Whether you manage an entire ad agency or dozens of customer campaigns, you’re constantly up against operational challenges. Campaigns, clients, budgets, and deadlines all demand equal attention and fast response times.
These daily problems are made bigger by manual processes and workflows. Operational inefficiencies burden you with duplicate efforts, excessive keystrokes, and tons of copy/pasting.
We compiled operational data from over 75 independent ad agencies to help agency leaders understand the operational landscape and how others are tackling scale and growth challenges across key advertising workflows. The 2025 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report outlines just how detrimental (and universal) these operational pain points are within advertising agencies.
Here are some of the most eye-opening findings from the report.
1. Budget management continues to strain agency resources and expose business risk
Budgeting is one of the most fundamental aspects of running both a successful agency and successful campaigns. For instance, accurate budget pacing ensures you spend a customer’s entire monthly budget without overspending.
However, many agencies still rely on fragmented tools and inefficient manual processes. In fact, 40% of agencies in the report use multiple tools for budget pacing. The most common pacing methods—manual processes (55% of respondents) and spreadsheets (42%)—exacerbate human-generated errors and risk for your agency.
“Pacing accounts (specifically, individual campaigns within accounts) is a manual and time-consuming process,” said one of the survey respondents.
Another respondent echoed the burden of budgeting tasks, stating that they “need an automated system that can help us balance budgets between ad platforms on a per-client basis” when asked about their agency’s biggest goals.
When budgeting data and tasks are fragmented across multiple systems or workflows, there’s an even greater risk of under- or overspending. Multiply that risk over every campaign for every account and it’s clear that budgeting workflows generate a ton of risk for agencies.
The perpetuation of these manual workflows indicates the need for an industry-wide shift in how advertisers manage budgeting tasks. Your team needs more sophisticated, automated budget management tools to eliminate the wasted time spent on daily budgeting tasks.
Comprehensive budget management and automated pacing solutions eliminate operational efficiencies and risks while improving accuracy and performance.
"We were spending so much time pacing every day, every week...it was the biggest thing we were looking to solve," said Jared Drahonovsky, Group Media Manager at Johnson Group in a recent case study. “Now, we've automated the whole budget pacing process. We don't have to touch anything. Fluency automatically refreshes every hour from our Google spreadsheets and then it’s good to go.”
The impact? Rather than four people working on pacing tasks two or three days a week, one person spends an hour every week checking pacing for nearly 2,000 campaigns.
2. The key to profitability is improving staff-to-account ratios
As advertising operations become increasingly more complex and complicated, there’s a widening disconnect between agencies’ growth aspirations and their actual operational capabilities.
The Benchmark Report revealed that agencies hope to increase their staff-to-account ratio by a staggering 83% (from 35 accounts per strategist to 64 accounts). One respondent in the report put it quite simply: “I would love to not need to hire each time we get a new client.”
Increasing the number of accounts managed by each strategist means you can improve profitability. But asking your existing workforce to manage more accounts with existing workflows and processes isn’t viable. If you’ve ever asked your top-performing ad strategists to take on more work, you’ve likely seen an uptick in employee burnout, incorrect data input, and, unfortunately, dissatisfied clients. (Hint: you can read our playbook for how to improve ad agency employee retention in 2025 on our blog.)
To truly scale and meet the demands of a growing client base without adding headcount, agencies need to reduce manual workloads for their AdOps teams. The most effective way to do this is by implementing interoperable tools that drive productivity and streamline campaign management.
How does reducing manual workloads enable you to improve portfolio ratios for your staff? Let’s say you’ve tasked one of your strategists with onboarding a new multi-location franchise client. The client wants to run 50 local campaigns across both Google and Meta. Using your agency's current tools and playbooks, every campaign must be manually configured for each publisher, one at a time.
Now, imagine if your strategists only had to set up a campaign once, no matter how many different channels you’re running on. Using a bidirectional API to connect your data sources (such as Google Sheets, APIs, or CRM systems) to publishers means your strategists can automatically populate dynamic campaigns directly from source data. For instance, they can simultaneously build ads for multiple channels while ensuring that highly localized ad elements—like city names, local product offerings, or regional promotions—are instantly tailored for each location.
When strategists are no longer forced to manually input specific details for every single campaign, they free up capacity to take on new clients without taking on more stress. If you want to grow your agency without growing your labor costs, you’ll need to find a way to decouple your headcount from your growth. It’s a must for agencies looking to improve profitability
3. Manual operations are incompatible with the future of advertising
Digital advertising is in the midst of a critical industry-wide tipping point. Those agencies still relying on manual operations will quickly fall behind.
“Time and tedium are the two biggest drawbacks to manual campaign management,” said Fluency President and CPO Eric Mayhew in a recent video focused on advertising automation. “Over the last several years, digital advertising has gotten so much more sophisticated but also complex at the same time. It takes more button clicks, more resources, and more energy just to execute campaigns.”
Consider this: according to the report, teams spend over 25% of their time (46 hours every month) just making manual adjustments to existing campaigns. That’s not even considering how long it takes to launch new campaigns. According to the report data, one in four agencies need more than one week to launch new campaigns.
The way your agency operated a few years ago isn’t sustainable if you want to compete in 2025 and beyond.
“The transformation from manual campaign management to automated campaign management is happening now,” said Mayhew. “We can see it across the board. Clients that have adopted automation in their portfolio are more effective and more efficient, and they deliver higher value to their clients. The cost of labor goes down and they stay profitable.”
The Benchmark Report makes it clear that, even though many agencies are currently using manual processes, there is a strong desire to replace these manual processes with smarter ways of completing key operational tasks.
For example, one respondent in the report said they “need to make account launches, pacing, and execution tasks in ad platforms more efficient and scalable." Another respondent hopes to “combine performance data from ad platforms with performance data from our back-end lead management engine” to help their teams work more efficiently and effectively.
However you look at it, one thing is clear: manual workflows aren’t going to cut it in the long run. Streamlining key operational workflows with automation is critical for your agency to maintain quality and deliver faster turnaround times.
4. Campaign management complexity is a real (but addressable) problem
Building, launching, and managing advertising campaigns is becoming more and more complex. Of course, you don’t need to hear that: you and your teams live it every day.
According to the report, 80% of ad strategists are now responsible for managing three or more advertising platforms simultaneously. This is a far cry from the early days of digital advertising, where teams were allocated by channel specialty.
This shift to multi-channel campaign management responsibilities indicates a wider, broader shift to more consolidated and holistic advertising strategies. When your clients want to be on more channels, your agency needs to find a way to deliver results on more channels. But building, launching, and managing campaigns on individual channels isn’t a sustainable growth strategy for your agency’s operational capabilities.
As your agency works to deliver multi-channel campaigns at scale, your teams need tools that enable them to work across channels with greater ease, control, and expertise.
“We manage a variety of different platforms,” said one respondent in the report. “It can be difficult to make strategic decisions based on data when they are split across a variety of platforms and not pulled into one central view to optimize.”
Bringing all your data together into one structured, comprehensive data set enables you and your teams to get a high-level view of your campaigns from one place. Using one data set at the center of your strategy delivers compounding benefits for your team.
For instance, your teams can use a single source of data truth to:
- Get real-time notifications from any channel in one place, make it easy to both identify and solve critical problems without multiple platform logins.
- Generate monthly client reports (tailored to specific client goals!) with a single click instead of spending hours compiling, analyzing, and building customized decks.
- Update any ad asset, keyword, or promotion on any platform directly from source data, rather than making manual updates within each relevant channel or campaign.
- Automatically adjust or reallocate budgets across multiple channels based on live performance insights, client input, or other important factors.
- Ensures that compliance rules—such as legal disclaimers or brand guidelines—are applied universally across every campaign, with flagging measures in place whenever something doesn’t meet compliance guidelines.
- Streamline performance tracking so you can spot trends, uncover opportunities, and optimize strategies at the portfolio level without bouncing between different datasets or reports.
5. Data silos hinder strategic growth across multiple workflows
Understanding the value of your data and bringing it into your operational workflows is key to holistically improving your advertising operations. The report reveals that agencies everywhere struggle with disjointed advertising data.
Disjointed “data silos” take many different forms in advertising. For starters, each publisher relies on data that is uniquely sourced from within their own publishing network. You’re also likely using client spreadsheets that include budgeting data or promotional messaging. Primary data sources, like CRMs or inventory databases, are valuable assets that can improve a client’s targeting or strategic messaging capabilities.
However, activating these data sources with traditional tools is an equally time-consuming and complicated process. The mere task of consolidating and analyzing multiple data sources doesn’t leave a lot of time (if any) for teams to utilize data within campaigns. The setup work takes so long that most agencies forgo using valuable data sets within advertising strategies, severely jeopardizing opportunities.
Advertisers want to use data to improve operational efficiency. One respondent, for example, wants the ability to “see the performance of our portfolio as a whole” without using different systems.
Bringing data from multiple sources—different channels, customer CRMs, even inventory databases—into one system unlocks a strategic advantage unheard of in today’s advertising ecosystem. Data is a powerful advertising tool: in fact, it may very well be your most valuable asset (after your human workforce). Using data to drive your entire advertising strategy offers your agency both convenience and functionality.
“If your data is your hub, the distribution networks in the campaigns that you generate off that become your spokes,” said Mayhew. “This allows you to set yourself up in a way that, as your one data set changes, it automatically updates across all of the ad networks. It keeps your strategy consistent and cohesive, centrally managed, and easy to scale.”
With more and more customers looking for multi-channel and multi-location performance results, agencies are ditching fragmented tech stacks for streamlined solutions that integrate advertising data from multiple sources.
The report that will help your agency grow faster and smarter
The 2025 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report highlights the specific efficiency bottlenecks and fragmented workflows holding teams back. But it also reveals an actionable roadmap to help your agency turn these obstacles into opportunities by showcasing real solutions.
Downloading the full report to:
- Access more than 35 never-before-seen operational data points gathered from over 75 independent advertising agencies, including detailed industry averages for specific tasks
- Learn what tools or solutions agencies are using to address the complexity of managing campaigns across multiple platforms
- Understand the role of technology in reducing operational costs while improving scalability
- See what kinds of results real agencies acheived after using automation for three, six, and 12 months
With valuable industry data and operational solutions in hand, your agency’s path forward has never been more clear. Download the full report now to take the next important step in transforming your agency operations.
