Casson Media Boosts its Client Portfolio by 55%

Casson Media was founded in 2009 as one of the first full-service digital marketing agencies in South Africa. Partnering with many of the largest South African brands, its outstanding technical know-how and reputation as a Google Premier Partner have empowered Casson Media to build a growing and thriving portfolio of business.

When the pandemic hit, many South African small businesses shifted to online advertising for the first time—and turned to Casson Media for help. To effectively serve these new clients at scale, Casson Media needed a way to automate hundreds of time-consuming optimizations for Google Ads accounts while freeing up the team’s time to focus on high-value tasks like identifying targets for bidding strategies and building personalized customer experiences.

To deliver world-class services to its dozens of new small business clients, Casson Media turned on auto-apply recommendations in late 2020. Before automatically applying recommendations, Casson Media had to turn away 97 percent of new business. But with this feature, it gained bandwidth while delivering value to SMB clients in much less time at a much lower cost.

“Auto-apply recommendations is like having an extra employee that does research and brings you great ideas. Google’s got the data and the insights to make automation a real lifesaver.” — Bryan Casson, Managing Director, Casson Media

By applying recommendations automatically, Casson Media was able to automate account optimizations such as writing fresh ad copy and adjusting Smart Bidding based on real-time demand, unlocking high-performance results at scale for SMB clients. This allowed Casson’s team to focus on providing the in-depth strategic guidance they specialize in while allowing automation to handle the optimizations.

Since gaining the scalable cost and time savings of auto-apply recommendations, Casson Media has been able to successfully grow its client portfolio by 55 percent. And 75 percent of its book of business is now enrolled in auto-apply recommendations. With recommendations being automatically applied, Casson’s account managers have become 25 percent more productive. The agency is using that newfound time to focus on what it does best: innovative customer research and strategy development. “The more controlled automation we do, the more we can offer everyone,” says Casson.