Automated Lead and Ad Reporting for a Leading University

Context

About this project

The university runs Meta ads for several departments and programs. Two teams had the same core problem: the data existed inside Meta, but the people who needed it did not see it in time. The program team behind an entrepreneurship program for women was recruiting through Meta lead forms, and the Computer Science department wanted to know how its ad budget was performing. The goal was simple, put the right numbers in the right inbox every morning, with no manual work.

Challenge

The challenge

• Recruitment leads sat inside Meta, so getting them meant logging in and downloading them by hand
• Meta only keeps lead form submissions available for download for 90 days, so the team had no permanent record
• Follow-up depended on someone remembering to check for new leads
• Department management had to open Ads Manager or wait for a monthly report to see how the budget was being spent

Approach

What I built

1. 1

   Lead capture into a client-owned sheet

   Set up a Meta lead ad with an Instant Form collecting name, gender, phone, email and entrepreneurial status, whether the applicant already runs a business or wants to start one. Every submission syncs automatically to a private Google Sheet that the university owns, so lead data stays in a restricted sheet rather than a third-party tool.

2. 2

   A daily 10:00 AM lead digest

   Every morning at 10:00 AM Dhaka time, an n8n workflow reads the sheet, keeps only the rows not yet sent and skips Meta's test leads. It builds one HTML email with a clean table and sends it through SendGrid to the program lead, with the wider team in CC. One digest a day, instead of one email per lead, lets the team work through new leads in a single sitting.

3. 3

   No duplicates, no empty emails

   After sending, n8n stamps each row with a timestamp, so no lead is ever emailed twice. On days with no new leads, nothing is sent at all.

4. 4

   A daily ad account email for management

   A second scheduled n8n workflow pulls the previous day's results from the Meta Marketing API, totals spend and results across the Computer Science department's ad account with a breakdown by campaign, and sends a short, readable summary to the department's management list.

5. 5

   Planned, built and tested with Claude

   Used Claude to plan the campaign, write the lead form copy, design and code both workflows, test and debug them, and document them. The lead digest was tested end to end with dummy data before go-live, then the sheet was cleaned so only real leads remain.

Results

Outcome

• Lead access moved from manual downloads with a 90-day limit to an automatic daily email backed by a permanent sheet record
• Same-day follow-up on every new lead from the 10:00 AM digest, instead of whenever someone remembered to check
• Department management sees how the ad budget is being spent every day, not at month end, without logging in to Ads Manager
• Problems such as a paused campaign or a rising cost per result surface within 24 hours
• Marketing and management now discuss the same numbers, from the same source
• The pattern, capture, store, summarise, deliver, is reusable, so the next setup starts from a tested workflow