The Google Ads SOP Your Agency Should Have Given You
You’re either managing your own Google Ads account and wondering what you’re supposed to be doing on a regular basis — or you’re paying an agency and have no idea whether they’re actually doing anything. Either way, you’ve never been handed a clear SOP. This is it.
Fair warning: it’s shorter than you expect. That’s the point.
The Short Answer
If you’re spending under roughly $200/day, you should be checking your ads 1–2 times per week. Not daily. And when you do check, you’re really doing one thing: looking at the search terms report.
That’s the whole SOP. Everything else is setup that — once done correctly — mostly runs itself.
Why Not Daily?
The instinct to check every day is understandable. Money is leaving your account every morning. But logging in daily and making changes is one of the more reliable ways to hurt a Google Ads account.
Here’s why: the algorithm needs time to gather data and find its rhythm. Every time you go in and adjust bids, swap out keywords, or pause things based on a single bad day, you’re interrupting that process. You’re asking the algorithm to relearn something it was starting to figure out. Google’s Smart Bidding doesn’t reward impatience — it punishes it.
The exception is if you’re spending somewhere around $1,000/day or more. At that volume, enough data is moving that daily check-ins make sense. Under that threshold — and most small businesses are well under it — 1–2 times a week is the right cadence. Not because you’re being lazy. Because you’re letting the algorithm do its job.
What should be watching it daily isn’t you — it’s software. A properly set up account should have monitoring that surfaces anomalies: spend spikes, conversion drops, campaign pauses. You get notified when something breaks. You don’t need to babysit it.
The Weekly Task (This Is the Whole Job)
When you do sit down to check the account, here’s what you’re doing:
Open the search terms report. Read it.
This is the report that shows you the actual queries — what people literally typed into Google — that triggered your ads. It’s not your keywords. It’s the real searches underneath them.
You’re looking for two things:
1. Irrelevant terms. Someone searched “google ads jobs” and your ad showed. You don’t want that click. Add it as a negative keyword so it doesn’t happen again.
2. Relevant terms you’re not running as keywords. Someone searched “google ads management for roofing companies” and converted. That’s a real signal. Add it as an exact-match keyword so you can bid on it intentionally.
That’s the task. Read through the new search terms, add negatives for the waste, pull good ones in as keywords. Fifteen minutes. Done.
I’m not being reductive — this is legitimately what the work is in a well-set-up account. Preventing your campaign from wasting money on irrelevant search terms is the 2026 play for Google Ads. It’s not step three on a list of ten optimizations. It’s steps one, two, and three. The entire lever.
This wasn’t always the case — 36 months ago, the work looked different. It could look different again in 36 months. But right now, the search terms report is where the money is won and lost.
What DOESN’T Need Regular Touching
This is where most “agency SOPs” fall apart — they’re full of activity that looks like optimization but is mostly theater. So let me be explicit about what you should leave alone once the account is set up correctly.
Conversion tracking. Set it up right once — form fills and phone calls, through Google Tag Manager — and don’t touch it. If it’s working, there’s nothing to do. If it breaks, your performance data will tell you immediately (conversions go to zero). The setup is where the work is; maintenance is nearly nothing.
Ad copy. Once you have responsive search ads with strong headlines and an offer that matches your landing page, you don’t need to rewrite them constantly. Running tests every week sounds productive. It’s mostly noise until you have enough impressions to read the data honestly. Revisit ad copy when performance changes — not on a calendar.
Keywords. If you’ve launched with a tight campaign structure — one campaign, a few ad groups, exact-match keywords you actually want to show for — those keywords are mostly done. You’re not culling and rebuilding the keyword list every month. The search terms report is how you grow the keyword list organically, based on what’s actually converting.
The live issue is always search terms. The rest should be quiet.
When Something IS Broken
The checklist above assumes a functioning account. Sometimes things aren’t functioning, and the search terms report isn’t the right starting point. Here’s how to tell.
Conversions dropped to zero. This is the one that needs immediate attention. Check the conversion tracking first — a broken tag is the most common culprit by far. If tracking is intact, look at impression share and budget — did something change in the campaign settings? Did a payment method lapse? If you want a structured way to diagnose this, the 30-minute audit covers it systematically.
Clicks are happening but no conversions. This is a landing page problem more than an ads problem. The traffic is showing up — they’re just not converting. Look at whether your ads are actually working as a diagnostic before assuming the account is broken.
Spend dropped significantly. Usually a budget or bid strategy issue. Sometimes a Quality Score problem. Worth a closer look, but not a panic.
The honest truth is that if you set the account up right — strong negative keyword list from day one, conversion tracking that actually fires, keywords that match what people buy rather than what they browse — you’ll see real problems rarely. The weekly search-terms review catches the slow leak before it becomes a flood. If you want a quick read on whether your topline numbers are healthy right now, the ad account health checker scores your last 30 days against benchmarks in about a minute.
What Most Agency SOPs Get Wrong
Most agency SOPs are a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly grid. They look thorough. They mostly exist to justify the retainer.
Daily: “check performance.” Weekly: “review keywords and search terms.” Monthly: “ad copy testing, bid adjustments.” Quarterly: “account-wide audit, competitive analysis.”
Some of that is real. A lot of it is activity for activity’s sake. Bid adjustments made monthly based on gut feel rather than data are often neutral at best. Ad copy “testing” with no statistical significance is just swapping things. Quarterly audits that find nothing to change after a well-run first 90 days are a deliverable, not a value.
The real SOP is short because the real work is front-loaded. The first 30–90 days — building the structure, getting conversion tracking right, establishing the negative keyword list — those decisions compound. After that, the job is staying vigilant about search terms and not breaking what’s working.
That’s it. A good account is quiet. Quiet is good.
When to Get Help
If you’ve been running ads for 60–90 days and can’t point to a clean search terms report, working conversion tracking, and a cost per lead that’s at least trending the right direction — something structural is off. More weeks won’t fix it.
Same goes if you’re checking the account regularly but aren’t sure what you’re looking at. The audit checklist gives you a framework for evaluating the account from first principles. And if you want the full picture of what a well-run account’s metrics should look like, how to tell if your ads are working covers the specific numbers.
The reason my service is priced the way it is — $800 setup, $200/month ongoing — is that the setup is where the value is. Monthly maintenance, for a well-built account, really is mostly search terms. I built software that handles the monitoring; I check the things that need a human. That’s the model. For more of the SOPs and templates I actually use, see the SOP library.
Tired of guessing whether your ads are working?
We manage Google and Meta ad accounts for businesses spending $500-$10,000/month. $800 setup, $200/month ongoing. You keep your account — we just make it work.