since switching to ThoughtMetric, we have been able to restructure our campaigns to gain better control over different product categories. The platform has been especially helpful in identifying which campaigns and ad groups are truly the top performers. By comparing ThoughtMetric data to Google Ads, we were able to see the real discrepancies and identify overlooked channels. This clarity has allowed us to confidently shift our budgets toward what is actually working."
But the insights didn't stop at campaign performance.
Catching What Would Have Gone Unnoticed
Better visibility into attribution data doesn't just help with budget allocation. It can also surface problems that would otherwise fly under the radar.
"Another super quick and unexpected win was identifying through the reports that we were victims of an affiliate fraud which we immediately mitigated."
Without independent attribution data, issues like this can go undetected for months, costing money before anyone notices.
Ready to See It for Yourself?
If you're dealing with the same platform reporting gaps Gardening Express was, ThoughtMetric can help. Book a demo to learn more.
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