Google Ads Campaign Checklist 2026

Setting up a Google Ads campaign takes about fifteen minutes. But a single wrong setting during those fifteen minutes can burn through your budget for weeks before anyone notices. We have audited accounts where location targeting was left on the default “Presence or interest” option, sending ads to users on the other side of the country who had zero intention of buying. Accounts where conversion tracking was never installed, so no one could tell which clicks actually turned into revenue. Accounts paying for clicks on queries like “what is google ads” because nobody thought to add negative keywords before launch.

None of these problems come from a lack of technical knowledge. They come from rushing. From the “we’ll sort that out later” mindset that never actually circles back. That is exactly why a proper google ads checklist should sit on your desk before every campaign goes live.

This guide organises every check you need to run into clear phases. Account configuration, conversion tracking, campaign settings, keyword strategy, ad copy, landing pages, pre-launch verification, and ongoing maintenance once the campaign is running. The list is long because each item exists for a reason: these are the settings that get missed most often in practice, and they are the ones that cost real money when they do.

You do not need to read this linearly. If your account is already set up, skip ahead to conversion tracking. If your tags are firing correctly, jump to campaign settings. But if you are launching your first campaign, work through from top to bottom.

1. Account Setup and Configuration

Before you build a single campaign, the account itself needs to be configured correctly. This step gets skipped constantly. People assume everything is fine because they managed to log in and see the dashboard. Then an invoice issue pauses their ads mid-campaign, a wrong timezone throws off their reporting, or an ex-employee still has admin access and makes changes nobody asked for.

Choosing the Right Account Type

You have two options: a standalone Google Ads account or a Manager account (MCC). If you run ads for one business, a standalone account is perfectly adequate. If you manage multiple brands, or if you work with a Google Ads agency, a Manager account lets you oversee several sub-accounts from a single dashboard. It centralises billing, simplifies user permissions, and makes cross-account reporting straightforward.

One critical detail when setting up: Google will try to push you toward “Smart Mode”. Decline it. Smart Mode strips away most of the controls that make Google Ads powerful. You cannot structure ad groups properly, you cannot choose match types, and you lose visibility into search terms. Switch to “Expert Mode” during setup and stay there.

Billing and Payment Configuration

Google Ads accepts credit cards, debit cards, and in some markets, bank transfers or monthly invoicing. Credit card is the most common choice because it keeps campaigns running without interruption. A few things to double-check:

Currency: The currency you select at account creation cannot be changed afterwards. If you serve UK customers, choose GBP. Serving the US market, choose USD. Running a mixed international account in a different currency creates unnecessary complexity with exchange rate fluctuations and makes budget planning harder than it needs to be.

Invoice details: If your business needs VAT invoices, enter your company registration details correctly from the start. Google generates monthly invoices under Billing > Documents. Your finance team will need these, and retroactively fixing company name or VAT number on historical invoices is not always possible.

Account-level spend caps: You can set a monthly spend limit at the account level. When you hit the cap, all campaigns pause automatically and resume at the start of the next billing cycle. For businesses testing Google Ads for the first time, this provides a hard safety net beyond daily budgets.

User Access and Security

Google Ads offers five access levels: email-only, read-only, standard, admin, and billing. Give each team member the minimum access they actually need. The intern does not need admin rights. If you work with an agency, have them link via their MCC rather than giving individual admin access. That way, account ownership stays with you, and revoking access later is a single click.

Two-factor authentication should be switched on for every user. Account hijacking is a real and growing problem. An attacker who gains access to your account can redirect ads to their own landing pages, racking up spend before anyone notices. 2FA reduces that risk to near zero.

Timezone and Location

The timezone you select during setup determines how ad scheduling and reporting work. If your business operates in the UK, choose “GMT London”. For the US, pick the timezone where most of your customers are, or your head office timezone if you serve the whole country. Timezone cannot be changed after account creation. Setting up in the wrong timezone means your “9am to 5pm” ad schedule actually runs at different hours, and your day-over-day performance reports become misleading.

2. Conversion Tracking and Tagging

This is the single most important section of the entire google ads checklist. Get conversion tracking wrong and the only data your campaign will produce is impressions and clicks. You will not know which keywords drive revenue, which ads generate leads, or which hours of the day your customers actually convert. You are spending money in the dark.

Google Tag Manager Setup

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a container script you install on your website. Once it is in place, you can add, edit, and remove conversion tags, analytics scripts, and remarketing pixels without touching your site code. Every new tag gets added through the GTM dashboard instead of filing a ticket with your developer.

Installation is two steps. First, place the GTM container snippet on every page of your site. The snippet has two parts: one goes in the <head> section, the other goes immediately after the opening <body> tag. WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, and most modern platforms have a dedicated GTM integration field where you paste your container ID. Second, create your tags, triggers, and variables inside GTM itself.

Verify GTM is working properly by using “Preview” mode. This opens a debug panel showing which tags fire on each page and which do not. The Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension provides an additional layer of verification.

Defining Conversion Actions

The most common mistake in conversion tracking setup is not defining what actually counts as a conversion. For an e-commerce site, the answer is obvious: a purchase. But for a B2B company? Is it a form submission, a phone call, a demo request, a quote enquiry? All of the above?

Separate your conversion actions into two tiers:

Primary conversions: The actions you want Google to optimise toward. Purchases, form submissions, phone calls. Google’s automated bid strategies use these conversions to set auction bids.

Secondary conversions: Actions worth tracking but not worth optimising for. Page views, video plays, PDF downloads. Mark these as “observation only” in your conversion settings.

Failing to make this distinction is dangerous. If you tell Google that a page view is a conversion alongside a purchase, its smart bidding will chase the cheapest conversions. Page views are easy to generate. Purchases are not. The algorithm will happily deliver hundreds of page-view “conversions” while your actual sales flatline.

Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced conversions use first-party customer data (email address, phone number, name) to improve conversion attribution. The data is hashed with SHA-256 before being sent to Google, so raw personal data never leaves your site. With third-party cookies increasingly restricted across Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, enhanced conversions close the measurement gap that cookie deprecation creates.

Setup runs through GTM. You create a variable that captures the user’s email or phone from your form submission, connect that variable to your Google Ads conversion tag, and GTM handles the hashing automatically. In the UK, this is compatible with GDPR requirements provided your privacy policy discloses the data processing. In the US, state-level privacy laws like CCPA have similar disclosure expectations.

Google Analytics 4 Linking

Link your Google Ads account to your GA4 property. The connection is made in Google Ads under “Linked accounts”. Once linked, you can import GA4 conversion events into Google Ads and use GA4 audiences for campaign targeting.

Launching a campaign without GA4 linked is technically possible but leaves significant blind spots. Google Ads reporting only shows what happens after the ad click. GA4 shows what the user does on your site: pages visited, session duration, scroll depth, exit points. Without that data, your optimisation decisions are based on incomplete information. Think of it this way: Google Ads tells you the door opened. GA4 tells you what happened inside the building.

3. Campaign-Level Settings

Account configured, tracking installed. Now you are building the campaign itself. This section of the google ads checklist contains the most items because campaign-level settings are where mistakes translate directly into wasted spend. Every wrong choice here has a price tag attached.

Campaign Type Selection

The first decision when creating a campaign is its type. The options: Search, Display, Video (YouTube), Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, App. Each has a distinct logic, and picking the wrong type undermines everything that follows.

If you want to reach people who are actively looking for what you sell, Search is almost always the right starting point. Someone typing “accountant near me” or “best CRM software for small business” is already in buying mode. Display and YouTube serve a different purpose: building awareness with people who have not searched yet but might be interested. For a deeper look at when to use each type, see our Google Ads services page.

Budget Setting

Daily budget is the maximum you are telling Google to spend per day. However, Google can spend up to twice your daily budget on high-traffic days, compensating by spending less on quieter days. The monthly total never exceeds daily budget multiplied by 30.4. Understanding this mechanism prevents the panic of seeing a $200 charge on a day when your daily budget is $100.

To set a realistic budget, you need two numbers. First, the average cost per click (CPC) in your industry. Second, your expected conversion rate. If CPC averages $4.50 and your conversion rate is 3%, one conversion costs roughly $150 (about 33 clicks). Set your daily budget with that math in mind. A $30/day budget in that scenario means you should expect one conversion every five days, not one every day. Budgeting without this calculation is guessing.

Bidding Strategy

Your bid strategy determines how Google places bids in the ad auction on your behalf. The options split into two camps: manual and automated.

Manual CPC: You set bids for each keyword yourself. Full control, but time-intensive and requires constant monitoring. Suitable for new accounts with limited data or very small budgets where every penny matters.

Target CPA (tCPA): You tell Google your target cost per acquisition. The system adjusts bids automatically to hit that target. Needs at least 30 to 50 conversions per month to work reliably. Below that threshold, the algorithm does not have enough signal and performance becomes erratic.

Target ROAS (tROAS): Common in e-commerce. You set a return on ad spend target, for example, “for every $1 spent, generate $5 in revenue”. Like tCPA, it requires sufficient conversion volume to function properly.

Maximise Clicks: Gets you the most clicks within your budget. Traffic-focused, not conversion-focused. Useful for the first two to three weeks of a new campaign to build data. After that, switch to a conversion-based strategy. Leaving a campaign on Maximise Clicks indefinitely is one of the most common budget leaks we see in audits.

Location Targeting

This setting is responsible for more wasted spend than almost any other. Google Ads offers two location targeting options:

Presence or interest: Shows ads to people IN your target location OR people who have shown interest in that location. Target London and your ads can appear to someone in Manchester searching “London hotels”.

Presence: Shows ads only to people physically located in your target area.

The default is “Presence or interest” and for most local businesses, this is wrong. A plumber in Birmingham does not want to pay for clicks from someone in Edinburgh who searched “Birmingham plumber” out of curiosity. Change the setting to “Presence” for local services. “Presence or interest” makes sense for e-commerce shipping nationally, hotels, tourism, and businesses where interest-based queries from outside the area represent genuine potential customers.

Location exclusions follow the same logic. Actively exclude regions you do not serve. If you are UK-only, exclude international locations. If you serve England but not Northern Ireland, exclude it rather than hoping the algorithm figures it out.

Language Settings

For a UK audience, select English. For a US audience, select English. But consider this: Google matches language settings to the user’s browser language. A user in London whose browser is set to French will not see your English-targeted campaign. If you serve a multicultural market, adding secondary languages captures these users. Since your ad copy is still in English, speakers of other languages who do not read English will simply not click. No harm done.

Ad Scheduling

You can control which days and hours your ads appear. Running ads 24/7 is not always the best use of budget. B2B services typically see lower conversion rates on weekends. Businesses that rely on phone calls should not advertise when the office is closed. Late-night form submissions in certain industries tend to be low-quality leads.

Start with 24/7 for the first two to three weeks. Collect data. Then open the “Day and time” report and identify which time slots produce conversions at an acceptable cost. Reduce bids or pause ads entirely during time periods that consistently waste spend without converting.

Network Settings

When you create a Search campaign, Google enables “Search Partner Network” and “Google Display Network” by default. Uncheck both. Search Partners (third-party sites using Google’s search technology) generally deliver lower-quality traffic. The Display Network checkbox causes your Search budget to leak into display placements, which is a completely different advertising model. If you want display ads, create a separate Display campaign with its own budget and targeting.

4. Keyword Strategy and Negative Lists

Campaign settings locked in. Now for the keywords. Your keyword research and match type decisions directly determine whether your ads appear in front of buyers or browsers.

Keyword Research

Google Keyword Planner is a useful starting point but should not be your only source. It shows advertiser competition and estimated CPC, but search volume data comes in broad ranges (100-1K, 1K-10K) rather than precise numbers. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Ubersuggest provide more granular data.

During research, ask yourself three questions for every keyword you consider adding:

What is the search intent? “What is PPC” is informational. That person is learning, not buying. “PPC agency London” is commercial. That person is probably ready to request a proposal. Concentrate your budget on commercial-intent terms.

Volume versus competition: High-volume keywords tend to be expensive and competitive. Low-volume, specific (long-tail) keywords are cheaper and convert better. “Solicitor” is broad and expensive. “Commercial property solicitor Manchester” is specific and likely to convert at a lower cost per acquisition.

Competitor landscape: Check who else is bidding on your target terms. The Auction Insights report in Google Ads shows which advertisers you compete against and how often they outrank you.

Match Types

Google Ads currently has three match types: broad match, phrase match, and exact match. Each offers different trade-offs between reach and control.

Broad match: Shows your ad for searches related to your keyword, including synonyms, related topics, and loosely connected queries. Adding “running shoes” as broad match could trigger ads for “trainers for jogging”, “Nike shoe price”, or “shoe shop near me”. Reach is wide but control is limited. Broad match can work effectively when paired with Smart Bidding strategies (tCPA or tROAS) because the algorithm factors in conversion likelihood. With manual CPC, broad match is a recipe for wasted spend.

Phrase match: Shows your ad for searches that include the meaning of your keyword. “Running shoes” in phrase match would trigger for “best running shoes for women” or “cheap running shoes UK” but not “shoe repair service”. A balanced choice for most campaigns.

Exact match: Shows your ad only for searches with the same meaning as your keyword. Narrowest reach, tightest control. Best for high-CPC, competitive terms where you need to manage costs precisely.

Negative Keywords

Skipping this step wastes 20 to 30 percent of your budget. That figure is not an exaggeration. Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant searches. If you bid on “Google Ads agency”, you need to exclude terms like “google ads tutorial”, “google ads certification”, “google ads course”, and “how to use google ads”. Those searchers are learning, not hiring.

Build your negative keyword list before launch. Common categories to exclude across most campaigns:

Informational qualifiers: “what is”, “how to”, “tutorial”, “guide”, “definition”, “meaning”. Job-related terms: “salary”, “jobs”, “career”, “hiring”, “internship”. Price-averse terms: “free”, “cheap”, “discount” (unless you actually compete on price). Competitor brand names (unless you are deliberately targeting them). DIY terms: “template”, “tool”, “software” (for service businesses).

After launch, check the Search Terms report daily for the first week, then two to three times per week going forward. Add irrelevant terms to your negative list as they appear. This is not a one-time task. It is ongoing maintenance that directly protects your budget.

5. Ad Copy, RSAs and Assets

Keywords selected, negatives added. Now you need the ads themselves. The standard format in Google Ads today is the RSA (Responsive Search Ad). Expanded text ads can no longer be created, though legacy ones continue to serve.

Writing Headlines

RSAs allow up to 15 headlines, each capped at 30 characters. Google combines two or three of them into a single ad impression. Add at least 10 to 12 headlines, ideally all 15. The catch: any headline can appear alongside any other headline, so every headline must make sense on its own and must not contradict the others.

Structure your headlines in groups:

Three to four should be keyword-focused. Include your target keyword or close variants. “Google Ads Management”, “Expert PPC Agency” and similar.

Two to three should highlight a benefit. “Increase Leads by 3x”, “Transparent Monthly Reporting”, “No Long-Term Contracts”.

Two to three should establish trust. “12 Years’ Experience”, “200+ Campaigns Managed”, “Google Partner Agency”.

Two to three should include a call to action. “Request a Proposal”, “Talk to Our Team”, “See Our Case Studies”.

Pinning headlines to specific positions gives you control over what appears where. Pin your strongest keyword headline to position one and a benefit headline to position two. But if you pin, pin at least two or three headlines per position so Google can still test combinations. Pinning a single headline per position eliminates all testing and can hurt performance.

Writing Descriptions

RSAs support up to four descriptions, each up to 90 characters. Google shows one or two per impression. Use this space to elaborate beyond what headlines can fit.

Include the target keyword at least once. State a concrete benefit. Add a call to action. Use numbers where possible. “Managed over $2M in ad spend across 150 accounts” is more persuasive than “We manage lots of accounts”. Specificity builds credibility.

Ad Assets (Extensions)

Assets expand your ad’s real estate on the search results page and improve click-through rate (CTR). Add these before launch:

Sitelinks: Minimum four, ideally eight. Clickable links to different pages on your site. “Our Services”, “Pricing”, “About Us”, “Contact” and so on.

Callouts: Minimum four. Non-clickable short phrases. “24/7 Support”, “No Setup Fees”, “Monthly Reports Included”.

Structured snippets: Lists of your services or product categories. “Services: SEO, PPC, Social Ads, Web Design”.

Call asset: Your phone number displayed in the ad. On mobile, users can tap to call directly. Essential for any business that takes enquiries by phone.

Image assets: Static images shown alongside your text ad. Square and sector formats required. Relevant product or service images outperform generic stock photos.

Launching without assets reduces your ad’s footprint compared to competitors who have them. It also lowers your Quality Score, which increases your cost per click.

Ad Strength

Google assigns each RSA an “Ad Strength” rating: Poor, Average, Good, or Excellent. The score reflects headline variety, keyword usage, description quality, and overall uniqueness. You do not need “Excellent” but launching at “Poor” or “Average” is a mistake. Aim for “Good” at minimum. If the score is low, add more unique headlines, vary your messaging angles, and ensure keywords appear naturally in at least a few headlines and one description.

6. Landing Page Checks

You have built a solid campaign. The user clicks your ad and arrives on your website. What happens next determines whether that click becomes revenue or a wasted pound. Google’s own data shows that when page load time increases from one second to three seconds, bounce rate climbs 32 percent. From one to five seconds, it jumps 90 percent.

Page Speed

Test your landing page with Google PageSpeed Insights. Target a mobile load time under three seconds. If your page is slow, the fixes are well-established: compress images (use WebP format), remove unnecessary JavaScript and CSS, optimise server response time, use a CDN, and implement lazy loading for below-the-fold images.

Ad-to-Page Relevance

Landing page relevance is one of the three factors that determine your Quality Score. Check these points:

Does the keyword from your ad appear on the landing page? It should be visible in the headline or within the first two paragraphs.

Does the page deliver what the ad promised? If the ad says “Get a quote in 24 hours”, the landing page needs a quote request form, not a generic “About Us” page.

Can the user find the key information without scrolling extensively? The main message and primary CTA should be above the fold.

Different ad groups should point to different landing pages. An ad for “SEO services London” should land on your SEO page. An ad for “PPC management” should land on your PPC page. Sending every ad to your homepage is one of the most common and costly mistakes in Google Ads. The homepage tries to serve everyone and ends up compelling no one.

Mobile Experience

In the UK and US, over 60 percent of Google searches happen on mobile devices. Open your landing page on a phone and test it yourself. Is the text readable without zooming? Are buttons large enough to tap easily? Can form fields be filled without frustration? Does the page scroll smoothly? Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool provides a quick automated check, but nothing replaces actually using the page on a real device.

CTA Clarity

What do you want the visitor to do? Fill in a form? Call you? Make a purchase? That action must be obvious and accessible from every section of the page. Phone numbers should be click-to-call links on mobile. Forms should be short: name, email, phone, and a message field. A ten-field form with dropdown menus and mandatory company size questions will kill your conversion rate. Place the primary CTA button above the fold and repeat it at the bottom of the page.

7. Shopping and Performance Max Specifics

Search campaigns are not the only campaign type that benefits from a pre-launch checklist. Shopping and Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have their own set of requirements that trip up advertisers regularly.

Google Merchant Center

Shopping and PMax campaigns pull product data from Google Merchant Center. Before launching, verify that your product feed is error-free. Check these items in particular:

Product titles should include the most important attributes: brand, product type, colour, size. “Nike Air Max 90 Men’s Running Shoes Black Size 10” outperforms “Running Shoes” in both visibility and click-through rate.

GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers) should be populated for all branded products. Missing GTINs reduce your eligibility for certain placements and can lower your impression share.

Product images must meet Google’s requirements: white or transparent background, no watermarks, no promotional overlays. Images that violate these rules get disapproved, and disapproved products do not appear in Shopping results.

Pricing and availability must match what is shown on your website. Google regularly crawls your landing pages to verify consistency. Mismatches lead to product disapprovals or, worse, account suspension.

Performance Max Asset Groups

PMax campaigns use asset groups instead of traditional ad groups. Each asset group needs text headlines (short and long), descriptions, images (sector, square, and portrait), logos, and video. If you do not provide a video, Google will auto-generate one from your images. These auto-generated videos are rarely good. Record or source a proper 15 to 30 second video instead.

Audience signals in PMax are suggestions, not hard targeting. Add your customer lists, website visitors, and custom segments as audience signals. Google uses these as starting points for its machine learning but will expand beyond them. Do not assume PMax will only target the audiences you specify.

Feed-Only PMax vs Standard PMax

If your goal is Shopping-style product ads without the full PMax network , you can run a feed-only PMax campaign by creating an asset group with no text, image, or video assets. Google will then serve only Shopping-format ads using your product feed. This approach gives you broader reach than a standard Shopping campaign while avoiding the opacity of full PMax.

8. Pre-Launch Final Verification

Everything looks ready. Before you press “Enable”, run through these final checks. Small oversights at this stage can derail the first week of a campaign, and first-week data shapes the algorithm’s learning period.

Ad Preview

Use the “Ad Preview and Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads to see how your ad appears in search results. Do not test by searching Google directly. Real searches generate impressions without clicks, which tanks your CTR and sends negative signals to the algorithm. Use the preview tool. Check that headlines, descriptions, and assets render together coherently. Look for truncation where a headline gets cut off mid-word.

Conversion Test

Before launch, test that conversion tracking actually fires. Open GTM Preview mode, navigate to your landing page, and complete a test conversion: submit a form, click the phone link, place a test order. Confirm in GTM that the relevant tags fire. Then check Google Ads under “Conversion actions” and verify the status shows “Recording conversions” rather than “No recent conversions”. Launching without this test means you risk losing one to two weeks of data, and data loss during the learning period is especially expensive.

URL Checks

Open every ad URL in a browser. Manually. Check for 404 errors, redirect loops, mixed content warnings (HTTP instead of HTTPS), and broken UTM parameters. Check sitelink URLs too. Each broken link is a paid click that leads nowhere.

Budget and Date Verification

Double-check the daily budget figure. A misplaced decimal or an extra zero turns a $50/day campaign into a $500/day one. Verify start and end dates. If no end date is set, the campaign runs indefinitely. For seasonal promotions , always set an end date. Forgetting costs real money when the promotion ends but the campaign keeps running.

Competitive Arena Scan

Search your target keywords on Google and observe the current advertising landscape. Who is already advertising? What do their ads promise? Do they mention pricing? Is there a clear angle your ad could take to stand out? If every competitor’s ad says “Best PPC Agency”, your ad saying the same thing blends into the noise. Differentiation in ad copy drives higher CTR.

Policy Compliance

Google reviews every ad before it serves. Approval typically takes one business day but can take longer in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legal. Ads with exaggerated claims (“guaranteed page one rankings”), restricted content, or misleading language get disapproved. Review Google’s advertising policies before launch. Dealing with disapprovals after launch delays your campaign and wastes your learning period.

9. Ongoing Optimisation After Launch

Launching is not the finish line. The first two weeks after launch are a learning period for Google’s algorithm, and what you do during that window shapes long-term performance. After the learning period, ongoing maintenance keeps the campaign efficient as market conditions shift.

First Week: Active Monitoring

During the first week, check these daily:

Search terms report: identify irrelevant queries and add them as negatives immediately. Budget pacing: is the campaign spending too fast (hitting its cap by noon) or too slowly (barely spending at all)? Conversion data: are conversions being recorded? If the counter stays at zero for 48 hours despite clicks, something is wrong with tracking. Ad approval status: if any ads were disapproved, fix them immediately. An ad group with all ads disapproved means zero visibility for those keywords.

Resist the urge to make major changes during week one. Do not change bid strategies, restructure ad groups, or overhaul keyword lists. Let the system gather data. The exception is clear errors: a wrong URL, a missing negative keyword that is burning budget, or a conversion tag that is not firing.

Weeks Two Through Four: Initial Adjustments

After two weeks, you have enough data to start making informed decisions. Review performance at the keyword level. Pause keywords with high spend and zero conversions. Increase bids on keywords converting at an acceptable CPA. Check the ad schedule report and consider reducing bids during low-converting hours. Review device performance: if mobile clicks cost the same but convert at half the rate of desktop, apply a negative bid adjustment for mobile.

If you started with Maximise Clicks or Manual CPC, this is the time to evaluate switching to a conversion-based strategy, provided you have accumulated at least 15 to 20 conversions. Google recommends 30 to 50 for optimal smart bidding performance, but campaigns in lower-volume verticals can transition earlier with some caution.

Monthly Ongoing Tasks

Once the campaign matures past its first month, establish a regular maintenance cadence. Monthly tasks should include: reviewing search terms and updating negatives, analysing geographic performance and adjusting location bids, checking Quality Score trends for top keywords, testing new ad copy variations (pause underperformers, write new alternatives), reviewing auction insights to track competitive shifts, and verifying that landing pages still load correctly and conversion tracking still fires.

Quarterly, take a wider view. Are your campaign goals still aligned with business objectives? Has the competitive arena shifted enough to warrant restructuring? Are there new keyword opportunities you have not explored? Should budget be reallocated between campaigns based on relative performance?

Frequently Asked Questions