Paid media teams rarely struggle with ideas. They struggle with execution capacity.
According to DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights research, campaign managers spend 26% of their time,over 10 hours per week,on manual optimizations. That includes tweaking bid modifiers, reallocating budgets, and adjusting performance thresholds.
That's not "small admin work." That's a full day every week.
And for North American agencies, DoubleVerify estimates that time equals $17,000+ annually per team member spent on repetitive tasks.
This post breaks down what the data suggests is happening, why it matters, and how teams can reduce the "manual ops tax" without losing control.
What DoubleVerify's 2025 report says
DoubleVerify's report draws on DV platform intelligence plus a global survey of 1,970 marketing and advertising decision-makers.
The headline finding for paid media operations is striking: 26% of time spent on manual optimizations, which works out to over 10 hours per week. For North American agencies, that time translates to $17,000+ annually per team member spent on repetitive tasks.
Perhaps more telling is this: 91% of marketers say they are using or plan to use third-party AI or automated bidding tools outside their DSPs to support performance and streamline operations. The industry knows there's a problem.
If you've ever felt like paid media has turned into "constant maintenance," DV's framing captures it perfectly: campaign managers becoming reactive "facilitators" instead of strategists.
Why this is happening
Manual work persists in paid media because the job is full of repeatable steps that feel too risky to automate without guardrails. Think about pacing checks and budget guardrails, QA and error prevention for broken links or disapprovals, copying changes across accounts, exporting data for weekly reporting, and adjusting thresholds as conditions change.
This work follows a weekly rhythm, but it's fragmented across multiple platforms, spreadsheets, and dashboards. It's easy to miss steps when under pressure, and it's hard to standardize because playbooks live in people's heads rather than in documented systems.
So teams keep clicking,because clicking feels safe.
The real cost isn't time. It's what time prevents.
The report's "10+ hours/week" statistic is useful, but the bigger impact is what those hours replace.
When ops work eats the week, teams lose strategic thinking time,the hours that should go toward testing ideas, improving creative, and refining targeting. They lose consistency, because different people end up running different versions of the "same" process. They lose speed, because every cycle depends on manual execution. And they lose confidence, because mistakes create fire drills, which creates more manual checking.
That's why teams feel busy without moving faster.
A practical framework to reduce manual campaign work
Here's a simple way to attack the problem without a massive replatforming project.
Step 1: Identify your "weekly ops checklist"
Most teams already have one,informal or documented. Write it down as a process, not as tasks: Monitor â Diagnose â Decide â Execute â Document â Report.
Then examine where time is spent inside that chain. What do you check every week? What triggers action? What gets repeated across accounts? What do you rebuild in spreadsheets each time?
Step 2: Pick one "high-pain workflow" to automate first
Don't start with "automate everything." Start with the workflow that happens every week, is currently manual, is error-prone, and produces a predictable output. Good candidates include pacing and budget guardrails, QA and hygiene checks, weekly performance reporting, or anomaly alerts for spend spikes and conversion drops.
Step 3: Decide the right automation approach
Most teams choose between staying manual (which gives control but is slow), DIY automation (which is flexible but requires technical skill and maintenance), single-purpose automation tools (which offer quick wins but are often template-driven), or workflow automation (which systemizes the weekly process into repeatable execution).
The point isn't "more automation." The point is more repeatability.
What "good automation" looks like
DV's numbers don't imply that teams should hand everything to an autonomous agent. They imply that teams need automation for repeatable steps, human review where judgment is required, and visibility into what ran and what happened.
That's how you get time back while staying confident.
Where pi-automate fits
If your biggest problem is "manual work eats the week," you don't need another dashboard. You need your weekly process to become a system.
pi-automate is an Ads Ops platform that implements your playbook as workflows your team runs,so pacing checks, QA, reporting, and routine optimizations stop living in spreadsheets and platform tabs.
Want a fast starting point? Pick one workflow you run weekly. That's the first one to automate.
FAQ
How many hours do campaign managers spend on manual optimization?
DoubleVerify's 2025 Global Insights research reports campaign managers spend 26% of their time,over 10 hours per week,on manual optimizations.
What tasks count as "manual optimization"?
DV cites manual work like tweaking bid modifiers, reallocating budgets, and adjusting performance thresholds.
Why do teams keep manual processes if they waste time?
Because manual execution feels safer. Teams often lack a workflow system with repeatability, approvals, and run history, so they rely on clicks and spreadsheets.