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Larger/growing agencies – what’s your solution to working weekends/holidays?
Posted by on December 29, 2025 at 4:21 pmI work at a growing agency.
Generally, keeping tabs on things over the weekends and holidays is just part of the job. We're spending as much as a luxury car a day on some ad accounts. It'd feel irresponsible not to keep your eyes on things.
But then I'm left with burned out employees that feel like they can never take a vacation. SEO and content teams get a nice holiday break, but here we are, adjusting budgets, turning off lower performing ads, tweaking last minute holiday copy a high importance client wanted to launch to give a final hurrah to end of year revenue.
What are some things you do to help mitigate this. Automated reporting, overseas teams, just checking out over off time and saying "not my problem"?
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1 Reply
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Launch new campaigns early in the week so potential initial errors are caught before the weekend. Never on Fridays. When campaigns are better established I think optimizing daily might be overkill. It also makes it harder to correlate changes in performance to your change history log. I find the best data for optimizing to is look at performance reports for the last seven days compared to the previous period, and scanning search terms to add to the negative keywords. Same for ads performance and weeding. I do the same for last 30 days each month. I think optimizing too frequently has risks. You might be focused on a daily anomaly instead of identifiable trends.
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Try to minimize it, but when it is required reward your team. Either bonuses, days off at other times to make up for, gift cards etc.
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If your employees are always working weekends and holidays. You need better SOPs for the agency.
Regardless of spend, no reason to be looking at accounts 24/7. Set up alerts and rules to email if there are issues worth checking into. You can pull data in Looker studio and do a 30 second check across accounts if you really want to spot check something in a few minutes.
Have deadlines with clients for ad copy, creative and assets, if they don’t make the deadline there no guarantee it won’t go live on time. We do 3pm EST on Thursday, if clients don’t get it in then it may not go up for the weekend. Clients have never pushed back on us setting expectations, having process and rules around deadlines. In fact, most client crave this because internally… things are a mess.
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I have worked with some of the largest media agencies in the world as well as boutique ones, and this is one of those problems that never seem to go away. The way I see it, the main levers you can pull are:
– Automated checks: You can spend time fixing things, but don’t waste it to check to find out everything is fine.
– Clear SOPs: Accountability, buddy systems, human errors should be minimized as much as possible. If something goes wrong, are you turning off the campaign or reallocating budgets, everyone should be on the same page.
– Make peace + provide incentive: In a former life I was an investment banker, and I know as an analyst I have to be putting in ungodly hours during the week, and I was happy with it knowing that 2-3 years later it would be worth it.
Overseas works to a certain extent, but I think AI agents are coming for them. Full disclosure, this is also the space I’m in right now and I’d be happy to share with you some of the easiest/biggest wins I see across agencies.
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