Introducing PlanPulse: health checking software for marketing agencies
PlanPulse is health checking software for marketing agencies. It connects your media plan to your live ad accounts so that planned spend, actual spend, and campaign setup are continuously checked against each other — and it tells you when something has drifted, rather than waiting for you to go looking.
This is the first post on this blog, so it's worth explaining what we've built, the problem it solves, and who I am.
What problem does PlanPulse actually solve?
Media plans live in spreadsheets. Campaigns live in ad platforms. Nothing connects the two.
That gap is the whole problem.
You build a plan in a spreadsheet: channels, budgets, flight dates, weekly splits. It's accurate on the day you build it. Then campaigns go live, and the plan and reality begin to separate immediately — a channel launches three days late, a daily budget gets set where a lifetime budget was intended, a client shifts $4,000 between channels mid-flight, a conversion event gets renamed.
None of those events write themselves back into the spreadsheet. Somebody has to notice, and then somebody has to remember to update it.
So the plan quietly stops being true. And because the plan is what you report against, invoice against, and pace against, everything downstream inherits the error.
Why do the quiet mistakes cost the most?
Campaign mistakes are rarely dramatic. They're small, silent, and they compound daily until someone looks.
A misconfigured budget doesn't throw an error. A pixel that stopped firing doesn't send you an email. A campaign pacing at 140% of target looks completely normal inside Ads Manager, because Ads Manager has no idea what your plan said.
These errors share three properties that make them expensive:
- They happen quietly. There's no alert, because nothing is technically broken.
- They happen fast. A daily-budget mix-up can burn through a fortnight of budget in four days.
- They're found late. Usually at month-end reconciliation, or — far worse — by the client.
By the time a variance shows up on an invoice, you have no good options left. You can absorb the overspend, or you can have an uncomfortable conversation. Neither is a strategy.
The fix isn't more discipline. Agencies already have discipline. The fix is closing the gap between the plan and the platform so the check happens automatically.
Who am I, and why did I build this?
I'm Cam Brewitt. I run OneOneThree Digital, a marketing agency in New Zealand, and I've spent several years in agencies doing account management and paid media.
PlanPulse came out of that work, not out of a product roadmap.
Running several client campaigns at once is a specific kind of load. It isn't that any single task is difficult — it's that the tasks are numerous, recurring, spread across platforms, and entirely dependent on a human remembering them at the right moment. Check pacing on six accounts. Confirm the pixel is still firing on the one that relaunched. Rebuild last month's report. Reconcile spend against the plan. Raise the invoice. Repeat.
I found the same three failures over and over, across accounts and across agencies:
- The media plan was out of date within a fortnight of launch.
- Setup errors were caught by whoever happened to look, not by any system.
- Reporting and invoicing were manual reconstructions of data that already existed somewhere.
Every agency I know solves this with spreadsheets, calendar reminders, and the diligence of good people under time pressure. That works right up until it doesn't — and when it fails, it fails on a client account, in public.
So we built the thing we wanted: a layer above the ad platforms that holds the plan, watches the accounts, and raises its hand.
How does PlanPulse work?
PlanPulse works in four steps: connect your ad accounts, load your media plan, let the checks run, then act on what surfaces.
1. Connect your ad accounts
Connect Google Ads, Meta Ads and GA4. Spend and performance data sync automatically, so your dashboards reflect live numbers rather than a CSV somebody exported on Tuesday. See platform integrations.
2. Load the media plan
Build a plan in the media plan builder — channels, budgets, flight dates, weekly splits across paid digital, organic, OOH and traditional — or import the spreadsheet you already have. You don't have to re-key a plan that already exists.
3. The checks run on their own
This is the part that matters.
- Pacing compares actual spend to planned spend daily, and forecasts end-of-flight spend from current run rate. See pacing analysis.
- Action points generate from the plan itself — SET UP tasks dated backwards from go-live, HEALTH CHECK tasks recurring weekly — so per-channel checks are scheduled rather than remembered.
- Anomaly detection watches CPA and spend against a rolling baseline and flags deviations while there's still budget left to steer.
- A daily AI briefing lands in Microsoft Teams or your inbox each morning covering overdue tasks, pacing alerts, anomalies and upcoming launches across every client.
4. Act, report, invoice
Ask the AI chat agent a plain-English question about any account. Export a client-ready PDF report. Generate an invoice with commission calculated off actual spend for the exact campaign period. The data is already there — you shouldn't have to rebuild it by hand.
Who is PlanPulse for?
PlanPulse is built for marketing agencies running paid media across multiple clients at once.
It fits best if you recognise most of this:
- You manage somewhere between 3 and 50 client accounts.
- You plan across more than one channel, and often across paid, organic and traditional media together.
- Your media plans live in spreadsheets today.
- Pacing and setup quality are somebody's job, but nobody's system.
- Reporting and invoicing take real hours every month.
The person who gets the most out of it is usually the account manager or media buyer who is personally accountable when a campaign goes sideways.
Who is it not for?
Being straight about this saves everyone time.
PlanPulse is not an ad buying platform or a DSP. You still plan and optimise inside Google Ads and Meta — PlanPulse sits above them.
It is not full agency finance software. It generates client invoices against media spend; it doesn't run your general ledger, payroll or WIP.
It is not built for in-house teams running a single brand. The whole design assumes a book of clients, with the comparison and prioritisation that implies.
And it doesn't currently handle RFP workflows, insertion orders or vendor bill reconciliation for traditional media buying. If broadcast IO management is the core of your business, a dedicated buying system will serve you better.
What's next
We're writing up the things we learned the expensive way — the setup mistakes that quietly break pacing, how daily and lifetime budgets cause accidental overspend, catching CPA anomalies before the client does, and how to structure a multi-channel media plan that survives contact with a live campaign.
If any of the above sounds like your Tuesday, there's a free plan and you can connect a real account in a few minutes.