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Budget management is an essential part of advertising agencies. Effectively managing budgets ensures you’re meeting customer goals and maximizing their revenue.
However, budget management can consume hundreds of hours and monopolize your analysts’ time. In fact, our clients typically say that budget management takes up 35% of employees’ workload: an exorbitant amount of time considering that most budget workflows can be automated.
Why is budget management such a time suck? The reality is that most advertising budget workflows used today—managing underspend, preventing overspend, and daily pacing struggles—are error-prone, tedious, and unscalable. This is especially true if your agency specializes in inventory-driven industries like automotive, retail, or real estate. What your team needs is a solution to handle all of the complexities of budgeting automatically, not manually.
In this article, you’ll learn how budget automation can completely transform how your teams oversee budgets within their ad operations and strategies. Keep reading to learn about specific budget automation tools that streamline these laborious tasks and turn budgeting into a strategic advantage instead of a daily struggle.
Advertising budgeting before automation: longstanding challenges in a dynamic landscape
Ad strategists and operational teams have long grappled with challenges inherent to manual budget management. You are expected to distribute budgets across multiple channels, make decisions using historical data and gut instinct rather than real-time insights, and constantly recalibrate budgets to match swiftly changing market conditions.
Let’s look at Google Ads as an example. We’ve all experienced the impulse to overshoot budgets to ensure spend. But then you walk the risky tightrope of overspending. Somehow, you’re expected to cushion budgets enough to overshoot but then immediately turn off a campaign when you reach the threshold of 100% spend.
Try doing that across the dozens of accounts and hundreds of campaigns you manage for every customer.
Now, imaging pacing with automation. This short video gives a glimpse into the power of using automated budget pacing as a building block in your overall budgeting strategy:
Budget pacing is only part of the problem. Here’s a closer look at four key workstreams that dominate advertisers’ time:
- Calculating daily spend based on the remaining monthly/flighted budget
- Logging into Google, Facebook, and other channels to update budgets across all individual accounts
- Shifting budget from underperforming or underspending campaigns to better-performing campaigns, such as those with high conversion rates
- Calculating underspend at month’s end and then rolling over that amount into the next month's manual adjustments (or, worse, issuing customer overspend credits)
A lack of data-driven decision-making has traditionally made it hard for AdOps teams to achieve optimal ROI metrics. These challenges are compounded for agencies managing budgets and ROI for industries bogged down by complex bidding competition and cost fluctuations. Add in a continuous expansion of available advertising channels, such as programmatic or CTV, and you quickly realize that budget management is a monumental task.
In short, traditional budget management processes have proven to be ineffective. This is why advertisers are increasingly looking for budget automation solutions.
Enhance your budget strategies with automation
Budget automation can transform your current laborious processes into a single-button push. Regardless of your managed budget's size or complexity, automation can alleviate some of the longstanding problems traditionally associated with manual budgeting efforts.
Reducing your team’s tedious task load gives them time back that can be used for more high-value efforts, such as strategic planning or optimizations. The impact is twofold: your employees are engaged in more meaningful work without stressing about overspend, and clients benefit from your team using their budget in a more strategic way to drive performance improvements.
Budget automation has evolved significantly since its inception. Here are the key budgeting work streams and processes that advertising teams can now address via automation while improving their strategic efforts.
Hands-off budget reallocation, pacing, rebalancing, and rollover
Gone are the days of editing daily budgets to meet a specific flighted monthly budget. Automation can pace monthly or flighted budgets towards a set goal, updating it continuously to ensure you meet customer goals.
Using automated pacing, one of our agency customers drastically reduced the time their team spent on budgeting efforts every month. Previously, four people worked on client pacing for two to three days every week. With automated pacing, one person now spends just five hours per month on pacing strategies. That’s a 90% decrease in pacing management!
Automatic underspend (and overspend) mitigation
With budget automation, you gain the ability to accurately (and effectively) put clients’ ad dollars to work—especially if they’re dealing with outsized scale demands. You and your clients can rest assured that their budget is maximized every month without leaving money on the table (or issuing credits). We like to think of it as automation, set by your strategic goals, within your pre-determined boundaries.
Improved account, campaign, and group-level budget management
Managing spend at the account, campaign, and group level is cumbersome and often leaves you in the dark. Budget automation allows you to manage spend at all levels, streamlining your overall workflow.
Additionally, automatic notifications alert you of optimization opportunities, zero spend campaigns, or budget concerns: you’re never left in the dark.
It’s clear: with budgeting automation, advertisers can save time by eliminating repetitive and click-heavy tasks. This allows more time for focused financial planning, testing new budgeting strategies (like “strong start” or “strong finish” pacing), and more detailed performance analysis to make continuous optimizations.
Fluency’s Operating System: harnessing automation for strategic, efficient budgeting workflows
At Fluency, our OS is powered by Robotic Process Automation for Advertising (RPA4A) makes advertising budget management efficient and easy.
Experience the power of automation and see what it can do for your budgeting strategy. One of our agency customers, Click Here Digital, has found tremendous success with budget automation:
“Managing budgets in Fluency is much easier than what we were doing in a previous platform. That’s a resounding opinion—company-wide at Click Here Digital—I find it incredibly easy.”
If you’re responsible for managing multi-location clients, learn more about the best budgeting automation solutions for franchise customer management.
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