Quickstart Guide to Bonsai

Welcome to Bonsai. This overview is designed to help you quickly understand what Bonsai does, what data you need, and how to get live in the platform as fast as possible.

Whether you are onboarding for Business Reporting, Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), Incrementality, or Algorithms—your first step is always the same: connect your data sources so Bonsai can build a trusted measurement foundation.

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What Bonsai Helps You Do

Bonsai is a measurement and optimization platform that unifies marketing and business data to help teams:

• Understand what is driving revenue and customer growth

• Measure marketing performance across digital and offline channels

• Attribute outcomes across touchpoints (not last-click)

• Quantify true causal lift with incrementality modeling and testing

• Optimize marketing spend and bidding using algorithms trained on attributed buyers

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What You Need Before You Start

To ensure a smooth onboarding, we recommend having the following ready:

• Admin access (or credentials) for your marketing and analytics platforms

• A primary business system source of truth (POS / ecommerce / CRM)

• A clear reporting definition for core KPIs (e.g., revenue, orders, new customers)

• A point of contact from your marketing and/or data team for validation

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Get Up and Running

1. Connect your data sources

Bonsai uses secure integrations (“Connect Cards”) to ingest data from platforms such as:

• Digital marketing (Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, etc.)

• Analytics (GA4, Adobe Analytics)

• Business systems (POS / ecommerce / CRM / order management)

• Offline media (TV/OOH spend and delivery)

• Google Search Console (for branded demand insights)

Once connected, data will flow automatically into your Bonsai cloud data warehouse.

Connect to Bonsai

Securely connect your sources and destinations. Start here if you’re new to Bonsai.

Review the Data Schema

Understand required fields for business data onboarding.

Understanding Analytics

Read how we use analytics data for marketing attribution.

2. Configure your business KPIs

Business Reporting is the foundation for everything in Bonsai.

During onboarding, Bonsai works with your team to define and configure:

• Revenue and order KPIs

• New vs returning customer logic

• Custom business metrics (LTV, repeat rate, frequency)

• Aggregation rules and date definitions

3. Validate the data

Before launching measurement views, Bonsai runs a validation process to confirm:

• data completeness (missing days, gaps)

• schema and formatting consistency

• correct KPI definitions and mappings

• reconciliation against your source of truth (when available)

4. Launch measurement products

Once onboarding is complete, you can begin using Bonsai measurement views:

• Business Reporting: Executive-ready reporting on business outcomes + marketing investment

• Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): Customer journeys + fractional credit across digital touchpoints

• Incrementality (Modeling + Testing): Causal lift and ROI measurement across channels

• Budget Planner: Forecast outcomes and optimize spend allocation

• Algorithms: AI-driven bidding optimization trained on attributed buyer behavio

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Explore the APIs

Developer Docs

One place for endpoints, parameters, and examples for every Bonsai API.

Multi-Touch Attribution API

Journey and touchpoint endpoints plus fractional attribution metrics.

Business Reporting API

Spend, impressions, DMA/time dimensions, and modeled business results.

Audience Analytics API

Create, list, and retrieve audiences for activation.

Incrementality Modeling API

Modeled ROI, lift, and forecast curve data for incrementality modeling.

Help & Resources

Resources Overview

A guided index of external resources for marketers and analysts.

FAQs

Answers to common setup, authentication, platform logic, and data questions.

Troubleshooting

Common errors and how to fix them quickly.

Release Notes

What’s new in the APIs and documentation.

Pro tip: Bookmark the Developer Docs index for quick navigation across all API references.