I designed and implemented an internal pacing system that helped a team manage hundreds of campaigns across multiple accounts, keep weekly SEM spend under control, and surface performance issues before they became end-of-month problems.
What started as spreadsheet chaos became a shared operating workflow built around scripts, Google Sheets, and Slack alerts.
I joined a fast-moving team managing hundreds of campaigns across multiple accounts. The pacing process was reactive: budgets overspent early, stalled later, and nobody had clean visibility until the damage was already done.
The goal was not to buy a more complex tool. The goal was to create a system the team could own internally — one that would monitor, adjust, alert, and keep everyone aligned.
Campaigns were either overspending early or falling behind. Shared budgets made the issue harder, because individual campaign pacing did not show the full picture. The team could see the symptoms, but not in time to respond cleanly.
Existing pacing reports and spreadsheets created more work instead of clarity. The problem was not a lack of data. It was a lack of structure around how that data should drive action.
I used scripting to create a daily pacing workflow that could check spend, compare it to targets, and adjust budgets before problems snowballed. The first version was intentionally simple: detect overpacing and underpacing, then flag the issue clearly.
From there, the system expanded into shared budget logic, weekly KPI monitoring, and Slack-based collaboration so the team could see issues and respond inside the tools they already used.
Pull the spend position for each campaign or shared budget and compare it to the pacing target.
If a campaign was overpacing or underpacing, the script adjusted the daily budget based on total spend and days remaining.
Weekly KPI monitoring tracked clicks, CTR, CPC, conversions, and cost per conversion so the team could catch meaningful changes early.
Alerts landed in Slack and Google Sheets, making it easy to assign follow-up and keep the workflow in the team’s normal operating space.
The system helped the team pace budgets to land within 1% of target by month-end across the accounts it supported. That level of control reduced fire drills and gave the team a clearer view of where action was needed.
Instead of waiting for end-of-month cleanup, the team could see issues early and respond while there was still time to course-correct.
Proactive beats perfect. A basic alert is better than a silent failure.
operating principle from the projectThis page is the condensed case study version of a longer breakdown I published in Better Marketing covering the original pacing problem, shared budget logic, KPI monitoring, Slack alerting workflows, and lessons learned while scaling the system.
The article walks through how the workflow evolved from a simple pacing check into a shared operational system used across a large SEM environment.
Automation only works when it fits your team’s workflow.
core principle behind the systemThis project shows the same operating style I bring to product work: identify a bottleneck, design a workflow around the people using it, and build something repeatable that improves with data.