Understory, operating as a growth agency for Lindus Health, faced significant operational challenges in tracking and visualising lead engagement across their multi-channel outreach campaigns. The organisation ran sophisticated outreach efforts spanning both email and LinkedIn channels, managing multiple campaign types including "Always On" and "Segmented" approaches across diverse market segments such as Biotech and Medical Devices. However, these campaigns generated substantial volumes of engagement data that remained siloed within individual platforms—primarily Instantly.ai for email campaigns and various LinkedIn outreach tools.
Without a unified view of campaign performance, the team struggled to answer critical business questions: How many active leads were being pushed to new campaigns each week? What was the true conversion rate from activated lead to booked meeting? Which campaigns delivered positive reply rates that justified continued investment? The absence of consolidated, real-time metrics meant that strategic decisions were often made with incomplete information, and opportunities to optimise underperforming campaigns were identified too late. Lindus Health required a centralised dashboard solution that could aggregate data from multiple sources, provide both high-level KPIs and granular campaign breakdowns, and enable dynamic filtering by segment and campaign type—all whilst maintaining data accuracy and updating regularly to reflect current performance.
The engagement sought to establish a comprehensive performance visibility framework with specific, measurable outcomes:
**Primary objective**: Develop a dynamic, filterable client dashboard hosted on JetAdmin that consolidates lead engagement and campaign performance metrics across Email and LinkedIn channels, providing Lindus Health with actionable intelligence for campaign optimisation.
**Data unification**: Create automated data pipelines that continuously sync campaign metrics from Instantly.ai and LinkedIn outreach platforms to Airtable, ensuring the dashboard reflects real-time performance without manual data entry.
**KPI visualisation**: Implement high-level performance indicators including active leads tracking (visualised via stacked bar charts with goal reference lines) and meeting conversion rates (displayed as rolling averages with campaign completion filtering).
**Granular performance modules**: Deliver detailed breakdowns for email campaigns (tracking sends, replies, positive responses, and booking rates) and LinkedIn campaigns
(monitoring connection requests, acceptance rates, message replies, InMail engagement, profile views, and post interactions), with all metrics filterable by segment and campaign type.
Our implementation strategy centred on building robust data pipelines in n8n that would serve as the automation backbone feeding the JetAdmin dashboard. We began by analysing Understory's existing campaign infrastructure, which heavily utilised Instantly.ai for email outreach, and designed a three-tiered automation architecture to capture, process, and deliver campaign data.
The first tier focused on comprehensive email campaign tracking through three interconnected workflows. The "Instantly Campaigns" workflow established the primary data sync mechanism, fetching campaign analytics including sends, opens, replies, bounces, and opportunities from Instantly.ai's API and storing structured records in Airtable with proper client and campaign linkages. We complemented this with the "Instantly Daily Stats" workflow, which operated on a scheduled basis to capture daily performance snapshots, creating a historical dataset essential for trend analysis and rolling average calculations required by the SOW. To ensure reply data granularity, we implemented the "Instantly Daily Replies" workflow, which ran hourly to capture and categorise email responses, enabling the dashboard to differentiate between interested prospects, objections, and out-of-office responses.
For LinkedIn campaign visibility, we leveraged our "LinkedIn Ad Notifications - Hockeystack" workflow as a technical foundation, adapting its data extraction and alert mechanisms to monitor LinkedIn outreach performance. This workflow demonstrated our capability to pull LinkedIn metrics from Google Sheets (where LinkedIn data was aggregated) and identify performance patterns. The approach ensured that connection requests, acceptance rates, message engagement, and InMail performance could be tracked consistently alongside email metrics. Throughout implementation, we maintained rigorous data quality controls, implementing deduplication logic and validation checks to ensure dashboard accuracy.
The solution architecture leveraged n8n Community Edition as the core automation platform, installed on a DigitalOean VPS with specifications carefully selected for performance and reliability: 8GB RAM, 240GB storage, and 48TB monthly bandwidth allocation on infrastructure certified to ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and SOC 3 Type II standards. The deployment utilised Docker containerisation for simplified management and version control, with environment variables configured for OAuth redirects and SMTP settings to enable team member access..
Data integration relied on robust connections between Instantly.ai and Airtable. The Instantly.ai API served as the primary source for email campaign metrics, with n8n workflows authenticating via API keys to extract campaign-level statistics, account performance data, and granular reply information. Airtable functioned as the central data warehouse, with carefully designed base structures that maintained relational integrity between clients, campaigns, lead lists, and engagement records. This architecture enabled efficient querying and supported the complex filtering requirements specified in the SOW.
JetAdmin provided the presentation layer, connecting directly to the Airtable data warehouse to render the dynamic, filterable dashboard interface. The platform's native visualisation capabilities enabled the stacked bar charts for active leads tracking and line charts for meeting conversion rate trends, whilst its filtering engine supported the segment and campaign type selections required by Lindus Health users. For LinkedIn campaign data, we established integration pathways through Google Sheets, which served as an intermediary data source before consolidation in Airtable.
Supporting infrastructure included webhook configurations that enabled real-time data flow between platforms, HTTP Request nodes within n8n for API interactions not covered by native integrations, and scheduled triggers that orchestrated the regular data synchronisation cycles. The entire stack operated with comprehensive error handling and logging, ensuring data pipeline reliability and facilitating troubleshooting during the ongoing support phase.
Technologies Used:
Aphex Automate delivered a fully operational campaign performance intelligence system that transformed how Understory manages Lindus Health's outreach operations. The JetAdmin dashboard now provides immediate visibility into campaign effectiveness through interactive visualisations, with active leads displayed in stacked bar charts segmented by "Always On" and "Segmented" campaign types, overlaid with goal reference lines that enable at-a-glance performance assessment against targets. Meeting conversion rates are tracked via rolling one-month averages calculated from leads that have completed their campaign sequences, providing statistically meaningful insight into booking performance whilst filtering out in-progress campaigns that would skew the metrics.
The email campaign performance module delivers comprehensive visibility into Instantly.ai operations, tracking emails sent, replies received, positive reply rates, and meeting booking rates with full traceability from activated lead through to booked appointment. The LinkedIn campaign module provides equivalent depth for social selling activities, monitoring connection request volumes, acceptance rates, message engagement, InMail performance, profile views, and post interaction metrics. Both modules support dynamic filtering by market segment (Biotech, Medical Devices, and additional segments) and campaign type, enabling Understory's team to rapidly identify which audience segments and campaign strategies deliver optimal results.
Behind the dashboard, the automated data infrastructure operates continuously with minimal manual intervention. The "Instantly Campaigns", "Instantly Daily Stats", and "Instantly Daily Replies" workflows maintain synchronisation between Instantly.ai and Airtable, capturing granular engagement data and updating campaign performance metrics throughout each day. This automation eliminated the manual reporting burden that previously consumed several hours weekly, redirecting that capacity toward strategic campaign optimisation. The self-hosted n8n installation on DigitalOcean provides Understory with full control over their automation infrastructure whilst benefiting from enterprise-grade security certifications.
The solution delivers ongoing business value through faster decision-making cycles, improved campaign ROI through data-driven optimisation, and enhanced client reporting capabilities. Understory now presents Lindus Health with professional, real-time performance dashboards that demonstrate campaign value and inform strategic discussions about market segment prioritisation and channel investment. With comprehensive support coverage during UK business hours (Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM GMT/BST) and scheduled version updates, the platform maintains operational reliability whilst evolving to meet Understory's changing requirements.
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