Case Study: Direct Agents | Cut Ad Ops Time by 63% & Boosted MQLs by 75% with Shirofune

Direct Agents is an omni-channel, full-performance marketing agency specializing in holistic media strategies. However, time-intensive manual bid adjustments for Amazon Ads limited the agency’s ability to focus on high-impact strategic initiatives, while rising ad costs and evolving client expectations heightened the need for greater efficiency.

By integrating Shirofune’s automated bidding and budget pacing, the agency cut ad management time by up to 47%, allowing teams to prioritize market research, audience segmentation, and creative  testing. In the E-Commerce team, where campaign management was previously highly manual, monthly operational workload for a single account dropped dramatically—from 125 hours to just 45.8 hours. These time savings freed up capacity for more strategic, high-impact work. Some clients saw up to 150% growth in leads while maintaining cost efficiency.

Looking ahead, Direct Agents plans to expand Shirofune’s role in omni-channel marketing and CRM-driven LTV optimization, further enhancing results and driving long-term client success.

（Source: Direct Agents）

Direct Agents is a full-service marketing agency that goes beyond ad operations, delivering comprehensive marketing strategies to clients across diverse industries. The company comprises several specialized teams, including an E-Commerce division focused on platforms like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Social Media, and a Paid Media team overseeing search advertising on Google, Microsoft, and other major channels.

Beyond advertising, Direct Agents delivers a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions—including B2B demand generation, influencer marketing, advanced analytics, and AI-powered creative and content development. These capabilities support clients in executing full-funnel, data-driven strategies that drive both short-term performance and long-term growth.

While industry-agnostic, the agency’s client portfolio spans subscription-based services, B2B companies, and E-commerce brands—many of which require nuanced strategies that balance aggressive growth goals with strict performance metrics like ROAS and CPA.

Recognizing the growing complexity of digital advertising and the heightened demand for strategic value, Direct Agents sought to optimize its operations, reduce time-intensive tasks, and enhance campaign performance. The agency encountered increasing challenges related to ad management—rising inventory costs, the need for more advanced bidding strategies, and the challenge of balancing strict client goals with overall business growth.

To address these issues, Direct Agents adopted Shirofune, an automated ad management platform designed to streamline bid adjustments, budget pacing, and performance tracking. By integrating Shirofune into their workflow, the agency has shifted its focus from manual optimizations to more strategic, high-impact initiatives.

Direct Agents faced challenges in efficiently managing advertising campaigns across its diverse client base. Direct Agents had already developed in-house automation tools and campaign trackers to streamline performance monitoring. However, as client demands and channel complexity grew, even these systems b egan to strain under the pressure of constant real-time optimization needs.

To support its operations, the team developed proprietary systems—most notably a custom bidding engine capable of making hourly bid adjustments within campaigns. Additionally, nearly every team created their own automated pacing and performance trackers using Supermetrics, pulling cross-channel data via API integrations to centralize reporting across Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more.

However, maintaining this complex infrastructure proved increasingly difficult.

“We had built our own bidding technology and used tools like Supermetrics to create performance trackers, but they required constant upkeep. If the campaign structure changed or if we wanted to analyze data from a new perspective, we had to rebuild everything. It was technically powerful, but not efficient.”

— Amira Desai, Supervisor, Paid Media

The E-Commerce team experienced similar struggles—particularly in managing Amazon Ads, which required intensive manual oversight and regular budget recalibration.

“For the E-Commerce team, managing campaigns across platforms like Amazon, Walmart, and Target involved a lot of manual work, especially with budget allocation and bid adjustments. We didn't have a unified system, so we were constantly exporting data, manipulating it in spreadsheets, and then re-uploading changes. This was incredibly time-consuming and made it difficult to react quickly to market changes or optimize campaigns strategically.”

— Nicholas Galante, E-Commerce Team, Direct Agents

To meet growing analytical needs, some team members turned to BigQuery for advanced reporting, while the analytics team developed custom Power BI dashboards that combined standardized KPIs with client-specific views. Though these tools delivered deep insights, they also required frequent manual updates and ongoing team coordination.

“We’ve developed a strong internal system to connect omni-channel data,” Amira at Paid Media team added. “But it was becoming increasingly resource-intensive to maintain, and it took valuable time away from more strategic work.”

Ultimately, while these internal tools reflected Direct Agents’ technical sophistication, they exposed a critical limitation: a lack of scalability and agility to keep pace with evolving client demands and the rapidly changing digital advertising landscape. The agency recognized the need for a more sustainable, streamlined solution—one that would free up internal resources and allow teams to focus on delivering strategic value instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Managing bids and reallocating budgets wasn’t just a daily task—it was a seven-day-a-week operational necessity. To meet aggressive client goals and keep pace with increasingly dynamic media environments, the Paid Media team implemented advanced strategies such as weekly MMM (Mixed Media Modeling) and predictive forecasting to inform spend decisions across multiple platforms, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other social and display channels.

While these strategies improved accuracy and alignment with business goals, they also demanded constant tactical adjustment, often over weekends and in real time, to ensure delivery stayed on target.

“There were many times when team members had to manually log in during weekends just to make sure campaign budgets didn’t overspend or underdeliver. It was just unsustainable.”

— Amira Desai, Supervisor at Paid Media

Despite having developed in-house tools and automation layers, the team’s focus on precision and control led to growing operational strain. The complexity of platform ecosystems, rising inventory costs, and granular client KPIs made manual oversight increasingly untenable, amplifying the need for scalable automation.

Optimizing Amazon Ads was a major challenge for the E-Commerce team, which manages advertising for direct-to-consumer (DTC) clients in the online retail space. These clients depend heavily on seasonal campaigns, time-sensitive promotions, and rapid-response advertising to drive conversions. As a result, campaign performance is highly influenced by external factors like weather, time of day, holidays, and promotional calendars, demanding swift, precise ad adjustments to remain competitive.

Unlike Google Ads, Amazon’s limited automation capabilities required marketers to manually set and adjust bids for each keyword. This tedious process became even more demanding due to daily ad performance fluctuations and frequent budget reallocations.

“Managing E-commerce advertising, especially on platforms like Amazon, requires significant time for tasks like bidding and budgeting, often involving thousands of keywords. This manual effort made it challenging to dedicate sufficient attention to broader, strategic planning for our clients' growth.”

— Nicholas Galante

The team’s workflow involved pulling performance data into Excel, building pivot tables, applying filters, and adjusting bids manually—one keyword at a time. In large-scale accounts, this meant working with thousands of active keywords across multiple campaigns, all while ensuring that every adjustment was aligned with performance goals and monthly budget pacing.

“Bidding and budgeting were the biggest time sinks,” says Nicholas. “We had to go through everything by the dollar, making sure our decisions aligned with client performance goals. It wasn’t just changing numbers—it required strategic thinking, and that took time.”

This manual, time-intensive workflow created significant operational strain—and made it clear that the team needed a more scalable, efficient way to manage Amazon Ads. The goal was to shift focus from survival to strategy: spending less time on data wrangling and more time driving long-term growth for clients.

As clients grew more data-savvy, they expected not just campaign execution but also proactive, strategic insights. Simultaneously, AI and automation were reshaping the industry, requiring agencies to rethink their competitive edge and approach to campaign management.

To stay ahead, Direct Agents recognized the need to automate repetitive yet essential aspects of ad management. By reducing manual workloads and streamlining operations, the agency aimed to boost efficiency, enhance performance, and refocus teams on high-impact growth initiatives. The ultimate goal was to free up time and resources to develop more precise, data-driven, and innovative strategies for sustained client success.

To tackle its growing challenges, Direct Agents explored various ad optimization solutions. However, most solutions fell short, lacking the close vendor collaboration and seamless platform integration essential for meeting tight deadlines and evolving client needs.

Recognizing the growing operational strain and the limitations of existing tools, the agency’s CEO took a hands-on approach—personally researching ad optimization platforms. After evaluating several options, he introduced Shirofune to the team as a potential solution.

Shirofune not only streamlined budget and bid management but also leveraged first-party data for advanced optimization, all while providing dedicated vendor support. With a fast implementation process and data-driven recommendations, Shirofune delivered the flexibility Direct Agents needed.

A major challenge was continuously fine-tuning keyword bids on Amazon Ads. Unlike Google Ads, Amazon offers limited automation, requiring marketers to monitor and adjust bids throughout the day. This manual process became even more challenging when scaling campaigns across multiple clients.

With Shirofune’s automated bidding system, Direct Agents eliminated the need for daily manual bid updates—keyword bids were now optimized in real time based on performance data. Shirofune also automated budget pacing, replacing manual ad-spend adjustments at the start and end of each month. There is also a feature that automatically sets bid modifiers to increase bids during specific days and times when performance is high, and this feature has recently been activated for Direct Agents.

Now, the team only needs to set a monthly budget, eliminating the need to monitor daily budget pacing or make ongoing adjustments. This ensures more efficient budget distribution without constant human oversight.

“Before Shirofune, we were bouncing between Excel and the ad platforms, using outdated performance data from the day before. Now we can access real-time data and manage everything in one place—which has made pacing, bidding, and budgeting much easier to control,” says Nicholas at E-Commerce Team.

“I’d estimate we’ve saved around 40 to 50 percent of our time. That’s a huge gain, and we’re now using that time to focus more on strategic tasks. We’re still learning some of Shirofune’s finer points, but it’s already been a big help to the team.”

Over the years, Direct Agents has tested and implemented a variety of automation tools to streamline ad operations. While some offered basic functionality, many ultimately fell short—not just due to technical limitations, but because of a lack of collaborative vendor support.

“We’ve tried multiple auto-bidders in the past,” explained Avery Klondar, Associate Director at Paid Media. “But we often struggled to build a working relationship with the vendor teams. It felt like we were on our own when it came to implementation and troubleshooting.”

Without hands-on support, these platforms added more complexity than they solved—making it difficult for the team to scale operations or confidently adopt automation at a broader level.

Unlike other automation platforms, Shirofune provided hands-on collaboration, enabling faster implementation and deeper insights into best practices. This dedicated support streamlined the transition to automation, ensuring Direct Agents could fully leverage the platform’s capabilities.

One of Shirofune's key differentiators is its intuitive, user-friendly interface. Users can quickly master the platform and start seeing positive results in a short amount of time. Direct Agents has effectively leveraged Shirofune’s platform and its technical support to maintain and accelerate their momentum.

Shirofune’s automated budget grouping and bid adjustments enabled Direct Agents to allocate spend more efficiently, ensuring high-performing campaigns received the investment needed to drive maximum conversions. Beyond saving significant time, this automation improved performance by dynamically optimizing bids in real time based on market conditions.

Before Shirofune, one of the most time-consuming aspects of ad operations was managing pacing, bidding, and budgeting across multiple platforms—including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. These retail media platforms required daily manual oversight, which placed a heavy operational burden on the E-Commerce team.

"Advanced budget planning—especially through budget groups—is essential for our seasonal clients who need rapid reallocation,” says Nicholas. “Shirofune’s budget grouping approach has been invaluable in meeting these demands.”

(Examples of negative keyword suggestions provided by Shirofune)

(Examples of budget configuration screen)

"Shirofune’s recommendations—like negative keyword optimizations and new keyword opportunities—help us continuously refine campaigns while reducing manual effort. It’s been a game-changer, freeing up our team to focus on more strategic initiatives."

— Amira Desai, Supervisor at Paid Media

By automating these processes with Shirofune, the E-Commerce and Paid Media teams significantly cut manual optimization time while keeping campaigns continuously refined and competitive.

By integrating Shirofune, Direct Agents significantly improved efficiency, allowing teams to focus on high-value strategic initiatives that drive greater client impact.

"We have now launched Shirofune across a $1.68M monthly budget spanning eight Direct Agents clients, including international accounts. The automation has consistently delivered clear time savings across all accounts where the autobidder was implemented, with even greater efficiencies as we expanded across more platforms—achieving a minimum of 27% reduction in time spent, up to 47% in some cases."

— Amira Desai, Supervisor at Paid Media

By automating bid adjustments, budget pacing, and performance tracking, Direct Agents lightened its day-to-day workload and shifted attention from repetitive chores to higher-impact initiatives.

By eliminating constant manual interventions, Direct Agents optimized ad spend allocation, ensuring resources flowed into the highest-performing campaigns for maximum impact.

These strategic initiatives have strengthened client relationships by providing deeper insights, more compelling recommendations, and measurable business results. As clients recognize greater value, they have expanded advertising budgets and embraced additional testing opportunities—further cementing Direct Agents’ status as a trusted growth partner.

With Shirofune, Direct Agents didn’t just streamline ad operations—it redefined client value, making strategic innovation the core of its advertising services.

As digital marketing evolves, Direct Agents remains dedicated to harnessing automation and data-driven insights to refine its advertising strategies. Looking ahead, the agency aims to expand Shirofune’s capabilities into omni-channel marketing and long-term customer value maximization.

By expanding Shirofune’s omni-channel capabilities, Direct Agents will develop more cohesive, data-driven strategies that enhance efficiency and maximize performance across all platforms.

With CRM-powered insights in Shirofune, Direct Agents can fine-tune strategies for sustainable growth, maximize ROI, and cultivate stronger, long-term customer relationships.

By embracing advanced automation, omni-channel execution, and an LTV-driven approach, Direct Agents is preparing to shape the future of digital advertising. With Shirofune, the agency will continue driving smarter, faster, and more efficient ad operations—ensuring long-term success and sustainable growth for its diverse client portfolio.