When iProspect Singapore found its team bogged down by manual campaign tasks, it developed custom scripts that would automate them. Here, Florian Lacombe, head of client and performance activation at iProspect, explains how automating aspects of campaign setup, optimization, and reporting saved the agency a total of 427 hours per month.
As a digital performance agency operating in a digital-first country, our team at iProspect is always looking for ways to innovate and improve our marketing efforts. So when we found ourselves spending too much time manually processing and analyzing data related to our search campaigns, we knew we were losing valuable time that could be better spent strategizing.
Looking to reassess how we handled data, we set out to learn how automation could free up time spent on repetitive manual tasks — from campaign setup to optimization to reporting.
Customizing script templates to meet clients’ needs
We kicked off the process by trying to identify tasks that could be automated. When we found our planners getting bogged down by things like downloading campaign data and copying it into spreadsheets — a task that could be easily automated by a simple reporting script — our partners at Google gave us 20 Google Ads script templates. These templates could instruct computers to perform tasks associated with campaign setup, optimization, and reporting. We used those templates to create 200 proprietary scripts, each customized to meet a client’s unique needs.
The scripts enabled us to automate numerous tasks throughout the campaign process. For example, automated quality checks were performed without human error during the setup phase, while bids and budgets were monitored and optimized in real time using data from Search Ads 360. Then, instead of manually exporting data from Google Ads and formatting it into reports, campaign data was fed directly into Data Studio, where decks featuring key reporting metrics were created automatically.
Automation saves valuable time, effort
In the end, the automated scripts saved us 138 optimization hours and 289 reporting hours, totaling 427 hours per month. For a team of 16 people, the hours saved accounted for about 20% of our time, allowing us to explore new opportunities for clients and growing our business. The switch to automation also got us thinking about talent sourcing, and we now actively recruit candidates with coding experience to allow us to do this more often in the future.
Overall, automation has greatly helped our business. Not only are we able to generate insights much quicker and deliver greater campaign performance for our clients, we’re also able to focus on strategic consultancy around their data strategy. Moving forward, we will continue to invest in automation because it allows us to deliver the efficiency we need.
