Case Study · E-commerce

From eight hours of
spreadsheet work to
a single source of truth

Shopify, Google Ads, Meta and the CRM each told a different story about performance, and reconciling them by hand was eating a day a week. We built automated pipelines into BigQuery and modelled the data with dbt, so the marketing team could trust the numbers instead of assembling them.

<30 min Weekly reporting time
4 Platforms unified
Daily Automated refresh
All client work

Sector

E-commerce

Service

Data Engineering

Stack

Platform APIs → BigQuery → dbt

01

The Challenge

An e-commerce brand was running paid media across Google Ads and Meta, selling through Shopify, and managing customer relationships in a separate CRM. Each system had its own definition of a conversion, its own timezone, and no shared identifier tying any of them together.

Every week, someone on the marketing team pulled exports from each platform by hand and stitched them into a spreadsheet to answer basic questions: what did we spend, what did we make, and which channel actually drove it. That process took the better part of a working day, and by the time the report was finished, the numbers were already stale.

Shopify Google Ads Meta CRM
Nobody was lying with the numbers. There just wasn't one number for the team to agree on in the first place.

The team didn't need another dashboard. They needed one warehouse everyone pulled from, built so the numbers reconciled by construction, rather than by someone's manual effort every Monday morning.

02

The Solution

We built automated pipelines that pull data directly from each platform's API on a schedule — Shopify orders, Google Ads and Meta spend and performance, and CRM records — landing it all in Google BigQuery as a single raw layer.

On top of that raw layer, we used dbt to build tested, documented transformation models: consistent definitions of revenue, spend and acquisition cost that every report downstream now pulls from, instead of each analyst deriving their own.

API-Based Extraction

Automated pipelines pulling Shopify, Google Ads, Meta and CRM data on a schedule, replacing manual exports with a repeatable process.

Centralised in BigQuery

Raw data from every source landed in one warehouse, so there's a single place the numbers live before anyone starts analysing them.

dbt Transformation Models

Consistent, tested reporting tables built with dbt, so “revenue” and “acquisition cost” mean the same thing everywhere they're used.

Automated Validation & Monitoring

Data quality checks and error monitoring built into the pipeline, catching problems before they reach a report instead of after.

Connected to the BI Platform

The warehouse feeding the client's BI tool directly, so reporting updates itself instead of waiting on a manual pull.

03

The Outcome

Weekly reporting preparation dropped from around eight hours to under thirty minutes, because the reconciliation work that used to happen by hand now happens automatically, every day, before anyone opens a dashboard.

The time saved was the visible win. The bigger one was that the team started trusting the numbers enough to actually act on them.

With one source of truth across marketing and sales data, the team could finally analyse channel performance against actual revenue, rather than each platform's own, generally optimistic, definition of a conversion.

0 min

Weekly reporting time, down from roughly 8 hours prepared by hand

0

Previously disconnected platforms unified into one warehouse

Daily

Automated refreshes, replacing a manual weekly export

The Service Behind It

This was a data
engineering build,
start to finish

The same approach works for any business pulling data from multiple platforms: automated extraction, a proper warehouse, and dbt models the whole team can trust, instead of another spreadsheet.

View Analytics Services How We Work

API Extraction

Automated, scheduled pulls from every platform you report on.

Centralised Warehouse

One place raw data lands, in BigQuery or the warehouse of your choice.

dbt Modelling

Tested, documented tables that define your metrics once, not per analyst.

Validation & Monitoring

Automated checks that catch data problems before your team does.

Your Turn

Still stitching reports
together by hand?

If your team is spending hours a week reconciling exports from different platforms, that's exactly the kind of problem a proper pipeline solves permanently.

hello@superflows.co.uk