Pulse

Paid search and paid social are the primary acquisition channels for the four UK consumer websites that the group advertises: lifequotesuk.co.uk, private-health.co.uk and releasemyequity.co.uk (all published by QLG Media Ltd), plus gites.co.uk (published by gites.co.uk Ltd, a separate company under common ownership). Pulse is the operational layer that sits between the ad platforms and our internal lead-management and booking systems, providing the team with a single place to monitor cross-site campaign performance, push conversion signals back to the ad platforms, and apply automated rules that protect spend.

Specifically, Pulse:

• Monitors campaign performance — pulls keyword-, ad-group- and campaign-level performance metrics (impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, cost-per-acquisition) from the Google Ads API, Microsoft Advertising API and Meta Marketing API on a recurring schedule, and stores the normalised results in our internal database so the team can compare cross-platform performance at a glance.
• Uploads offline conversions — when an enquiry submitted through one of our comparison sites is accepted by an FCA-authorised broker in our partner network (a confirmed billable event for QLG Media), Pulse matches the original ad click identifier (gclid for Google Ads, msclkid for Microsoft Ads, fbclid for Meta) to the conversion and uploads an offline conversion event back to the originating ad platform. This gives the ad platforms ground-truth conversion data and allows their bidding algorithms to optimise toward genuinely valuable clicks rather than form-fills alone.
• Enforces spend guardrails — a scheduled job (the “keyword spend guard”) checks every active keyword every 15 minutes against same-day and rolling 7-day spend thresholds calibrated to each campaign's per-lead payout. Keywords that breach the threshold without producing conversions are paused automatically via the API, with a notification sent to the QLG Media operator and an audit row written to our internal control log.
• Surfaces search-query insights — pulls the search-query / search-term reports from each platform daily so the operator can identify queries to negate, queries to promote to exact-match positives, and emerging quote-intent language to incorporate into ad copy.
• Manages bids and budgets — exposes a UI for the operator to adjust per-keyword bids and per-campaign daily budgets and pushes those changes through to the underlying ad platforms via their official APIs.
• Maintains ad-copy compliance — each of the consumer verticals we publish in (Equity Release, Private Health Insurance, Life Insurance) has compliance rules published by the network we partner with (banned brand names, required disclaimers, prohibited claims). Pulse flags ads that would fall foul of those rules before they are submitted to the ad platform.

Pulse is used exclusively by employees and contractors of QLG Media Ltd and gites.co.uk Ltd to manage the group's own advertising campaigns and the associated lead and booking pipelines. The two companies are under common ownership; Pulse is not a software-as-a-service product and is not licensed to, resold to, made available to, or operated on behalf of any unrelated third party.

Access to Pulse is restricted by individual login credentials, with sensitive operations (e.g. publishing live ad changes, uploading conversions to ad platforms, modifying budgets) gated behind admin-level permissions and logged for audit purposes.

Pulse currently authenticates against the following ad-platform APIs, in each case using application credentials registered in QLG Media's name and OAuth refresh tokens belonging to QLG Media's own ad accounts:

• Google Ads API — used to read campaign / ad-group / keyword / search-term performance reports, upload offline conversion events, pause and resume keywords, update keyword bids, and update campaign budgets, on the group's Google Ads account. That single account hosts the campaigns for QLG Media's three lead-gen sites and for gites.co.uk Ltd, the sister company under common ownership.
• Microsoft Advertising API — used for the same set of operations on QLG Media's Microsoft Advertising account. (This integration is already live; the Google Ads equivalent is under review pending Basic Access approval at the time of writing.)
• Meta Marketing API — used for campaign monitoring, audience seeding from our first-party enquiry data (lookalike-audience input), and Conversions API event forwarding for paid-social conversion tracking.

All three integrations are configured with the minimum scopes required for the operations described above. We do not request scopes for features we do not use.

Pulse processes two distinct categories of data, kept logically separate inside the platform:

• Ad-platform telemetry — aggregated campaign, ad-group, keyword and search-term performance metrics retrieved from the ad-platform APIs. This data is reporting-grade aggregate and does not identify any individual end-user; it describes impressions, clicks, costs and conversion counts at the campaign or keyword level.
• First-party enquiry data — the contact and quote-specific details submitted by visitors to our comparison sites, captured as described in our Privacy Policy. When Pulse matches an enquiry to an ad click for the purpose of uploading an offline conversion event, only the ad click identifier and a hashed or anonymised conversion timestamp are sent to the ad platform — the visitor's name, email address, telephone number, postal address and other quote-specific details are not transmitted to Google or Microsoft.

Where an ad platform offers a feature that would require transmitting hashed customer identifiers (e.g. Google Ads' Enhanced Conversions for Leads, which accepts hashed email addresses), Pulse's default configuration is to leave that feature switched off and rely on click-ID-based attribution alone. If a hashed-customer-data feature is enabled in future, it will be enabled only after the visitor has given specific consent at the point of enquiry, and the relevant consent record will be retained in our internal database.

Pulse is a Next.js application backed by a PostgreSQL database, running on a managed Linux host operated by QLG Media. The ad-platform API integrations are implemented as separate Python microservices (one per platform) running on the same host, communicating with the Next.js front-end over an internal HTTP interface bound to localhost only.

Scheduled jobs (the keyword spend guard, conversion sync, daily report fetch, etc.) run under systemd timers on the same host and write structured audit rows to the internal database for every action they take. Application logs are retained for 30 days and are accessible only to authorised QLG Media staff.

All OAuth tokens and API credentials are stored in encrypted form in a secrets store on the same host and are never exposed to the browser front-end. Production secrets are rotated periodically and on any suspected compromise.

Pulse's use of the Google Ads API is governed by the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. In particular, QLG Media affirms that data obtained from the Google Ads API is used solely to provide and improve our internal ad-operations functions described on this page; we do not transfer Google API-derived data to third parties, use it to serve advertising, allow humans to read it other than authorised QLG Media operators investigating specific operational issues, or use it for any purpose unrelated to the operation of our own Google Ads campaigns.

Pulse's use of the Microsoft Advertising API is similarly governed by Microsoft's API terms and developer policies; QLG Media is the sole user of the data retrieved.

Questions about Pulse, the integrations it operates, or how it handles data: mail@qlgmedia.co.uk.