Executive summary:
Pearson Qualifications previously split paid media across its internal team and three media agencies, with no consolidated view of campaign performance. Reports took hours to assemble and it ate into the time the team could spend on doing analysis and providing insights. Pearson used Funnel to manage campaign data and reporting within the team and has since brought day-to-day agency work in-house. The team now manages four times as many ad accounts without increasing reporting overhead, and automated reporting saves the team 15 to 20 hours each month.
Key results:
- Manages 4x as many ad accounts in-house without increasing the reporting burden.
- Replaced three agency relationships with an in-house paid media operation and removed the associated agency fees.
- Saves 15 to 20 hours each month by automatically populating campaign reports.
Company profile:
Pearson is a global learning company with around 17,000 employees worldwide and £3.6 billion in sales in 2025. The team featured in this case study sits within Pearson Qualifications, which provides school qualifications, vocational qualifications and related learning resources. Kirsty Capes, Head of Performance Marketing at Pearson, leads a paid media team that manages campaigns from strategy through to reporting and recommendations.
The challenge: Fragmented reporting that took hours to assemble
Campaign and portfolio managers briefed the paid media team, which then coordinated activity across its own specialists and three agencies in different markets. Different channels within the same campaign could be managed by different teams.
“We would run some channels while an agency ran others, so the reporting was scattered,” Kirsty says. “There was no consolidated view of everything happening in one campaign.”
Bringing those results together left less time for the work the team was hired to do. “All of the numbers had to be pulled in manually before we could add commentary or recommendations,” Kirsty says. “It took hours. It was long, boring work and we should have been spending that time optimizing campaigns.”
The resulting reports only contained what had been prepared in advance. A follow-up question about a specific date range, channel or campaign sent the team back into the advertising platforms to find the answer.
The reporting setup also depended on technical support outside the paid media team. When that support was no longer available, the team could not maintain the setup and the dashboards broke. “It was a complete nightmare,” Kirsty says.
The solution: Bringing campaign data and reporting into Funnel
Pearson already used Funnel to move advertising data into BigQuery, but had not explored its reporting capabilities.
“Funnel was already moving our advertising data into BigQuery, but we didn’t have the skills within the team to use it for reporting,” Kirsty says. “When the previous setup broke, we needed a way to deliver reporting and give stakeholders access to the data. My view was: why are we not using Funnel when it already has this capability?”
Over the following eight months, the team built a suite of dashboards directly in Funnel. Custom dimensions organize the data by portfolio and website and give the team a consolidated campaign view across channels.
The dashboards are published and used during campaign reviews. When stakeholders ask about a different date range, channel or campaign, the team can explore it directly from the dashboard.
The results: Reporting that keeps up with the team
Bringing campaign data and reporting together in Funnel gave Pearson the confidence to move more paid media in-house.
“We now manage four times as many ad accounts,” Kirsty says. “Having Funnel in place meant we didn’t have to worry about whether reporting could keep up as we expanded.”
“We have removed all three agencies from day-to-day work,” she continues. “One contract in particular was very expensive, so taking that work in-house has created cost efficiencies as well.”
The dashboards populate automatically. This saves the team hours each month, which its specialists can spend interpreting performance and deciding what to do next.
“Funnel saves us 15 to 20 hours a month, so that alone pays for itself,” Kirsty says. “It gives us more headspace to add value through recommendations, insights and analysis.”
Stakeholders no longer have to ask the paid media team for every update. “They can access the dashboards whenever they want,” Kirsty says. “They feel more connected to the campaigns and can see what is happening without sending a request to our team.
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