Ever chased a bug for days, only to discover the "bug" was actually the platform working exactly as designed? That happened to me building a client reporting pipeline. The lesson stuck.
Here's what nobody tells you about pulling marketing data from multiple ad platforms: the hard part was never the dashboard. It was everything underneath it.
The Setup That Looked Simple on Paper
The brief sounded easy. Pull spend, clicks, and conversions from Google Ads and Meta. Store it. Display it in a chart. A junior dev could knock this out in a sprint, I figured.
Reality disagreed. Google Ads API enforces operation quotas per developer token, and those quotas scale differently depending on account tier. Meanwhile, Meta's Marketing API throttles based on a rolling usage score tied to the ad account itself, not your app.
