Skip to main content
A card is the unit of work inside the Nerve Centre. Each card represents one question asked of one data source over one defined time window - for example, “Shopify Total Revenue, last 30 days versus the prior 30 days” or “Google Ads Zero-Conversion Spend, last 30 days”. The card is the smallest object that has a stable identity, a stable query, and a stable visual treatment. The merchant trusts a card the same way they trust a row in a financial report: same definition every day, same window logic every day, same colour rules every day. A card is not a chart. A chart is one of the things a card can render. A card is the wrapper: identity, metadata, query binding, render rules, alert binding, and sentiment binding.

​
Metrics types

The cards in the Nerve Centre catalogue are classified into three metrics types.

​
Key Metrics cards

Key Metrics cards answer the questions you ask of a connector on a typical day - not weekly, not quarterly, but daily. They are editorially curated by the Vortex IQ product team in collaboration with the merchant base, capped at roughly 15 percent of each connector’s card set. A metric becomes a Key Metric after two checks:
  1. Universality - does every merchant on this connector ask this question regularly?
  2. Decision impact - does the answer change what the merchant does today?
Key Metrics cards render in a larger tile at the top of each category group. They carry a coloured accent border that picks up the card’s sentiment colour. They surface in the Executive view (the cross-connector morning scan) and lead every scheduled briefing. Example Key Metrics cards per connector:
  • Shopify - Total Revenue, Order Count, Refund Rate, AOV, Conversion Rate
  • Stripe - Authorisation Rate, Successful Charges, Decline Rate by Reason
  • Google Ads - ROAS, Spend, Cost per Acquisition, Zero-Conversion Spend, Wasted Spend
  • Klaviyo - Active Subscribers, Open Rate, Click Rate, Revenue Per Recipient
  • Datadog - Checkout Latency p95, Error Rate, Open Incidents

​
Supporting Metrics cards

Supporting Metrics cards are the long-tail breakdowns that fill out each connector’s card set: ROAS by Campaign, Spend by Device, Conversions by Hour, CPC by Region, and hundreds more. Supporting does not mean unimportant - a merchant investigating a performance drop needs the breakdowns. What changes is the visual treatment: smaller tiles in the secondary grid, excluded from the Executive view by default, snapshotted weekly rather than daily in Vortex Memory.

​
Cross-Platform Metrics cards

Cross-Platform Metrics cards join data from two or more connectors to compute a value that no single connector could produce alone. The card’s cross_channel flag is true and the derive_from field lists the source connectors. Examples:
  • Active Ads on Out-of-Stock SKUs (derive_from: [google_ads, shopify]) - for each SKU advertised in Google Ads in the last 24 hours, what is the current Shopify inventory level? When spend > 0 and inventory == 0, you are paying for clicks on out-of-stock product.
  • Revenue at Risk from active incidents (derive_from: [stripe, shopify]) - joins Stripe decline spikes with Shopify refund spikes inside the same window to surface payment-vendor incidents before they appear in your support queue.
  • LCP-to-Conversion Correlation (derive_from: [website_performance, google_analytics]) - maps Largest Contentful Paint scores to session conversion rates by landing page.
Cross-Platform Metrics cards are roughly 4 to 7 percent of the catalogue and render in a larger tile with a distinctive connecting-lines icon. Clicking a Cross-Platform Metrics card routes you into the corresponding Vortex Mind diagnostic report.

​
Card categories

Within each connector’s tab, cards are grouped by category. The categories mirror the way the vendor’s own admin presents its data, so the metric you know from Google Ads or Shopify’s own dashboard sits in the same logical place inside the Nerve Centre. Common categories across connectors:

​
Chart types

Each card renders one of the following chart types, chosen to match the shape of the data:

​
Real card examples

​
ROAS (Google Ads) - Key Metrics

The ROAS card (gads_roas) is a gauge chart in the Executive Overview category. It displays Return on Ad Spend - revenue divided by ad spend - for the selected time window compared to the prior comparable period. Across most ad-platform connectors (AdRoll, Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Microsoft Ads, and others), ROAS is consistently a Key Metrics card because it is the primary signal of whether paid acquisition is profitable.
ROAS of 4.0× means £4 of revenue per £1 of ad spend. Below 2.0× is unprofitable for most direct-to-consumer brands after accounting for cost of goods, fulfilment, and overheads.

​
Zero-Conversion Spend (Google Ads) - Key Metrics, gads_zero_conversion_spend

This kpi card surfaces the total spend on enabled campaigns that produced zero primary conversions over the last 30 days. The formula sums cost_micros ÷ 1,000,000 for every campaign where metrics.conversions = 0 and campaign.status = ENABLED. The alert fires at any non-zero value; an action prompt fires at spend above the threshold (default: $500 per 30-day window). A worked example from the source data: a UK fashion brand with £27,400 total Google Ads spend had £680 of zero-conversion spend across two campaigns - a Display Remarketing campaign with too-small an audience (£420) and a mismatched “vintage 90s” search campaign (£260). Pausing both was a five-minute action recovering 2.5 percent of total spend.

​
ROAS Drop Alert (Google Ads) - Key Metrics, gads_alert_roas_drop

An alert_list card with data_type: Real-time. The alert fires when today’s ROAS drops more than 25 percent versus the average of the same day-of-week over the prior seven days. The card is suppressed before 14:00 local time to avoid false positives from incomplete morning data. It sits alongside Conversion Drop Alert and CPC Spike Alert as the first-responder cards for a Google Ads account going wrong.

​
Card metadata

Every card carries a fixed metadata shape used by the Nerve Centre renderer, the alert engine, Vortex Mind, Ask Viq, and the documentation generator. Key fields:
1

Open the Nerve Centre

Click Nerve Centre in the left navigation. The connector tab row appears at the top of the dashboard.
2

Select a connector tab

Click the tab for the connector you want - for example, Google Ads, Shopify, or Klaviyo. If the connector is not yet connected, the tab shows a “Connect to unlock” placeholder.
3

Browse by category

Cards are grouped by category. Expand any category group to see all cards in it. Use the Key Metrics only filter (top-right) to collapse the view to Key Metrics cards only.
4

Open a card's full documentation

Click the info icon on any card tile to open its documentation page. The doc page covers the metric definition, calculation formula, source field trace, worked example, sibling cards, and FAQs.
Use the Executive view toggle (dashboard header) to see Key Metrics and Cross-Platform Metrics cards across every connected connector at once. This is the fastest way to spot which connectors have active alerts or amber metrics.