You may know the feeling. You launch a Google Ads campaign, watch it start to perform, and then… it just stalls.
Here’s the truth: Google Ads isn’t broken. It just doesn’t reward passive marketers.
It rewards the ones who treat their campaigns like living, breathing systems. The ones who track performance, make intentional adjustments, and know how to pivot when the data calls for it. It also tends to reward the ones with the biggest budgets, but since that isn’t possible for everyone, it becomes even more important to be strategic and intentional. The ones who carry treats in their back pocket and understand that consistency wins loyalty, just like training a stubborn dog.
This checklist is built for those marketers. The ones who want results, not just reports.
Weekly Quick Wins
- Search Term Report + Negative Keywords: Nothing drains budget faster than irrelevant queries. Check your search term reports at least once a week. Add negative keywords like your budget depends on it.
- Ad Copy Testing: Rotate out the weak links. Test new headlines. Highlight different benefits. Make sure every ad has a purpose beyond just filling space.
- Impression Share Monitoring: If you’re losing impression share to budget or ad rank, that’s your cue. Either raise your budget, refine targeting, or improve ad quality.
- Budget Pacing: Make sure you’re not front-loading or underspending. Daily budgets should reflect your actual spend capacity and campaign goals.
- Quality Score Triage: Anything under a 6 deserves attention. Look at expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience to troubleshoot.
Biweekly / Monthly Strategic Tweaks
- Keyword Expansion & Pruning: Identify high-converting queries to add as exact match. Pause or delete underperforming terms that drag down quality.
- Refine Match Types: Broad match isn’t bad, but it needs structure and layered audiences. Make sure your match types support, not sabotage.
- Audience Layering: Use in-market, affinity, or custom segments to refine who sees your ads. Add observation audiences even if you’re not targeting them (yet).
- Device & Location Adjustments: Check performance by device and geography. Adjust bids or split out campaigns for higher control.
- Extension Audit: Are your sitelinks still relevant? Do your callouts reflect current offers? Don’t let stale extensions dull your CTR.
🔧 Pro Tip: Extensions can boost click-through rate, but only if maintained.
Quarterly Performance Engineering
- Landing Page Relevance: Your ad promises something. Your landing page better deliver. Audit for speed, clarity, and message match. Don’t live in a silo from your web team – work together to get the best possible result, like how my cat and dog team up against me every weekend morning when it’s their breakfast time and I’m still snoozing.
- Conversion Tracking Audit: Are your goals still valid? Are events triggering correctly? Fixing this can uncover all kinds of misattributed performance issues.
- ROAS / CPA Target Recalibration: Set new benchmarks based on real-world data. Don’t just ride with last quarter’s targets.
- Bid Strategy Check-In: Maximize Conversions? Target ROAS? ECPC? Make sure your strategy still matches your campaign objective.
- Competitor & SERP Landscape Review: Has a new player entered the auction? Has ad copy shifted across the board? Keep your eyes on the SERP and not just your own stats.
📈 Reminder: Sometimes the issue isn’t the ad, it’s the changing competitive landscape.
Pro-Level Additions
- Use Automated Rules & Scripts: Automate low-performers pausing, budget alerts, or ad scheduling. Save your future self some manual work.
- Watch for Performance Max Cannibalization: Monitor overlap with branded search or competitor terms. Separate campaigns if needed.
- RLSAs & First-Party Audiences: Use your own customer data to refine targeting. Show up smarter for people already familiar with your brand.
- Campaign Naming & Structural Hygiene: Clear naming = better insights. Audit how you name and group your campaigns for easier reporting and optimization.
🐕 If you’ve ever tried calling your dog by five nicknames, you know why consistency matters.
Final Word
Google Ads doesn’t reward set-it-and-forget-it. It rewards strategic tinkering, structured habits, and marketers who treat their data like intel, not noise. Use this checklist regularly; you won’t just maintain performance, you’ll scale it.
Need help turning this into a system your team actually uses? Let’s talk. We do this every day, and we don’t mind getting a little scrappy when it counts.
