The second eBook in the Paid Growth and Campaigns category, focused on the search-intent channel. It assumes you've read Paid Ads for Small Businesses and decided Google Ads is your channel. From here it goes deep on the specifics: keywords, match types, ad copy, budgets, conversion tracking and the weekly routine that keeps a small Google Ads account healthy.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 45 minute read
Chapter 7
A Weekly Google Ads Routine
The thirty-minute weekly routine that keeps a small Google Ads account healthy, plus the monthly and quarterly checks that catch the bigger drifts before they cost real money.
Most small business Google Ads accounts go through the same shape over time. The first month is busy with setup and small fires. The second month feels under control. The third month gets quietly ignored. By the sixth month, the owner has forgotten what the campaign even contains, the search-terms report has a year of negatives waiting to be added, the bids haven't been touched and the cost per customer has drifted up by twenty per cent without anyone noticing. The campaign is still technically running. It's just running worse than it was, slowly.
The fix isn't more attention. It's regular attention. Thirty minutes a week, on the same day, with a fixed checklist. The checklist is short enough to actually do, specific enough to catch the real problems and boring enough that you can hand it to someone else when the time comes. This routine is what separates a small business Google Ads account that compounds into a real channel from one that quietly decays into a forgotten direct debit.
This chapter is the routine. Weekly, monthly and quarterly. Thirty minutes, one hour and three hours respectively. By the end you'll have a calendar with the slots booked and a one-page checklist for each.
The full chapter walks through the weekly thirty-minute checklist, the monthly review that updates the four numbers and reviews the bids, the quarterly deep clean and the signals that mean it's time to step away from the channel.
The weekly thirty-minute checklist
Pick a day. Mondays work for most owners - the previous week is fresh, the upcoming week is open and the pattern becomes a habit fast. Block thirty minutes in your calendar with the title "Google Ads weekly review" and treat it as a real meeting with yourself. Bring the spreadsheet from chapter six of Paid Ads for Small Businesses and open the Google Ads dashboard. Then walk through the seven items below in order. The whole thing fits in thirty minutes once it's familiar.
Weekly thirty-minute checklist
Open the search-terms report for the last seven days. Add irrelevant phrases as negative keywords. Five to fifteen minutes.
Glance at click-through rate per ad. If one ad's click-through rate is half of the other ad in the same group, pause it and write a replacement. Two minutes.
Check conversion count for the week against last week. Note any large drop or spike. Two minutes.
Check the daily spend trend. Confirm it matches your expected weekly spend. Two minutes.
Open any new recommendation from the platform. Decide and dismiss the ones you don't want. Don't apply automatically. Five minutes.
Update the conversion spreadsheet with last week's enquiries and any that became customers. Five minutes.
Note any change you made on a one-line log so you remember what you did when you review next month. One minute.
The monthly one-hour review
Once a month, on the last working day, do the longer review. This is where the four numbers from chapter six of Paid Ads for Small Businesses get updated and any real change to the campaign happens. Cost per enquiry. Enquiry-to-customer rate. Cost per customer. Return on ad spend. Compare each one against last month's number and against the maximum you set when you started.
If the four numbers are healthy, the monthly job is to review the bids per keyword. Where the cost per enquiry is comfortably below your maximum, you can usually raise the bid by ten to twenty per cent and capture more volume at the same efficiency. Where the cost per enquiry is above your maximum on a particular keyword, drop the bid by ten to twenty per cent or pause the keyword altogether. Slow, regular bid adjustments compound into a tighter account over the course of a quarter.
If the four numbers are drifting in the wrong direction, the monthly job is to find out why before changing anything else. Open the search-terms report for the full month and look for patterns you missed in the weekly reviews. Look at the breakdown by device - mobile versus desktop performance often diverges. Look at the breakdown by location - one neighbourhood might be quietly burning the budget. The fix usually emerges from looking, not from changing settings at random.
The quarterly three-hour deep clean
Once a quarter, sit down for a longer session. Review every keyword in every ad group against the last ninety days of data. Pause any keyword that hasn't generated a conversion despite having at least thirty clicks (clearly not pulling its weight). Move keywords between ad groups if the search-terms report shows the wrong ad is appearing for a particular search. Add three to five new keywords based on the search-terms report patterns.
Refresh the ad copy in every ad group. Keep the winning ad. Replace the loser with a fresh variant - new headline, new angle, same offer. Update any sitelink that's pointing to a stale page. Re-do the maximum cost-per-click maths from chapter five with the actual conversion rate from the last quarter, not the estimated one. Real numbers usually beat estimates after ninety days, and the bids should reflect that.
The annual review
Once a year, ask the bigger question. Is this channel still worth it? Look at the last twelve months of data. Cost per customer. Total customers from the channel. Total revenue from the channel. Return on ad spend. Compare against the time and money the channel cost you, including the thirty minutes a week, the monthly hour and the quarterly three hours. If the answer is comfortably yes, plan the next year - usually a small budget increase and one tighter focus area. If the answer is borderline, decide whether the underneath has changed (offer, prices, capacity) and whether one more quarter of effort would push it back into the comfortable zone. If the answer is clearly no, switch the channel off without sentimentality, learn the lessons and put the budget into the channel that's working.
Signals that it's time to step away
Three signals are worth taking seriously. First, six consecutive months where the cost per customer is above your maximum despite genuine attempts to fix it. The channel may not fit your offer at this stage of the business. Second, a sustained drop in conversion rate on the landing page that you can't trace to a specific change. Sometimes the market shifts and the offer needs reworking before paid traffic makes sense again - the earlier eBook Designing Your First Offer is the right re-read. Third, the channel competing for your attention against a higher-return activity (a referral programme that's working, a reviews push, an email list growing nicely). Time is finite and you should put it where the return is highest, not where you've put it before.
Don't run the routine alone forever
After about a year of steady weekly reviews, most of the work in the routine is repeatable enough to delegate. A virtual assistant with a checklist, a part-time helper or a cautious agency engagement can take over the weekly thirty minutes without losing the discipline, as long as the four-number monthly review stays in your hands. The owner's job is to know whether the channel is paying back. The weekly maintenance is a job you can hand over once the system is in place. The companion eBook When to Hire an Affordable Marketing Agency covers how to do that handover well.
What to do this week
Open your calendar. Add a recurring weekly Google Ads review for thirty minutes. Add a monthly review for an hour on the last working day of the month. Add a quarterly three-hour review on a date that works for you. Add an annual review at the same point each year. Print or save the weekly checklist and the monthly four-number form somewhere you can find them easily. The single most valuable habit a small Google Ads owner can build is doing the boring routine on schedule, every week, regardless of how the campaign feels in the moment.
That's the eBook. The earlier eBook Paid Ads for Small Businesses is the wider context for how this channel fits into a small business's marketing, and the companion eBook Facebook and Instagram Ads for Small Businesses covers the discovery side of the same paid-channel question. Use AI and tools to support judgment, not replace it - the platform offers automation everywhere, and your job is to keep the four numbers in front of you and use those to decide what's actually working.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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