How automation can eliminate inefficiencies in digital ad agencies and unlock faster growth, better ROI, and smarter campaign execution.
Ad strategists today are expected to launch campaigns faster, prove ROI sooner and pivot quickly when client priorities change—all while managing hundreds of accounts across multiple platforms and thousands of targeted locations. This pressure is starting to take a toll–according to Fluency’s AdOps Benchmark Report, more than one-third (35%) of strategists admit they struggle with multi-channel campaign management.
Many digital agency teams spend a disproportionate amount of time making manual campaign changes like updating budgets, adjusting target audiences and swapping creative assets, which can pull their focus away from on strategy and performance. This impacts more than just ad strategists’ workloads–CROs may wonder why ad strategists aren’t driving more revenue and CFOs question why tech stacks keep growing.
At the root of this problem is operational inefficiency.
Agencies want to scale, often aiming to double their client accounts without adding staff, yet most rely on systems built for a simpler era, when launching one campaign on one platform at a time was the norm. To accelerate growth, agencies need to bring automation into their daily operations. Centralizing and automating campaign execution processes like budget pacing, campaign setup and reporting eliminates hours of manual work, reduces errors, improves collaboration and frees teams to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives.
In its AdOps Benchmark Report, Fluency surveyed 75+ digital ad agencies and in-house advertising teams to uncover how they’re approaching campaign operations and understand what’s working and what’s not. Here are three of the biggest operational challenges holding agencies back—and how automation can help overcome them.
1. Manual Budget Workflows Limit Agency Profitability
Budgeting remains one of the most fragmented workflows in digital advertising. Many agencies still rely on manual processes (55%) and spreadsheets (42%) and often juggle multiple tools to manage budgets (40%).
While this patchwork approach can get the job done, it’s time-consuming and leaves room for costly mistakes. When teams reconcile static spreadsheets with constantly shifting platform data, small errors can easily snowball into over- or underspending or misallocated funds that require expensive adjustments further down the road.
This is no surprise to many digital ad agencies, as more than half of them (56%) want technology solutions that mitigate risk across budgeting and campaign management.
With automation, agencies can automatically monitor pacing, reallocate spend in real time to the highest-performing campaigns or platforms and maintain a consistent budget across channels—all without the hassle of making manual adjustments.
By removing the guesswork, automation not only reduces the margin for error but also keeps campaigns on track and budgets aligned with strategic goals. As a result, agencies can maximize ROI and reduce wasted dollars.
2. Client Account Growth Stalls When Teams Can’t Keep Up
Even the best account managers can eventually hit a breaking point where taking on more accounts means lowering their quality of service—or burning out completely. Hiring can help, but onboarding new team members takes time and expanding headcount eats into margins.
Fluency’s AdOps Benchmark Report found that nearly half (44%) of agencies are actively looking for ways to scale both their team’s capacity and their agency’s profitability without adding staff. While account managers currently handle an average of 35 client accounts, agencies report wanting to nearly double this to an average of 64 accounts per strategist—an 83% increase in client load.
As pressure mounts on agencies to do more with less, the only way to increase productivity without expanding headcount is by automating some of strategists’ more repetitive, manual tasks.
By automating the campaign setups and duplicating assets across platforms, for instance, teams can reclaim hours of their week. Agencies can manage more client accounts without sacrificing performance or results and create space for teams to focus on higher-value work, but it requires the integration and effective use of automation tools.
3. Heavy Campaign Workflows Slow Time to Market
Each platform comes with its own interface, campaign setup requirements and performance metrics, forcing teams to go back and forth to different platforms to keep campaigns running. On average, strategists spend about 46 hours—more than a full workweek—per month making campaign changes across a variety of workstreams.
When teams are buried in manual updates and constantly switching between platforms, they lose the ability to move quickly, test new channels and pivot in response to changes in ad performance. This slowdown can delay launches for days or weeks, and leave agencies reacting to results instead of driving them, which puts both campaign outcomes and client retention at risk.
To avoid this, agencies need to centralize everything they need to manage their campaign—from budget sheets and target audience lists to creative assets and reports—into a single, unified view. It’s the only way they can have a clear picture of performance across channels, enabling ad strategists to clearly identify successful campaigns and channels, spot issues early and make adjustments in real time.
Paired with automated budgeting, reporting and campaign optimization, teams can spend more time brainstorming new ideas, testing strategies and driving better results for clients.
The challenges digital ad agencies are facing go beyond tighter timelines and more ad platforms—they’re dealing with outdated ways of working that no longer fit the pace or complexity of digital advertising. By leaning into automation and finding more effective ways to connect data and streamline workflows, agencies can take pressure off their teams and set themselves up for real, scalable growth.
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Andy MacLeay, VP of Engagement & Channels at Fluency
Andy MacLeay is the VP of Engagement & Channels at Fluency, the only digital advertising operating system engineered for organizations that run complex digital media portfolios. Andy leads strategic relationships with major advertising publishers and helps enterprise clients optimize performance across channels. With more than 20 years of experience in digital marketing, advertising and product management, Andy is a certified product owner and recognized thought leader in the AdOps space. He has launched and managed search, social and programmatic advertising products, guided media strategies for organizations with millions in annual ad spend, and led advertising product development for the largest provider in the automotive vertical.
