Case study · Measurement & Data Infrastructure
Reports nobody opened became the tool everybody uses.
A fast-growing lead generation business whose sales close through its call centre and CRM.
The situation
Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, the CRM and the phone call tracking software each held a piece of the truth, and none of them talked to each other. The reports that were meant to join the pieces were built in Excel, and as the business grew the files grew with it, until opening one became slow enough to think twice about.
Decisions that needed fresh numbers ran on stale ones, because assembling the fresh view was manual, slow and painful.
The assumption
Reporting was treated as a formatting job: the numbers all exist somewhere, someone just has to paste them together each week. Slow spreadsheets were accepted as the price of thoroughness, and the friction was nobody's problem to fix because the data itself was fine.
What the evidence showed
Usage told the real story: reports that take minutes to open do not get opened. The business was steering channel and budget decisions on partial, out-of-date views, not because the analysis was hard but because the plumbing was. Once GA4, ads, CRM and call data were integrated in BigQuery, the same questions that took a morning to answer took seconds, and the answers included offline sales the spreadsheets had never joined correctly.
What we did
- i.Made the collection layer trustworthy first: GA4 tracking across every digital touchpoint, with the granularity the business questions actually required.
- ii.Integrated GA4 with BigQuery so web, ads, CRM and call-tracking data could be stored, joined and analysed in one place, in near real time.
- iii.Merged online behaviour with offline sales outcomes, bridging the gap between what the website reported and what the call centre closed.
- iv.Built Looker Studio dashboards on top: fast, visual, and designed around decisions rather than exports.
Results
Report adoption
after launch vs the Excel baseline
Report adoption rose 60% once the dashboards replaced the spreadsheets, which is the metric that matters: data only changes decisions when people actually look at it. The joined dataset now answers cross-channel questions the silos never could, and reporting stopped being a weekly production task.
The lesson
Data nobody opens is data you do not have. Speed is part of measurement.