Take one look at your company’s software subscriptions, and it’s clear that advertising operations teams have plenty of tools to use…but are they getting the answers (or help) they need? Budget pacing lives in one spreadsheet. QA checks happen in another. Campaign data is scattered across five different ad platforms.
And yet, these are the outdated solutions and processes that most advertisers rely on. In fact, our latest data found that 68% of surveyed ad strategists manage four or more ad platforms. But AdOps tool sprawl and siloed workflows do more damage than just burn out your ad strategists. They also hinder your company’s scalability and growth.
The tides look like they’re finally turning: 90% of respondents in our recent benchmark survey of advertising professionals said they want to eliminate AdOps tool fragmentation. After all, it’s hard to ignore the true cost of tool sprawl and manual work once you look at the individual gears churning in your AdOps.
Let’s look at the ripple effect of AdOps tool sprawl and how adopting a paid media system of record can help your team achieve true operational efficiency for scalable growth.
The hidden cost of manual AdOps and tool sprawl
AdOps tool fragmentation isn't just annoying: it's expensive.
Even if you set aside the cost of different software licenses, the labor costs are staggering. Our latest data found that the average strategist spends 3.5 months of full-time work doing routine AdOps tasks (budgeting tasks, account launches, and campaign optimizations) every year.
At an average base salary of $77,000, that’s $22,000 you’re paying every employee annually to do work that could be automated.
There’s also an efficiency cost to consider. When your AdOps team operates across disconnected systems, you lose:
- Strategic thinking time (because everyone's stuck doing duplicative campaign work for each channel)
- Client trust (if multichannel performance numbers don't match up across reports)
- Your competitive advantage (because nimble, agile agencies can move faster)
- Top talent (because your best ad strategists want to spend more time strategizing, not merging data exports)
Why agencies are moving to unified advertising operations systems
When we asked 170+ independent advertisers why they want to unify their AdOps data and workflows, three priorities rose to the top:
58% of surveyed advertisers want centralized multichannel reporting
Multichannel campaigns are the norm now, and your clients know it. That’s why they expect your team to report how their social campaigns interact with search, which creative performs best across different channels, and where to spend next month’s budget in order to hit their goals.
With each ad channel’s data living in its own silo, though, this level of cross-channel insight is nearly impossible for AdOps teams to deliver—at least not without heroic manual effort and crazy-good Excel skills.
By centralizing data from all major ad platforms into a single place, cross-channel insights can be delivered to your team. They don’t have to go out and find them. That means they can focus on building better client strategies instead of flexing their PowerPoint skills.
47% of surveyed advertisers want accurate and automated budgeting
Budget accuracy matters when you're managing millions in client spend. And yet, 40% of our surveyed advertisers said they rely on multiple tools for budget pacing. The most common budget pacing methods cited in the survey were manual processes and spreadsheets, both of which are highly error-prone and contribute to budget discrepancies and operational risk.
Here’s the hard truth: when budget data lives in different spreadsheets (each with its own slightly unique formatting) and every client’s budget strategy is at the discretion of an individual strategist, anomalies are inevitable. With how much trust clients place in your team to manage their money, advertising budgets should be managed in a better way.
42% of surveyed advertisers want faster campaign optimizations and management solutions
Speed wins in digital advertising. Your ad team needs to keep up if your company doesn’t want to fall behind.
But if making a budget reallocation requires updating and QA'ing three different systems or coordinating across multiple teams, speed is an impossible ambition for your team. They’re just trying to stay ahead of the next (inevitable) client ask. More and more agencies are asking for tools that enable them to spot opportunities across multiple channels, make the right decision about what to do, and execute—all in the same, cohesive workflow.
Building a paid media “system of record” for your agency
Our survey results make it clear that advertisers want to improve specific AdOps functions, like more accurate budget management or faster campaign optimizations. When we dug a little deeper into what advertisers wanted from their advertising data, 45% of respondents specifically mentioned wanting a centralized "source of truth."
In other words, advertisers aren’t looking for another tool to wedge into their tech stack. They want a foundational system where all their critical advertising data lives, stays accurate, and powers everything else.
A CRM for advertising operations: why you need a centralized system
These kinds of tools already exist for most business operations. For example, your company likely uses a CRM. Products like Salesforce or HubSpot aren’t just “one of the tools” your team uses: it’s the definitive system of record for your entire company’s customer data. Everyone trusts it and references it. When there's a question about an account, you don't check three places: you check the CRM.
That's what more and more advertisers want for their paid media operations: a system where campaign structure, real-time multichannel performance data, and “best practice” operational workflows live together in one place.
This kind of system (we call it a Digital Advertising Operating System, or DAOS) is an operational powerhouse for boots-on-the-ground ad teams. With a DAOS, AdOps teams can:
- Manage ads, campaigns, or accounts in bulk across multiple channels. Strategists can update a campaign in one place and automatically implement (or pre-schedule) the relevant changes wherever necessary.
- Access centralized, real-time reporting and analytics to easily monitor performance across every channel (and client) from a single space.
- Automate budget pacing and reallocation, reducing the risk of overspending or underspending while still optimizing for every client’s KPIs.
- Onboard new accounts and launch campaigns faster by automating repetitive setup tasks—a major benefit for teams managing franchise or multi-location clients.
- Easily optimize across channels using AI-powered automation rules to adjust bids, keywords, budgets, or creative assets at scale.
Key features to consider for a centralized AdOps system
A truly unified advertising operations platform should give your team:
- A centralized data foundation. Your people shouldn’t have to export/import performance data from different channels or worry that data isn’t up-to-date when building client reports. All campaign data, from all major ad channels, should automatically flow into a single system.
- True cross-channel budget management. Manual budgeting tasks generate a lot of risk for your AdOps. When multichannel budgeting workflows can be handled in one place, your team can set up automated budget reallocation between campaigns or platforms. They can also rely on alerts about zero-spend accounts, exhausted budgets, or budgeting discrepancies.
- Bulk operations capabilities. Need to pause (or build) 200 campaigns or update copy across three platforms? Doing multichannel work en masse is one of the biggest time-saving features of a DAOS (Digital Advertising Operating System). Tasks that usually take hours (or sometimes days!) using manual workflows can be done via automation rules in a matter of minutes.
- Instantaneous multichannel reporting. Building monthly reports is a major time suck for AdOps teams. As one of our enterprise advertising clients said at Advertising Week New York, using AI and automation saves his team “thousands of hours” on reporting alone. With a single source of truth right at your fingertips, multichannel data can be filtered in any number of ways within one system to build real-time multichannel reports on demand.
Unifying multichannel workflows for AdOps efficiency
The agencies that will thrive in the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones with highly sophisticated AdTech tool stacks. Instead, it will be agencies that rein in operational chaos and give their teams clarity. The most successful agencies we work with take the time to identify patterns in their workflows, codify their “secret sauces,” and then use automated technology to bring their strategies to life at scale.
If you want to achieve this level of clarity, you must first combat one of the primary obstacles: tool sprawl. Continuing to run your AdOps with an array of single-purpose tools will exponentially multiply workflow inefficiencies, the risk of costly errors, and employee burnout.
Much like a CRM improves the multifaceted components of client management, unifying your advertising operations into a single source of truth simplifies complex tasks and improves data-backed decision-making. Utilizing a DAOS as your advertising system of record eliminates the manual data wrangling tasks currently draining your team and muddying multichannel insights.
Best of all, using a unified AdOps system gives your agency the data-scalable foundation it needs to grow profitably.
