Bret Lawson
Analytics & Measurement Leader | Ecommerce & Omnichannel Retail
Measurement & incrementality · Online-to-offline attribution · Forecasting · Analytics engineering · AI-native workflow
Summary
Analytics and measurement leader with 20+ years in ecommerce and omnichannel retail who finds out why the number moved, and proves it. Measurement that holds up under challenge: attribution that reaches store transactions, holdouts and tests that settle budget arguments, decompositions that sum exactly to the observed change, forecasts that finance plans against. Builds the platform underneath it (dbt mart, pipelines, dashboards, monitoring) with an AI-native workflow that lets one senior person deliver what usually takes a team. Founder before enterprise leader.
Selected Results
- Built the ecommerce master mart (dbt on BigQuery): one governed daily table unifying ERP sales, web analytics, Google Ads, media, calls, and chat, with field definitions, a drift-checked ERD, a daily quality report, and readiness gates; the single source of truth for the deck, the forecast, and every dashboard
- Delivered the platform around it solo: API ingestion (Google Ads, Contentsquare, Conductor, SimilarWeb, Datadog), 41 scheduled jobs, 75+ dashboards and readouts, and an automated weekly executive deck; 1,350 commits in eleven months on an AI-native workflow
- Architected online-to-offline attribution for a ~2,300-store retailer: cross-device identity stitching from digital journeys to ERP transactions, 30-day lookback, tiered last touch across 16 channels, ERP-calibrated; the source of truth for channel ROAS and budget allocation alongside media mix modeling
- Measured what bidding Google Shopping on store sales cost: 5% of ecommerce orders site-wide (95% interval 3% to 8%), no gain in store orders per click, and no recapture by other channels
- Built the finance forecast that finance and the weekly executive deck run on: gradient-boosted daily conversion and AOV models, holiday-tiered and walk-forward backtested; monthly, quarterly, and annual revenue within ±5%
- Showed a 27% drop in brand search clicks could not be bought back: impression share already 96%, click elasticity to bid statistically zero, and a geo holdout reading the channel at about two-thirds incremental
- Built AI-search measurement: AI Overviews cost 13% of Google organic visits in August 2026, up from 2% a year earlier, while AI assistants sent back under 3%; visits and stitched omnichannel sales by assistant, plus a 2027 impact scenario
- Decomposed a ~25% YoY organic-traffic decline into seven measured causes that sum exactly to the observed loss. Rank, the assumed culprit, explained under 1%, reframing an eight-figure revenue exposure
Core Strengths
Measurement science
attribution (multi-touch, tiered last-touch, online-to-offline), incrementality and experiment design (geo holdouts, campaign tests, difference-in-differences, event studies, Granger causality), LMDI decomposition, media mix modeling, AI-search and AI Overview measurement
Forecasting & planning
revenue and KPI forecasting, gradient-boosted models, fiscal-calendar holiday alignment, spend-scenario and sensitivity analysis, walk-forward backtesting
Analytics engineering & delivery
dbt semantic layer, BigQuery/GCP, API ingestion, scheduled pipelines, readiness and data-quality gates, anomaly detection, metric definitions; executive decks and dashboards where every number is verifiable
AI-native workflow
Claude Code as the daily analytical workflow in the IDE, MCP data connectors (Conductor, SimilarWeb, Contentsquare); AI-assisted modeling, SQL, and documentation under human review. Rule for AI in reporting: Python computes every number, the model only narrates
Technologies
Data
BigQuery, GCP, dbt, SQL, Python (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost), R, HTML/CSS/JS, PowerShell, Git
Analytics
Adobe CJA, Contentsquare, Google Analytics, Tealium, Search Console, Conductor, SimilarWeb, Datadog RUM
Marketing
Google Ads (API), Adobe Advertising, Campaign Manager, Datorama, Optimizely, Adobe Target
BI & AI
Power BI, Looker Studio, Tableau, Streamlit, R Shiny, Netlify · Claude Code, MCP connectors, VS Code
Professional Experience
Senior Manager, Digital Analytics
May 2020 – Present
Mattress Firm | Houston, TX
Ecommerce analytics owner for a ~2,300-store omnichannel retailer. Led a team of 7 analysts and developers; now sole owner of the full platform on an AI-native workflow, serving finance, marketing, merchandising, operations, and retail leadership.
Measurement & causal analysis
- Tested paid-to-organic spillover across 16 channels with first differences, partial correlation, bootstrap intervals, and Granger causality to separate incremental from cannibalized traffic
- Read a new Shopping test campaign against the prior year's best and caught it bidding on the wrong goal within a week; built a Q4 incremental-spend tracker with per-campaign-type elasticities behind the holiday plan
- Measured out-of-stock cost at product and size on user journeys, price-band contribution (traffic, conversion, price) with a Shapley split on contribution dollars, and cross-sell module economics for merchandising
- Sized an $18.2M page-speed revenue opportunity and $2.1M conversion-friction loss to set tech priorities
Planning & executive communication
- Built a CPC-based paid-search traffic engine and spend-scenario models for annual budget planning, plus an hourly intraday order forecast tracked against ERP actuals
- Delivered the 2026 off-site readout on what moved the business, each cause dated with separate 2026 and 2027 impact estimates
Governance & monitoring
- Defined the canonical KPI catalog (sales, shopping conversion, AOV, contribution dollars, stitch rate, attribution windows) so every dashboard, deck, and ad-hoc answer reconciles to the same definitions
- Wrote the dashboard house standard (metric definitions, data-integrity gates, shared date controls, formatting) and built every dashboard and the weekly deck against it, so numbers agree across every surface
- Built an anomaly-detection pipeline (robust z-scores against eight same-weekday baselines) for the funnel, paid search, and tag health, and a daily site-health dashboard from Datadog RUM in BigQuery; turned a cart-to-checkout investigation into a reusable diagnostics playbook
Director of Customer Engagement & Digital Analytics
May 2016 – April 2020
Stage Stores | Houston, TX · Promoted April 2019 · Digital Analytics Manager 2016–2019 · Omni-Channel Associate of the Year 2018
- Led omnichannel analytics for an 800+ store retailer; built cross-channel attribution integrating online and offline touchpoints to guide budget allocation and reduce customer acquisition cost
- Deployed Adobe Advertising DSP analytics with geospatial targeting, a 30%+ campaign-efficiency gain
- Segmented ecommerce performance by distance-to-store bands and connected web analytics to store foot traffic for executive omnichannel KPIs
Digital Project Lead
Dec 2013 – Mar 2016
Hisco, Inc. | Houston, TX
- Led a 400,000+ SKU ecommerce platform launch in 14 months to top-of-industry conversion benchmarks with a 20+ person cross-functional team; integrated catalog, inventory, and payment systems
Founder & Owner
Jan 2003 – Sep 2013
VectorTec | Spring, TX
- Grew a specialty ecommerce retailer to $2M+ revenue and #3 nationally in its sector
- Built fully automated invoicing, fulfillment, and reporting; applied analytics to pricing and inventory
Education & Certifications
- B.S., Life Sciences, Texas A&M University
- Business Science University: Data Science for Business (101P), Python for Data Science Automation (101P-A)