The Best of Exmoor's newsletters showed no orders in Mailchimp. A backend fix put the revenue there.

Two jobs on Upwork

The Best of Exmoor lets self-catering cottages in places like Porlock, Dulverton and Dunster, picked and visited by a small local team. It advertises on Meta and Google Ads and sends a Mailchimp newsletter.

Chris Lister first hired Shahzada, now Crisper's founder, in March 2023 to fine-tune Facebook conversion tracking, clean up GA4 and work on Google Ads conversions. His review says the issues had lasted more than two months.

In June 2024 Chris came back. He wanted better figures on how well the Mailchimp newsletters were doing. Shahzada flagged an outdated server container, wrote the developers a spec for passing customer details with each booking, and set up Google Tag Manager to send bookings to Mailchimp. By 25 June it was working in his test bookings.

Why Mailchimp still showed no orders

On 1 August 2024 Chris noticed that the last newsletters had not produced a single conversion in Mailchimp, which he thought unlikely.

Shahzada found why. Mailchimp's orders and revenue reports can't be filled from the browser; Mailchimp support confirmed they need a call from the site's backend. The tags only fed Mailchimp's activity segments, and the newsletter links carried no UTM parameters.

He wrote a spec for Mailchimp's ecommerce orders API for Chris's developers, and a UTM guide for the newsletter manager. When their first backend call went live in October, the test order still didn't show.

He found that Mailchimp credits an order to a campaign only when it carries the campaign ID from the email link, and asked for the store to use the newsletter's audience. On 11 November 2024 orders and revenue appeared in Mailchimp. The first figures included a test booking. In December Chris agreed it was working.

Still working together in 2025

In 2025 Shahzada built a Looker Studio report on blog engagement for the team. He traced missing transaction IDs in their in-house affiliate program, which their developer then fixed, and added the property and guest names to each affiliate booking.

In July 2025 Chris referred another agency to him.