When clients with hundreds of locations run a lot of promotions, adjusting ad copy or swapping creative can become an Ad Strat’s full-time job. The tighter deadlines and higher stakes of promotional campaigns only make the stress—and mistakes—pile up faster.
Automated campaign management tools are a must for running promotional ad campaigns at scale. Whether you’re running dozens of different sales for a national brand or localizing offers for a multi-location franchise, templatizing and automating your ad strategies can save you time, reduce errors, and increase efficiency.
This article explores how automation can help advertisers tackle three key challenges in promotional campaigns: managing time-sensitive promotions, scaling localized advertising for multilocation businesses, and making bulk updates across campaigns.
What challenges do advertisers face when running limited-time advertising promotions?
Limited-time promotional campaigns present significant operational hurdles for digital advertisers, primarily due to the complexities of manual campaign management.
Manual workflows can breed errors ranging from incorrect budget allocations to inaccurate targeting. These operational inefficiencies increase workload and stress. But they also create potential revenue loss and client issues when promotions are mismanaged across different markets or platforms.
The limited, temporary nature of sale campaigns increases the likelihood of these costly mistakes. With so many variables to coordinate, something is bound to go wrong eventually. Some of the biggest challenges in running promotional campaigns include:
- Managing frequent updates for multiple locations: Running digital promos for multiple store locations is like navigating a labyrinth of different ad copy, offers, and targeting parameters. Strategists constantly switch between accounts, hoping they don’t accidentally push the wrong promotion to the wrong market.
- Regional and seasonal variations: During peak advertising seasons, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, companies often run different promotional offers for different audiences or regions. Manually managing so many complex variables is the perfect scenario for things to go wrong, like incorrect budget allocations.
- Manual processes and errors: Any AdOps processes that rely heavily on manual workflows are more likely to cause issues. Process inconsistencies can cause operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
- The temporary nature of promotions: Sometimes, the biggest challenge with promotional campaigns is simply remembering when to turn them on or off. Manually juggling deadlines, content changes, and budgets adds unnecessary stress and risk.
- Platform-specific imitations: Certain platforms, like YouTube, don’t allow for easy ad updates and force you to make new ads instead of modifying existing ones. This adds unnecessary complexity when managing temporary promotions.
How can automation help scale promotional digital advertising campaigns?
Automation enables advertising teams to manage complex, time-sensitive promotional ad strategies without errors or burnout. Updating hundreds of accounts for an upcoming sale is a breeze with automation.
Automation tools can deploy, manage, and even revert ads back to evergreen content on a set date. Best of all, automation helps teams focus on promotional strategies rather than tedious execution.
Let’s look at three ways that automation can make managing promotional ads at scale faster, easier, and less error-prone.
How to manage temporary advertising promotions like seasonal sales, Black Friday, and year-end offers
Think about the sheer volume of work (and effort) that goes into managing Q4 campaigns for Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year’s. Budgets are high, precision is critical, and the complexity of pairing specific offers to different locations, regions, products, or dates is enough to stress out even the most seasoned advertisers.
That’s why the best way to manage temporary promotions is with tools designed for scheduling time-sensitive messages. For example, Broadcast allows you to schedule and run a temporary ad for a specific period, making it easy to manage year-end advertising promotions. Strategists can set specific promo time frames so they don’t even have to be online to make the change.
Best of all, Broadcast automatically reverts to a campaign’s previous content once the promotion ends. “Limited time” sales stay limited, with no risk of running promotional ad copy outside the set promotional window. This eliminates the need for manual reminders to pause or remove ads, ensuring you never run an outdated offer.
That icky feeling when you find a Black Friday campaign running at the end of December? Automation makes that feeling a thing of the past.
Case Study: Running automated New Year specials for a national fitness company
The weeks surrounding New Year's Day are critical for gyms and fitness centers. In fact, one of Fluency’s fitness center clients spends nearly 40% of their annual budget in the weeks surrounding January 1.
With so much money on the line, this client continuously tests and swaps promotional messages during these weeks to maximize ROAS. A free trial month, discounted monthly rates, and other promotions can bring in new business during a critical time. But manually updating promotional ads for the client’s hundreds of locations was an operational nightmare.
With Fluency, the client uses a centralized feed (like a spreadsheet detailing specific promotions for each location) to power their ads. When a promotion changes, they simply update the spreadsheet and Fluency’s automated workflows handle the rest.
Common follow-up questions for automating temporary advertising promotions
What happens to my original ads when I use Fluency Broadcast?
Broadcast doesn't replace or delete your current ads. It temporarily edits them for the scheduled period that you set. After the Broadcast ends, the ads automatically revert to their previous version.
Can I run a Broadcast for just a few specific accounts?
Yes. You can set up account-level Broadcasts for a single account. You can also use rules to apply a global Broadcast to a specific group of accounts that meet certain criteria.
How to manage localized advertising creative updates for multi-location businesses at scale
A one-size-fits-all ad strategy rarely works for brands with a physical presence in multiple regions. But it also takes a lot of work to customize creative and messaging based on local needs, seasons, and promotions.
For example, let’s say you want to run a national ad campaign promoting a variety of new menu items and the closest location where people can try it. The ad copy likely follows a set structure, like “Try our new seasonal [MENU ITEM]! Stop in at [ADDRESS] today!” But manually adjusting all the different location addresses and products for hundreds of ads would take hours.
Fluency Blueprints solves this challenge by combining automation with localization. Blueprints automate the execution of multi-location, multichannel campaigns right from your data sources, eliminating the need to manually plug localized variables into individual ads. With Blueprints, you get:
- Centralized data hub in a Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS): You set the rules and frameworks for how creative and messaging should adapt across markets. Once defined, Blueprints automatically generate and update ads based on each location’s data, ensuring brand standards are consistently met.
- Automated updates at scale: Managing seasonal promotions, price changes, or compliance-driven messaging? A single adjustment in the Blueprint instantly cascades across every campaign, ad group, and channel.
- Localized relevance without extra effort: Blueprints automatically pull in location-specific details (such as promotions, creative assets, targeting parameters, and inventory feeds) to tailor creative images and copy for each market.
- Always in sync with business data: Blueprints are dynamic; they refresh whenever source data changes. That way, your campaigns remain accurate, timely, and aligned with real-time client priorities.
Simply put, Blueprints give you precise control over brand consistency while delivering hyper-local creative and messaging at scale. You can learn more about Blueprints in this short video:
Case study: Tailoring seasonal ads for a home services franchise
Consider one of our home services franchise clients. They came to Fluency wanting to promote different services and offers based on weather conditions and seasonal trends across their national footprint.
But how often do the weather conditions in Georgia align with those in Massachusetts? For example, maybe the company’s Atlanta ads are running summer specials because it's still hot, but the New England ads have switched to furnace maintenance specials.
More importantly, how does the campaign manager ensure the right seasonal messages run in the right location when they’re responsible for hundreds of locations?
The answer lies in a seamless, automated flow of information from a central data source to the live advertising campaigns. Using a DAOS, you can bring strategic data sets together into one place for multichannel ad creation and management. The data for this home services company might include:
- Location-specific services: What services are offered in each city?
- Seasonal promotions: Is it time to promote AC repair in Miami, but furnace maintenance in Boston?
- Creative assets: Which images or ad copy correspond to each promotion?
- Local weather conditions: How do temperatures or precipitation impact your advertising strategy?
With all these data points in one place, the company can set automation rules based on specific factors. For example, if the temperature in one region drops below a certain threshold, Blueprints’ automated workflows change “warm weather” ads to “cold weather” ads without strategists doing anything at all. The same goes for precipitation: if snow is on the way, automated Blueprints rules automatically switch ads over to featuring services like “24-hour furnace repairs” or “emergency plumbing services.”
Automation makes it possible to run highly relevant ads at any time of day or night, all without the manual work. It’s also a huge time saver: our clients report that it takes 59% less time to build and launch new campaigns after using Fluency, giving teams back 10% of their work week.
Common follow-up questions for localizing ad promotions at scale
What if each of my clients has a different strategy?
You can create custom Blueprints for each client. This allows for highly personalized campaigns while still giving your team valuable time savings as a result of centralized advertising management and automation.
Can I launch campaigns on Google and Meta with the same Blueprint?
Yes, Blueprints are designed for cross-platform management. You can launch and manage campaigns on Google, Meta, programmatic DSPs, and other major platforms from a single Blueprint. This saves you hours of manual work for every campaign launch and enables a stronger, more consistent strategy across channels.
How to make changes in bulk across hundreds of advertising accounts
When managing advertising at scale, making copy changes ad by ad is not an option. It’s a waste of your team’s time and skills. Plus, manually performing these tasks for hundreds of accounts generates unnecessary risk.
Bulk management capabilities are a must for large-scale ad management. Bulk actions allow you to make changes simultaneously, en masse, across multiple accounts, campaigns, or ad groups in a single operation. This gives you and your team the power to implement strategic decisions quickly and accurately across your entire portfolio.
Case study: Scaling automotive advertising with bulk catalog management
One of our automotive clients wanted to run a campaign featuring items from their parts catalog. The complexity of managing thousands of parts, each with its own inventory level, was immense.
Fluency’s bulk management tools turned an impossible campaign challenge into something manageable and effective. Instead of trying to update each part individually, the team could use bulk actions to make widespread changes across the campaign. For example, they could easily update pricing across entire part categories, pause ads for out-of-stock items, and apply new labels for better organization.
While the initial setup of data feeds was a lot of work, the ability to manage the campaign at scale moving forward was worth the up-front effort. Now, the team can use a powerful combination of structured data and automation tools to easily manage even the most complicated campaigns.
Common follow-up questions for bulk advertising management
What kinds of bulk advertising changes can I make?
The available actions depend on what you're managing. However, the majority of bulk advertising actions include modifying budgets, editing ad copy, modifying keywords in bulk, updating destination URLs, and assigning labels across multiple accounts or campaigns at once.
Automation: the key to scalable promotional ad campaigns
Automation is a must for teams wanting to run more efficient, accurate, and scalable promotional ad campaigns. By integrating tools like Fluency Broadcast and Blueprints into your AdOps, you can more easily manage time-sensitive promotions, localize creative for multi-location franchises, and make bulk campaign updates.
The result? More resilient and responsive operations, capable of handling peak season advertising demands and last-minute changes with ease.
