Manually keeping uyp with underspend, overspend, and budget pacing causes errors

Managing ad spend is the foundation of most agencies’ monthly campaign workloads, but keeping up with underspend, overspend, and pacing is error prone, tedious, and unsustainable. Budget management—especially pacing—requires constant attention; for most analysts this means daily work calculating and implementing changes to keep the budget on track. 

Couple this already challenging process with a system that can’t keep up and numerous bottlenecks are bound to emerge. The ones present for the Click Here team occurred while using the SA360 budgeting solution. The team struggled with restrictions when setting up budgets each month individually—rather than bulk. Since there is no formula feature, the team also had to do the math daily and change budgets manually if they wanted the formulas to work and to ensure they were meeting their goals. The way the platform is configured also conflicts with Google’s pacing strategies; in SA360, users have to abandon Google bid strategies completely. 

The Click Here team wanted to maintain control over their bids, but part of SA360's native budget management strategy involved the platform raising or lowering bids. Additionally, if the team was using any sort of automated bid strategy in Google Ads, it wouldn’t work to use SA360’s budgeting because they couldn’t adjust bids on a smart bidding strategy. Since neither one of these aspects were workable, and was an all or nothing approach, the team ended up deploying a completely manual process. With Fluency, however, the Click Here team can set and manage their bidding and pacing strategies 100% at scale. 

Click Here Digital has more time for client strategy with Fluency’s Digital Advertising Operating System

Click Here Digital was facing perennial challenges with their existing budget management tool and needed a solution that could not only mitigate the time spent on budget management, but empower them to make quicker and more informed decisions and spend far less time—or no time at all—worrying if the budget they set would actually be spent accurately. 

After using both Fluency and SA360, Click Here Digital’s team can confidently say a few key things: 

• “The time saved with using Fluency is night and day [in comparison to SA360]”
• “We now have more time to think of bigger, more strategic goals for our clients”
• “Fluency is much less labor intensive”
• “The Fluency team makes our job so much easier” 
• “If I had a choice of managing 5 accounts on SA360 or 15+ on Fluency, I would hands down pick Fluency”
• “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.”

Fluency’s platform and partnership allow Click Here Digital’s team to make changes at scale. They’re also empowered to have discussions and reach mutual conclusions on what's best for both parties and have those changes implemented for them. 

Now, the Click Here Digital team is now taking full advantage of increased time savings across their budget management strategy. Specifically, the team noticed impactful savings across new ad and RSA creation, as well as ad adjustments and optimization (including targeting, budget allocation, ad copy, asset swap and bidding). 

Before Fluency the team was spending an average of 1.25 hours on new ad and RSA creation. With Fluency, the team is now spending 0.5 hours. That’s 40% time savings on their new ad and RSA creation process. 

Before Fluency the team was spending an average of 1.25 hours on ad adjustments and optimizations. With Fluency, they’re now spending 0.5 hours on the same effort. That’s another 40% time savings on essential digital advertising strategies.

Lastly, new account launches have gone down from a couple of hours to 5-10 minutes.

Partner with Fluency Today

Of all the areas of digital advertising Fluency’s Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) touches, no function benefits more from its time-saving abilities than automated budgeting. In addition to automating single- and cross-channel optimization and over-and under-spend protection, advertising automation minimizes the maximal effort demanded by budget pacing—a task that analysts dread but were previously helpless to escape.

If you’re enticed by the benefits of advertising automation for budgeting and pacing, reach out to Fluency to see how you can take your advertising strategies to the next level.