Cut ~$5M a year in wasted ad spend
Automated new-account setup (3 hours down to 15 minutes) and nightly KPI monitoring, then rebuilt ad accounts around State Farm’s compliance rules.
- $8M+company revenue growth in year one
- $4.8Mless client ad spend in year one
- 130%more ad conversions in year one
- 15 minper new account setup, down from 3 hours
Role
Director of Paid Search Product Development / Artificial Intelligence
The challenge
When I joined Melon Local, a team of five people set up every new client’s ad accounts by hand. Each setup took about three hours, so onboarding had become a bottleneck, with a backlog of clients waiting to go live.
Every client was a State Farm insurance agent, and State Farm holds its agents to strict compliance rules for advertising online.
What I did
1. Automated client onboarding
I sat with each member of the paid search team to learn how they completed a setup. The work turned out to be a series of repetitive steps done by hand, so I built an automated workflow: the team entered a new client’s details once, and the system generated complete account setup files, ready to import into every ad platform the client had signed up for.
- Average setup time dropped from 3 hours to 15 minutes, a 92% reduction.
- Each team member could set up as many as 15 accounts a day, up from 3.
- The team cleared its entire backlog within three weeks.
- Sales began pitching “No Wait Account Setup” to close more deals.
2. Automated performance monitoring
With setups streamlined, the paid search team now had time to analyze client ad performance in detail, but poring over thousands of lines of account data for every client was another slow, repetitive task. I built a system that downloaded every client’s account data each night and checked it against the KPI ranges defined in our client database. When a KPI fell out of range, the system flagged the client’s account, notified the Paid Search and Client Success teams, and opened a ticket to track status and resolution.
3. Compliance-first ad optimization
With the data now easy to see, I turned to ad performance. I completely overhauled the ad account structure around State Farm’s compliance guidelines, maxed out Quality Score and Ad Rank on Google, and got the changes approved by State Farm corporate. That structure then became the basis for improving the other ad platforms.
Results
My first annual performance review compared that year with the one before I joined:
- My ad optimizations, together with accounts going live faster, lowered total client ad spend by $4.8M, while active accounts grew 32%.
- Ad conversions rose 130%.
- Ad engagement increased by 60%.
- Company revenue grew by more than $8M.
These gains continued at the same pace for the rest of my time at Melon Local.