Performance marketing agencies live and die by the numbers—ROAS targets, CPL benchmarks, conversion rates, and budget pacing. But the analysts and media buyers responsible for hitting those numbers spend a surprising portion of their time on work that has nothing to do with optimization: formatting reports, documenting campaign settings, coordinating ad ops tickets, and responding to client status requests.
Virtual assistants are being deployed across performance marketing agencies to absorb this administrative load, returning strategic capacity to the analysts who most need it.
Where Administrative Time Disappears in Performance Agencies
A 2025 industry survey by Marketing Week found that performance marketing analysts at agencies spend an average of 29% of their working hours on administrative and reporting tasks rather than active campaign optimization. At agencies billing for analyst time at $100 to $200 per hour, this overhead is both expensive and unnecessary.
"Our analysts are expensive for a reason—they understand attribution modeling, bidding strategy, audience construction," said Derek Fontaine, VP of operations at a performance marketing agency in Boston. "Having them spend two hours a day building PowerPoint reports or responding to 'how are we tracking' emails is a real cost. VAs changed that for us."
Campaign Administration and Setup Documentation
When new campaigns launch, significant documentation work accompanies the technical setup: campaign naming convention compliance, tracking parameter documentation, budget allocation tracking, creative asset inventory, and audience segment logging. VAs handle this documentation layer—ensuring the agency's internal records reflect current campaign configurations and providing account managers with accurate status updates.
For agencies running campaigns across Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and programmatic DSPs simultaneously, maintaining accurate cross-platform documentation is a full-time coordination function. VAs trained in digital advertising platforms manage this work through structured templates and project management tools.
Cross-Channel Reporting Compilation
Client reporting in performance marketing requires aggregating data from multiple platforms, applying attribution models, and presenting results in a format aligned with client KPIs. The data pull and formatting work—pulling metrics from platform dashboards, populating report templates, generating trend charts, calculating performance against target benchmarks—is time-consuming but not analytically complex.
VAs are handling this reporting infrastructure at a growing number of agencies. Trained in tools like Google Data Studio (Looker Studio), SuperMetrics, and agency reporting templates, VAs pull weekly and monthly performance data, populate client-facing dashboards, and prepare draft performance narratives for analyst review.
"Before we brought on VA support, our team was spending 15 hours a week on reporting prep across our client portfolio," said Kira Anderson, director of client services at a performance agency in Seattle. "Now our analysts spend 30 minutes reviewing and personalizing reports the VA has already built. The time recovery paid for the VA cost in the first month."
Ad Ops Coordination and Ticket Management
Performance agencies frequently manage ad operations workflows that require coordination between media buyers, creative teams, ad trafficking specialists, and publisher or platform representatives. VAs serve as coordination hubs in these workflows—logging ad ops tickets, tracking creative submission deadlines, following up on pending approvals, and ensuring trafficking timelines stay on schedule.
When creative assets arrive from clients or internal design teams, VAs conduct specification checks—verifying file sizes, aspect ratios, character counts, and URL parameters—before routing to the trafficking queue. This front-end quality control reduces revision cycles and delays in campaign launches.
Client Communication Management
Between weekly calls and monthly reporting cycles, performance agency clients generate significant inbound communication: questions about budget pacing, requests for mid-month data pulls, competitive intelligence inquiries, and approval requests for campaign changes. VAs manage this inbox layer—logging requests, pulling the relevant data, and drafting responses for analyst or account manager review before sending.
Performance marketing agencies looking to build VA-supported operations can find qualified candidates with digital advertising and reporting experience at Stealth Agents.
In an environment where performance margins are under constant pressure, the agencies building the most efficient operations—not just the best media buying strategies—are winning the long game.
Sources
- Marketing Week, "Performance Agency Analyst Time Allocation Report," 2025
- eMarketer, "Paid Media Agency Operations Benchmark," 2025
- Search Engine Land, "Agency Reporting and Client Communication Trends," Q1 2026