Fluency's 2026 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report finds 71% of ad operations teams say manual processes risk client campaigns, with 87% still pacing budgets manually across 170 U.S. agencies.
Fluency this month released the findings of its 2026 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report, a study drawing on data from more than 170 U.S. independent digital advertising agencies and in-house advertising teams. The report documents a sharp acceleration in operational strain across agency ad operations teams - and a growing consensus that the manual workflows underpinning most campaign execution are no longer safe at scale.
The headline figure is stark. According to the report, 71% of ad operations teams say manual processes are putting client campaigns at risk. The errors they describe are concrete: wrong creative or copy uploads, audience targeting mistakes, overspent budgets, and inconsistent reporting. Risk mitigation, not efficiency, has become the primary driver pushing agencies toward AI-powered automation.
The report paints a detailed picture of what daily life looks like inside a modern ad operations team. According to Fluency's survey data, the average ad strategist manages 33 client accounts simultaneously. That number is not the whole story. 82% of those strategists are managing campaigns across three or more advertising channels. Of those, nearly two in three - 63% - are handling four or more platforms at once.
Each platform carries its own interface, its own reporting system, and its own campaign configuration requirements. The result, according to the report, is that strategists spend significant time re-entering the same information into different systems rather than applying analytical judgment to campaign performance.
The time cost is quantified. According to Fluency's survey, routine AdOps tasks - campaign optimizations and budget pacing - consume an average of 39.75 hours per strategist every month. That is roughly 25% of a full working year spent on executional maintenance. New account launches add another 6.75 hours per account on average.
Budget management represents a particular pressure point. The AdOps teams reporting that they manage budgets manually increased by 14.5% year-over-year, rising to 63% in the 2026 study from 55% the year prior. And 87% of advertisers in the study still rely on manual budget pacing - a process the report identifies as exposing campaigns to errors, overspend, and underspend, especially as account volumes increase.
The concern about budgeting risk has also grown. The share of advertisers stating they want to mitigate budgeting risk rose from 56% in 2024 to 60% in 2025, a 7% year-over-year increase. 85% of surveyed advertisers now cite "reducing manual execution" as a primary goal for pursuing automation.
One of the most significant year-over-year shifts in the 2026 report concerns multi-platform management complexity. In 2024, 43% of strategists in the study managed four or more advertising platforms. By 2025, that number had jumped to nearly 70% - a 58% increase in a single year.
This trajectory aligns with a broader sentiment captured in the survey. 94% of advertising executives said that "difficulties scaling operations" is their top challenge. The number has held at 94% across multiple survey iterations, suggesting that as agencies add clients and channels, the operational ceiling becomes an ever-present constraint rather than an occasional friction point.
Audience data complexity is adding to the pressure. Between 2024 and 2025, the proportion of advertisers using third-party data sources for audience building increased by 59%, rising from 27% to 43%. The number of advertisers using three or more audience data sources nearly tripled - from 8% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. As a result, teams that once managed reasonably contained data environments are now reconciling proprietary first-party data with multiple external audience sources across campaigns running on several platforms simultaneously.
The fragmentation extends to reporting. According to the report, 46% of advertisers currently use two or more reporting tools to piece together campaign performance insights. Without a centralized source of truth, teams manually reconcile data across systems - a process that creates both inefficiencies and potential for reporting errors. The share of advertisers who want a single system of record for better reporting capabilities rose from 38% in 2024 to 54% in 2025, a 42% increase in a single year. 89% of surveyed advertisers stated they want better internal performance reporting tools.
The report identifies four goals that emerge from the data as central to agency strategy in 2026: decoupling growth from headcount, shifting strategist time from execution to strategy, centralizing AdOps operations, and reducing risk through automated governance.
The first of these - growing without proportional hiring - runs through survey responses directly. According to the report, one respondent wrote: "We're looking to take on additional clients without bringing on additional overhead." Another noted: "We want to be able to handle sharp increases in workload that are difficult to address through hiring." These responses reflect a structural reality that headcount-based scaling is expensive and slow compared to the pace at which new business can arrive.
The second goal - reclaiming strategist time - is about what happens when executional work is reduced. According to the report, "senior strategists hired to grow business don't have time to catch CPA spikes because they're too busy jumping between tabs." The data breaks down where that time goes: 27 hours per month on campaign optimizations, 12.75 hours on budgeting and pacing. These figures leave limited bandwidth for the analytical and strategic work that agencies use to differentiate their services and retain clients.
The third and fourth goals - centralization and risk reduction - are directly connected. According to the report, 90% of respondents want to eliminate tool, data, and team silos. The specific capabilities most wanted: better multichannel reporting features (58%), more accurate budgeting (47%), and easier bulk management capabilities (35%). One survey respondent described the current state this way: "Budget pacing, naming conventions, and QA live in scattered spreadsheets and scripts. There are too many different places to manage things." Another said: "We want to consolidate execution, pacing, and even reporting so there is one platform instead of 5+."
Risk reduction, meanwhile, has become the dominant motivation for automation adoption. According to the report, 7 in 10 respondents (71%) cite risk mitigation as their single biggest motivation for moving away from manual AdOps. As one respondent wrote: "We have a lot of accounts but very little time to manage everyone's accounts. Things get missed."
The 2026 report includes data from a separate 2025 Fluency client survey of 60 users who had adopted automation. The workflow impact figures reported there are precise. According to the client survey data, automation users saw:
On the account management side, the survey found that individual Fluency users can manage 2 to 4 times more accounts after one year of using automation compared to manual workflows, without sacrificing client quality or satisfaction.
The risk-reduction dimension also carries direct financial implications. According to client survey data, automated "safety nets" - such as budget overspend protection and zero-spend account alerts - delivered a 3.1% average increase in captured client budget spend that had previously been lost to manual pacing lag.
One client survey respondent described the before-and-after shift: "Prior to adopting automation, there were many man-hours put in... 90% of that tedious effort is now in the hands of budget automation tools." Another noted: "I can sit down every Monday and launch up to 100 Facebook campaigns for a client in about 30 minutes."
The report also profiles three case studies. The Johnson Group, a full-funnel brand and advertising firm managing 1,600 localized campaigns for a single key client, adopted automation for budgeting tasks and reported a 90% reduction in pacing tasks, an 84% reduction in QA time, a 35% increase in conversions, and a 50% decrease in cost per conversion.
Union Street Media, a real estate marketing agency with over 500 clients, used automation to build, launch, and manage dynamic ad campaigns from live MLS listings. The agency reported a 2.5x increase in strategist capacity and a 99.5% decrease in CPM compared to direct mail. The system automatically pulls listing details - street addresses, agent names, prices - into live multichannel ads, and removes ads when a property sells.
Dealer.com, the automotive digital advertising provider serving over 10,000 dealerships across the United States, integrated Fluency's Blueprints system to scale multi-channel campaigns using consumer data. The outcome, according to the report: 208,000 labor hours saved and a 300% increase in click-through rates for a key account.
The 2026 findings reflect a continuation of patterns that have been building across the industry for several years. Fluency's 2025 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report, released on September 18, 2025, documented agencies seeking to nearly double client portfolios - from 35 to 64 accounts per strategist - without expanding teams. That report also found 64% of strategists managing multiple channels and teams spending 46 hours monthly on manual campaign work. The 2026 data shows manual budgeting growing more prevalent, not less, despite the pressure this creates.
Platform complexity has not decreased during this period. TikTok's partnership with Fluency in January 2026 to automate automotive ad campaigns illustrates how new channels continue entering agency workflows, each requiring its own management infrastructure. Google's March 2026 change to budget pacing for campaigns using ad scheduling - documented in detail by PPC Land - further underscores the operational impact of platform policy changes on agencies managing dozens of client accounts simultaneously.
The broader advertising technology industry has been working through related infrastructure questions. Basis and Mediaocean announced a partnership in January 2026 to automate the complete media campaign lifecycle from planning through financial reconciliation - a direct response to the kind of fragmentation the Fluency benchmark quantifies. The Ad Context Protocol, launched in October 2025, attempted to establish a unified communication layer for AI agents operating across advertising platforms, precisely to address the siloed platform problem the Fluency survey respondents describe.
For agencies managing campaigns programmatically, Google's move to enforce a $5 minimum daily budget on Demand Gen campaigns from April 2026 adds another operational variable that compounds the complexity of managing large, automated campaign portfolios. These structural platform changes require agencies to update their automation tooling and validation logic at the same time they are trying to expand account capacity.
The survey demographics are worth noting. According to the report, 76% of the 170+ respondents currently work for agencies, and 24% work for brands. The organizations represented both generalist agencies and vertical-specific firms covering real estate and multi-family, automotive, health and wellness, retail, consumer packaged goods, and quick-serve restaurants.
Fluency describes itself as the first solution to combine purpose-built Robotic Process Automation for advertising with integrated AI. The platform manages over $3 billion in annual ad spend and more than 250,000 monthly campaigns. The company ranked #1,278 on the Inc 5000 in 2025, its third consecutive year on the list. Its founding team has worked in online advertising since 1998.
Who: Fluency, a digital advertising operating system company based in Burlington, Vermont, surveyed more than 170 U.S. independent digital advertising agencies and in-house advertising teams for its 2026 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report. Respondents included agency owners, managers, team leads, and ad strategists. Seventy-six percent worked at agencies; 24% worked for brands.
What: The 2026 Agency AdOps Benchmark Report documents that 71% of ad operations teams say manual processes are putting client campaigns at risk, leading to errors such as wrong creative uploads, audience targeting mistakes, budget overspend, and inconsistent reporting. The report finds that 87% of advertisers still rely on manual budget pacing, that manual budget management increased 14.5% year-over-year, and that ad strategists spend an average of 39.75 hours per month on routine campaign tasks. The study also shows that multi-platform management workloads surged 58% in a single year, and that 94% of advertising executives cite scaling operations as their top challenge.
When: The findings were released on March 26, 2026. Survey data reflects the 2025 operating environment of the 170+ respondent organizations. A companion Fluency client survey of 60 users from 2025 provided additional before-and-after automation impact data.
Where: The research covers U.S. digital advertising agencies and in-house advertising teams. Fluency is headquartered in Burlington, Vermont, and manages campaigns globally, powering over $3 billion in annual media spend and more than 250,000 monthly campaigns.
Why: The report addresses a structural challenge in digital advertising operations: as agencies take on more clients, manage more platforms, and handle larger budgets, manual processes that were once manageable have become sources of operational risk. Errors in creative uploads, budget pacing, and reporting have direct consequences for client performance and agency margins. The study documents why risk reduction - not efficiency alone - has become the primary motivation for automation adoption among U.S. advertising agencies.