See how this agency reduced 90% of pacing tasks and drove 35% more conversions
The Johnson Group is a full-funnel marketing and advertising firm that delivers personalized brand and strategy services to franchises and national brands.
One of their key customers is a national multi-location brand with a complex ad portfolio: over 400 campaigns on Meta and an additional 1,200 on Google. The sheer scale—both in campaign breadth and workload—was becoming increasingly unsustainable because it could not be managed effectively using in-house tools.
Jared Drahonovsky, Group Media Manager at Johnson Group, knew the hurdles impeding his team’s growth and efficiency were only getting bigger as the client relationship evolved. His team needed to update roughly 1,000 monthly campaign strategies every month but they were already maxed out.
No matter how many internal processes they tried to change or improve, nothing seemed to help. The team couldn’t get back any capacity as the customer relationship grew.
Highlights
The challenge: Inability to scale pacing and campaign management
The hardest workflow for the Johnson Group team to manage? Budget pacing.
Pacing is crucial in terms of aligning ad spend with client budgets and goals, but it's also a process inundated with manual, time-intensive tasks. Like most agencies, the Johnson Group relied on traditional digital advertising tools and workflows to complete these tasks.
Pacing for +1,000 campaigns across two publishers is a beastly task. Drahonovsky and his team were spending two to three days every week making pacing adjustments and tweaks, aiming to maximize budget without overspending.
As time went on, though, Drahonovsky quickly realized their historical tools were not designed to handle the complexity and scale of their current operations. These time-consuming and complex tasks impacted the team’s operational efficiency. It also restricted their ability to test, innovate, optimize, and focus on strategic growth for this key customer.
"We were spending so much time pacing every day, every week...it was the biggest thing we were looking to solve," said Drahonovsky.
The existing budgeting playbooks required extensive manual input, making it difficult to achieve the precision and speed necessary for effective campaign execution. Drahonovsky added that meeting the customer’s expectations “wasn't feasible with our old tools.”
“We wanted a solution that could operate on both Google and Meta to meet our pacing goals,” he added.
The solution: Reducing pacing tasks by 90% with data-powered budgeting automation
The Johnson Group selected Fluency as their digital advertising operating system partner based on Fluency’s robust and comprehensive capabilities that aligned with the teams’ greatest needs.
Using Fluency’s ability to integrate data from both Google and Meta (plus other publishers) into one holistic system, Drahonovsky and his team can quickly address critical pacing updates across multiple publishers from one place, en masse.
Drahonovsky’s team has utilized the full breadth of Fluency’s budgeting and pacing tools to achieve their customer’s goals. These include features like underspend mitigation or setting different pacing strategies for different campaigns.
“Fluency helps reduce underspend to marginal nominal numbers and reduces overspend—quite literally—to zero for our customers,” said Drahonovsky.
The team also worked with Fluency to configure custom pacing automation to address their customer’s multi-location, multi-account, and multi-channel complexities. One of these innovative solutions was to align budget groups with specific locations using Fluency Blueprints, allowing for precise budget allocation and management across different regions.
This setup enabled them to handle non-traditional account structures effectively. It also gave them the agility to implement different pacing strategies for different regional campaigns so each campaign could meet specific goals while maintaining overall budget efficiency.
The impact of these automation tools was significant. Drahonovsky and his team slashed the amount of time spent on pacing by 90%. Instead of four or five team members spending 12-15 hours a week on pacing, the team now spends less than five hours every month to perform the same tasks.
The team has gained both capacity and confidence by using Fluency’s budgeting automation solutions. Even when budgets “come in super late throughout the month,” according to Drahonovsky, “we don't have to really do anything. We just make sure that the numbers are correct and Fluency allocates the budget the way we need it to.”
“We've really automated the whole process and don’t have to touch anything,” Drahonovsky added. “Fluency automatically refreshes every hour from our Google spreadsheets and then it’s good to go.”
The result: Transformational efficiencies, improved performance, and improved account growth
Since adopting automation, the Johnson Group team has seen drastic time savings. Drahonovsky said they used to “launch and QA about 400 campaigns over three days. Now, it’s done in less than a day. Campaign launches for Google now take seconds, and for Meta, maybe 10 minutes.”
The team has dedicated these freed-up hours toward key business drivers, like strategic testing, performance management, and team upskilling. For example, the team now spends 25% of every week on strategic planning and process improvements—something they didn’t have time to do consistently before using automation.
“Automation allowed us to open up a lot of doors,” added Drahonovsky. “We wanted to spend less time on the day-to-day management and spend more time on strategy and client communication. Fluency helped us accomplish that.”
The Johnson Group also restructured the team to enable “one-on-one interactions with franchisee owners,” according to Drahonovsky. This has resulted in more personalized service and stronger client relationships.
“The things that used to take us weeks to do now take us hours, maybe minutes,” said Drahonovsky. “Those improvements with pacing and campaign launched allowed us to restructure and better serve our client.”
The extra hours back in every day also enabled Drahonovsky to expand his role as a manager and team lead.
“Fluency handles a lot of the day-to-day tasks, which has allowed me to train up the team and get them to where they need to be,” said Drahonovsky. “It has also allowed me to advance and work on other accounts and other initiatives.”
Finally and just as importantly, the Johnson Group's more strategic, data-powered budgeting solution has led to better customer outcomes. On Google alone, they've seen:
- Conversion rates doubled year-over-year
- Cost per conversion decreased by 50%
- Overall conversions increased by over 35%
Simply put, according to Drahonovsky, “we're getting more qualified leads for half the price and our lead rate is skyrocketing.”
Automating mundane tasks to propel value-driven activities
The adoption of Fluency marked a turning point for the Johnson Group, transforming their operations and opening up new strategic capabilities. With more time to focus on strategic initiatives and client communication, Drahonovsky and his team can continue exploring new opportunities and automation use cases.
Fluency's efficiencies and innovations improved the bottom line—for the Johnson Group and its customer—while simultaneously future-proofing the agency for years to come.
