Marketing Data & Reporting Automation

The report someone types up every morning, collected, normalised and delivered automatically instead. Every figure traceable to its source, every run checked before it sends.

Automated Reporting Competitor Monitoring Google Ads API Data Pipelines

The report that costs a morning

Most marketing teams have one. A spreadsheet or an email that someone assembles at the same time every day or every week by opening a dozen tabs, reading numbers off screens and typing them into a fixed format. Ad spend by campaign. Yesterday's leads against the CRM. Competitor prices or rates from the comparison sites. It gets done because the business needs it, and it is fragile because a person is the pipeline: figures get misread, a column gets skipped on a busy day, and nobody can say where last Tuesday's number came from.

I replace that process with a scheduled collector that reads the same sources, produces the same report in the same format, and lands it before the working day starts. The person who used to build it reads it instead.

This is not a dashboard product or a monthly service. It is a one-off build, scoped around the report you already read, with the code and documentation handed over at the end.

What I build

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Scheduled reporting pipelines

Google Ads and Microsoft Ads pulled through their APIs, GA4, CRM exports and spreadsheets, joined and normalised into the report you already use. Delivered by email, into a Google Sheet, or as a file on a shared drive, at the time you need it.

📡

Competitor price monitoring and tracking

Daily competitor price tracking from the comparison platforms, marketplaces and public pages your market is priced against, normalised across each site's own naming, ranked the way your team already ranks them. Built once for your market, no subscription. How competitor price monitoring works, and the savings rate case study.

🔔

Alerting and budget pacing

Scripts that watch the accounts so you do not have to: spend pacing against monthly budgets, conversion volume dropping below its normal range, a source returning nothing. A message when something needs a person, silence when it does not.

🧱

One reconciled view: marketing analytics you can act on

Google, Microsoft, GA4 and your CRM giving three different numbers for "conversions" is the normal state of an account. A single reconciled dataset, mapped to your sales stages from enquiry to closed-won, so monthly reports roll up into quarterly reviews without a reconciliation argument first.

How every build is done

Start from the report you already read. The format is not redesigned. If your team reads ten tables in a fixed order, the automated version is ten tables in that order, so it is usable on the first morning and trusted by the second.
Treat every source as its own problem. One platform paginates, one renders after load, one splits by URL, one serves different content to automated clients. Each gets its own collection strategy and is tested to return the full inventory, not the first page.
Normalise, and keep the original. "1 Year", "12 months" and "Fixed 12 month" land in the same row. Each figure still carries the source's own wording, so a number that looks wrong can be traced in seconds rather than argued about.
Make the report check itself. Every run writes a health block naming each source and what it returned. The send step checks the data date first, and if the figures are not fresh the subject line says so and the email opens with the date it actually holds.
Engineer the reliability rather than hoping for it. Two independent schedulers, retries within each run, and a finish time hours before the report is due, so a single failure has several chances to correct itself before anyone sees it.
Hand it over. Documentation of what runs, where, and how to change it, plus the code. You own it. There is no lock-in and nothing that only I can operate.

What it does not do

It does not get you data you are not entitled to. Where a platform deliberately withholds figures from automated clients, usually because they originate with a commercial data provider, I document the gap rather than engineer around it. The right route to licensed data is a licence, and the report says on its face which slice of the market it does not cover.

It does not make the decision. An automated report gives your team the market or the account at nine o'clock instead of eleven, with figures they can trust and trace. What to do about a competitor moving a rate is still a person's call.

It does not need a warehouse. If the report is an email or a sheet today, it stays an email or a sheet. A dashboard is worth building when someone will open it every day; otherwise it is an expensive screen nobody looks at.

It is not a retainer. Sources change their layouts occasionally and the collector for that source will need a fix. The health block tells you the same morning, and the fix is a small one-off job, not a monthly fee.

It is sometimes the wrong tool. If you need a number once, do it by hand. Automation pays back on repetition: the report that goes out every working day, the check that runs every hour, the export that happens every month for years.

Recent work

Automating a daily competitor rate report for a UK savings provider

A product team opened around a dozen pages across four comparison platforms every morning and typed the best rates into ten ranked tables. The brief looked like a scraping job and turned out to be four separate collection problems, one of which was a platform withholding licensed rates from automated clients.

Two weeks from brief to live, replacing around two and a half hours a day of manual collection. Around 460 products collected per run across twelve source URLs, normalised into the same ten tables, emailed before the team starts work. Every figure carries its bank, platform, original term wording and minimum deposit. Health block per source, stale-date warning in the subject line, two schedulers, three retries.

Read the case study

Reporting inside PPC engagements

The same tooling runs underneath the paid search work: a Microsoft Ads build for a home services company shipped with a BI dashboard consolidating spend, leads and revenue, and the checkout tracking rebuild for an airport parking operator produced the first cost per booking the business could reconcile against its own system.

Questions

What sources can you automate reporting from?

Google Ads and Microsoft Ads through their APIs, GA4, CRM exports, spreadsheets and public web pages such as comparison sites and competitor price lists. If a person can open it every morning and read a number off it, it can usually be collected on a schedule instead.

Do I need a data warehouse or a BI tool?

Usually not. Most of the reports I replace are an email or a spreadsheet someone reads at a fixed time, and the automated version arrives the same way. A dashboard is worth building when someone will actually look at it; otherwise it is a screen nobody opens.

What happens when a source changes its layout?

The collector for that source returns fewer products or none, and the health block in the next report names it the same morning. The fix is a small one-off job on that source, not a monthly retainer. Every build ships with documentation and the code so the fix can be made by anyone.

Is competitor rate or price monitoring allowed?

I collect what a platform publishes to an ordinary visitor, and I do not engineer around a source that deliberately withholds data from automated clients. Where figures originate with a commercial data provider, the right route is a licence, and the report says so plainly rather than quietly under-reporting. This is a working practice, not legal advice.

How is reporting automation priced?

As a fixed-scope, fixed-price project after a short scoping call, the same as everything else I do. No retainer. If the report you want is a one-off export, I will say so and suggest you do it by hand.

Tell me about the report you are still building by hand

Send me what it looks like and where the numbers come from. I will tell you plainly whether it is worth automating, what the build would involve, and a fixed price for it. Based in Manchester, working with clients anywhere in the UK.

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