A Daily Analytics Briefing for Editorial Teams

The problem

Editorial teams at independent publishers need to know how yesterday’s stories performed and how the business is trending, but they don’t have time to log into four different dashboards to piece it together. Data existed in GA4, Pelcro, and Cakemail. Nobody was looking at all of it, because nobody had time to.

Approach

A scheduled pipeline pulls from all four sources every morning: pageviews and traffic sources from GA4, subscription and paid-member activity from Pelcro, and newsletter open/click performance from Cakemail. Rather than dropping raw numbers into an email, the pipeline uses the Gemini API to generate a short plain-language summary highlighting what actually matters that day, before the full metrics breakdown.

Tools

Google Cloud Functions, scheduled via GCP’s built-in scheduler. GA4, Pelcro, and Cakemail as data sources. Gemini API for narrative summarization.

Result

A daily email, delivered automatically to editorial and leadership stakeholders, covering: top story performance against a 30-day baseline, newsletter open/click rates against trend, and subscriber growth (email and paid) with day-over-day and 7-day averages. No login, no dashboard, no manual pull required.

What this demonstrates

Turning data into something people actually use is a different skill from building the pipeline itself. This project required both: the integration work to unify three data sources on a schedule, and the judgment to know that a narrative summary, not a wall of numbers, is what gets read by a non-technical audience on a Monday morning.