What Google Ads Management Includes (and What It Doesn't)

Almost every Google Ads management proposal I get shown says the same thing: “ongoing optimisation”, “campaign monitoring”, “monthly reporting”. Three lines. And those three lines describe equally well a serious job that takes several hours a week and someone who logs in on the 30th to export a PDF.

The proposal isn’t lying. It just doesn’t say anything you can check.

This is the guide I’d want any business to read before signing a monthly retainer: which tasks should happen every week and every month, what usually sits outside the fee (and why), what a report that’s actually useful looks like, and how to confirm, using the account’s own history, that the work is being done. I’m not covering prices here; that’s in my guide to what a Google Ads consultant costs.

In 30 seconds:

• Google Ads management runs on two rhythms: weekly (search terms, negatives, spend pacing, conversion status) and monthly (bids and targets, ad tests, reporting).
• Landing pages, creative production, building tracking from scratch and rebuilding a Shopping feed are usually separate projects.
• Google Ads change history keeps the last 2 years and shows who made each change (Google Ads Help).
• With read-only access you can check it yourself without touching anything.

What exactly is monthly Google Ads management?

Monthly Google Ads management is an ongoing service where someone makes changes in your account every week and answers for the results month by month. It isn’t a one-off audit or a plan your team executes later. It’s recurring work inside the account, with documented decisions and a report that explains them.

The difference from a one-off consultation matters because it changes what you should expect. With an audit, you pay for a diagnosis. With management, you pay for sustained execution, and that means there should be a trail: changes in the account, tests running, negatives added, budget decisions made.

So what does that look like in practice? I split it into two rhythms, because mixing them up is where a lot of disappointment starts.

Which tasks should happen every week?

Weekly work is what stops budget leaking. It’s maintenance, not glamorous, and that’s exactly why it’s the first thing to disappear when someone is juggling too many accounts. When I inherit an account, the first thing I check is whether any of this was happening.

Reviewing search terms

The search terms report shows the real searches that triggered your ads. Google’s guidance is blunt: if a term isn’t relevant enough to what you sell, add it as a negative keyword (Google Ads Help). With broad match and increasingly automated campaigns, this review is your main defence against wasted spend.

One nuance worth knowing: Google leaves out terms with low query activity to meet its privacy standards. So the report doesn’t show everything, and whoever manages your account should know that and make up for it by looking at themes. I’ve written up the full process in how to audit the search terms report.

Maintaining negatives

Reviewing search terms without turning them into negatives is spotting the problem and leaving it there. Proper management keeps shared lists by theme (jobs, free, training, competitors where relevant) and adds to them every week. How to structure them without blocking good traffic is covered in my guide to negative keywords in Google Ads.

Watching spend pacing

Google Ads doesn’t spend your daily budget evenly. Its own documentation says that “on a given day, your campaign might spend up to twice your average daily budget”, and that by the end of the month you won’t have spent more than 30.4 times that average (Google Ads Help).

That’s normal. What isn’t normal is finding out on the 25th that the month’s budget went in the first fortnight, or that one campaign has been limited by budget for three weeks while another burns money without converting. A weekly pacing check lets you move money before the month is lost.

Checking conversions are still recording

This is the one people forget, and it does the most damage. If the conversion tag breaks after a website change, Smart Bidding keeps bidding on incomplete data and nobody notices until the report.

Google Ads shows a status for each conversion action. “Awaiting conversions” means no conversions have been recorded in the last 7 days, and “Misconfigured” means conversions have stopped recording entirely because of a setup error or a broken tag (Google Ads Help). Looking at that screen once a week takes a minute. Not looking can cost you a month of optimising blind.

Reviewing recommendations before they apply themselves

If auto-apply recommendations is switched on, Google applies changes on a regular basis. Some are sensible; others broaden match types or add keywords that don’t fit your business. Whoever runs the account should decide which types apply automatically and review the rest. Everything applied shows up in the recommendations “History” tab and in change history (Google Ads Help).

And what should happen every month?

Monthly work is where the bigger decisions get made. This isn’t about plugging leaks any more. It’s about steering the account towards where it makes the most money.

Bids and targets. If you use target CPA or target ROAS, someone needs to check each month whether that target still makes sense against your real margins, not just what the dashboard says. A tROAS set too high chokes volume; one set too low buys sales with no margin in them. That’s a business conversation, not a technical tweak.

Ad tests. A responsive search ad takes up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions (Google Ads Help). That’s plenty of room to test messages, and very little control if nobody is working from a hypothesis. Good management always has at least one copy or landing page test running, with a clear question behind it. For bigger changes there are experiments, which Google says let you compare how your experiment performs against your original campaign over time, splitting traffic and budget (Google Ads Help). How to set them up without drawing false conclusions is in designing rigorous RSA tests.

Structure and clean-up. Pausing what doesn’t work, consolidating low-volume ad groups, reviewing assets (sitelinks, callouts, images) and audiences. Nothing dramatic, but an account without a monthly clean-up degrades on its own.

Report and meeting. More on this below, because it’s where providers differ most.

The checklist at a glance

Frequency	Task	What you should be able to see
Weekly	Search terms review	New negatives in lists or campaigns
Weekly	Spend pacing per campaign	Budget adjustments before month-end
Weekly	Conversion status	Issues spotted and flagged within days, not weeks
Weekly	Google recommendations	Recommendations dismissed or applied with a reason
Monthly	Bid targets	tCPA/tROAS changes justified by margin or volume
Monthly	Ad tests or experiments	One live test with a hypothesis and a read-out date
Monthly	Structure, assets and audiences	Pauses, consolidations and new assets
Monthly	Report	What happened, what changed, what was learned, what’s next

What does Google Ads management usually not include?

Monthly Google Ads management covers the work inside the account. Anything that needs a different skill set, or is a project with a start and an end, is usually quoted separately. That isn’t the provider being stingy. Folding it into the fee ends one of two ways: an inflated fee, or tasks that never get done.

These are the most common exclusions, and they should be in writing from day one:

• Building or redesigning landing pages. Suggesting changes, yes. Designing, building and publishing them is design and development work.
• Creative production. Writing ad copy is part of management. Producing YouTube videos, photo shoots or graphics for Performance Max or Demand Gen usually isn’t.
• Building tracking from scratch. Checking conversions work is a weekly task. Setting up Google Tag Manager, GA4, Consent Mode, enhanced conversions or offline conversion imports from your CRM is an implementation project with its own scope.
• Rebuilding a Shopping feed. Optimising feed titles or custom labels may be included. Rebuilding the feed, migrating platforms or sorting out complex Merchant Center suspensions rarely is.
• Other channels. Meta Ads, LinkedIn or Microsoft Ads are separate management, even when the same person runs them.

My advice: don’t assume anything on this list either way. Ask. Some providers include small landing page or feed fixes; others charge extra just to add a new conversion action. What matters is knowing before the first incident, not during it.

What does a good monthly Google Ads report look like?

A good monthly report answers four questions: what happened against the business goal, what changed and why, what the tests taught us, and what’s happening next month. If a report doesn’t answer those four, it doesn’t matter how polished it looks.

I’ve seen thirty-page reports packed with impressions, CTR and position charts that never answered the client’s only real question: is this making me money? More data isn’t more rigour. Quite often it’s the opposite, a way of making sure nobody asks questions.

Here’s what I include, and what I’d suggest asking for:

1. Results against target. Conversions, CPA or ROAS, plus revenue or qualified leads if there’s CRM data. Compared with last month, and with the same month last year where seasonality matters.
2. The month’s key changes, each with its reason. You don’t need every negative listed, but every change of target, budget or structure should be there.
3. Tests. What was tested, what won, what’s being dropped. A test with no winner is still information.
4. Problems spotted, even when they’re nobody’s fault: a drop in conversions after a site change, disapproved products, a competitor bidding on your brand.
5. Next month’s plan and what I need from you. A promotion I don’t know about, stock running out, a landing page worth changing.

If the report leans on metrics that sound impressive but don’t move the business, be a little suspicious. I wrote about that in vanity metrics in digital advertising.

How can you tell the work is really being done?

Use Google Ads change history. It lists the changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years, and you can filter by date range, change type or campaign (Google Ads Help). It doesn’t depend on anyone’s version of events.

The most useful part is that it shows who made each change. Changes made in the interface appear with the user’s email address; automated ones show names like “Google Ads system”, and changes made via the API or third-party tools show the tool’s name. In two minutes you can separate a person’s work from what Google applied on its own.

You don’t need edit rights to look. Read-only access lets you view campaigns, reports and billing information without being able to change anything (Google Ads Help). If your provider pushes back on you having that access to your own account, that’s an answer in itself. I cover ownership and access in detail in how to choose a PPC agency or freelancer without lock-in.

What should you look for when you open it?

• Whole weeks with no changes from a human user. A quiet week happens. A quiet quarter doesn’t.
• Changes made only by “Google Ads system”, or auto-applied recommendations with nobody stepping in. That’s autopilot, even if you’re paying a management fee.
• Activity bunched at the end of the month, right before the report.
• Negatives. Filter by keyword changes and see whether negatives are added regularly. It’s the most reliable sign that someone is reviewing search terms.

A caveat, to be fair: more changes doesn’t mean better management. An account on well-calibrated Smart Bidding needs stability, and moving targets every three days stops it learning. You’re not looking for volume. You’re looking for a pattern: constant review, bigger changes spaced out, and each one explained in the report.

What should you ask before signing a monthly retainer?

These questions aren’t about price or contract terms. They’re about the actual work, and the answers tell you a lot about what day-to-day will look like:

1. What do you do in the account every week, and what do you do every month? Push for specifics, not “ongoing optimisation”.
2. How do you handle search terms and negatives in broad match or Performance Max campaigns?
3. Who will actually work on my account? The same person who’s pitching to me?
4. Which recommendations do you have set to auto-apply, and why?
5. How would you know if conversions stopped recording? How many days before you’d tell me?
6. What’s outside the fee? Get the list: landing pages, creative, tracking, feed, other channels.
7. Can you show me a real monthly report, anonymised?
8. Will I have read-only access to check the change history whenever I want?

Someone who does the job properly answers all eight without getting uncomfortable. If any answer is “we’ll figure that out later”, write it down.

If your question comes earlier, whether you need an agency or an individual, the comparison is in Google Ads consultant vs agency.

Frequently asked questions

How much time does monthly Google Ads management take?

It depends on the number of campaigns, search volume and whether Shopping or Performance Max is involved. Rather than hours, look at the rhythm: weekly review of search terms, spend and conversions, plus monthly decisions on bids and tests. If change history shows human activity only once a month, the time going in isn’t enough.

Does Google Ads management include building landing pages?

Usually not. Management includes analysing landing pages and suggesting data-backed changes, but designing, building and publishing pages is design and development work that’s quoted separately. Ask before signing, because some providers include small fixes and others include none.

How can I check what my provider has changed in the account?

Open Google Ads change history. It records changes from the last 2 years, with the email of whoever made them, and separates manual changes from automated ones made by Google. With read-only access you can check it without any risk of changing something.

How often should I get a report?

A monthly report with a meeting or call is the norm, plus quick alerts when something important happens: a drop in conversions, a feed problem or a budget change that’s needed. A full weekly report rarely adds much. A quick heads-up when something breaks does.

Is it a bad sign if few changes are made in the account?

Not necessarily. Accounts with stable automated bidding need few big changes. The bad sign is no trace of review at all: no new negatives, no budget adjustments, no tests. A few changes, well explained in the report, is good management. No changes at all is no management.

What you’re really paying for

Google Ads management isn’t measured by what the proposal promises. It’s measured by the trail it leaves in the account: weekly tasks that stop leaks, monthly decisions that move the business, a report that explains both, and a change history that backs it up.

If you’d like someone to go through what’s actually happening in your account right now, or what management at this level of detail would look like, book 30 minutes and we’ll look at it with the change history open. And if you’d rather see how I work first, here’s my Google Ads management service.