From Manual Monitoring to Autonomous Root Cause Analysis

The Challenge: A Maze of Dashboards and Data

For one of the world's largest consumer platforms, digital advertising is the lifeblood of growth. But managing hundreds of millions of dollars in spend meant constant firefighting. The marketing operations team was forced to monitor dozens of disconnected dashboards across ad platforms—from Google Ads, Meta, Apple Search Ads (ASA), TikTok, and LinkedIn—trying to detect whether changes in performance signaled a major issue.

Even then, dashboards alone couldn't tell the full story. Internal data pipelines, experimentation logs, and even external news events had to be pieced together manually to uncover the true root cause. What should have been fast, data-driven decision making often turned into hours (or days) of detective work, draining productivity.

Take, for example, when an accidental bid change caused a sudden drop in spend on one of the major platforms. On the surface, dashboards only showed the decline—but pinpointing that hidden setting change required digging through multiple accounts, logs, and approvals. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack, and wasted valuable time.

The Aliveo AI Solution: Root Cause Analyzer Agent

Aliveo AI partnered with the company to implement the Root Cause Analyzer Agent—a system designed to connect the dots automatically. Instead of scattered manual checks, the Agent created automated workflows to monitor each platform—Google Ads, Meta, ASA, TikTok, and LinkedIn—in real time.

But monitoring ad platforms was just the start. The system also integrated:

• First party data signals from internal data warehouses.
• Change events like bid adjustments, budget shifts, or paused campaigns.
• A/B test logs to account for controlled experiments, validated with statistical significance (stat-sig) checks.
• External signals such as industry news, policy updates, or platform outages.

Crucially, the Agent didn't just look at platform-level signals in isolation. It ran anomaly detection on the full funnel, fusing first party conversion data with ad platform performance metrics. This ensured that issues were traced through to business outcomes—clicks, signups, purchases—rather than flagged as shallow anomalies.

Real-World Scenarios Uncovered

• Spotting that a campaign underperformed because of an ongoing stat-sig A/B test rather than a systemic issue.
• Flagging a budget reallocation event that explained why one campaign dipped while another surged.
• Detecting that a spend drop was tied to an accidental bid change rather than external competition.
• Linking a breaking industry news story to a sudden spike in impressions or clicks.

By correlating these inputs, the Root Cause Analyzer could surface not just anomalies, but the why—cutting through noise to highlight whether metric fluctuations were caused by specific recent actions, a platform outage, an internal experiment, or broader external events.

The Results: From Reactive to Proactive

The impact was transformative:

• 100x–1000x reduction in time-to-insight. What once took hours or days to diagnose was now automated in near real time.
• Drastically reduced manual workload. Teams no longer spent hours reconciling dashboards and datasets.
• Accelerated decision-making. Root causes were flagged automatically, enabling faster responses.
• Productivity boost at scale. What previously required constant vigilance was now managed proactively with AI.

With Aliveo AI's Root Cause Analyzer Agent, the company turned an overwhelming, manual monitoring process into a scalable, automated system—freeing teams to focus on strategy and innovation rather than constant firefighting.

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Key Takeaways

• Fragmented dashboards across Google Ads, Meta, ASA, TikTok, LinkedIn and first-party data make it impossible to get the full picture.
• True root cause analysis requires connecting events, internal data, and external signals, not just dashboards.
• AI Agents like Aliveo's Root Cause Analyzer can automate anomaly detection across the full funnel, with statistical rigor, shifting teams from reactive to proactive.

“When the stakes are hundreds of millions in ad spend, knowing why something happened is much more important than knowing that it happened.”

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If your organization faces similar challenges, Aliveo AI can help you streamline monitoring and uncover true root causes—reach out to us today.