What Should a Google Ads Agency Actually Do Every Month?

1 Search term review and negative keyword updates

This is the single most important ongoing task in any search campaign. Every week, your agency should be reviewing the actual search terms triggering your ads and adding irrelevant ones as negative keywords.

Why weekly? Because new search terms appear constantly. If your agency only checks once a month — or worse, never — you're bleeding money on clicks from people who will never buy from you.

What bad agencies do: set up a campaign, add a handful of negatives at launch, and never touch them again. Some don't even look at the search terms report. They rely on broad match and Google's algorithm to "figure it out," which is code for "we're not doing the work."

2 Bid and budget monitoring

Cost-per-click fluctuates constantly based on competition, seasonality, and Google's auction dynamics. Your agency should be monitoring whether your budget is being spent efficiently throughout the week — not discovering at month-end that you blew through your budget in the first two weeks.

What bad agencies do: set automated bidding and walk away. While smart bidding strategies have their place, they still require oversight. An agency that sets Target CPA and never checks back is an agency that isn't managing your account.

3 Performance anomaly checks

Click-through rates suddenly drop? Cost per conversion spikes? A good agency catches these issues within days, not weeks. They're monitoring key metrics and investigating when something looks off.

What bad agencies do: wait for you to notice something is wrong and ask about it.

4 Ad copy testing

Your agency should be continuously testing ad variations. That means writing new headlines, descriptions, and calls-to-action, then measuring which versions drive better results. A proper testing cadence means you always have at least one active test running.

This includes responsive search ad (RSA) pin testing, headline variations, and testing different value propositions. Over time, the learnings from ad copy tests compound into significantly better performance.

What bad agencies do: write the initial ads at campaign launch and never update them. Or they make tiny, meaningless changes — swapping "Call Now" for "Contact Us" — and present it as strategic optimisation.

5 Landing page review and recommendations

Your ads are only half the equation. If you're sending traffic to a slow, confusing, or irrelevant landing page, no amount of campaign optimisation will fix your conversion rate. A good agency reviews landing page performance monthly and makes specific recommendations for improvement.

This doesn't mean they need to build your landing pages (though some do). But they should be tracking conversion rates by landing page, identifying underperformers, and giving you actionable feedback.

What bad agencies do: never mention your landing pages. They treat everything after the click as "not my problem."

6 Campaign structure evaluation

As data accumulates, your campaign structure should evolve. Maybe a high-performing ad group should become its own campaign with a dedicated budget. Maybe a campaign targeting multiple geographies should be split for better control. Maybe keywords that seemed promising at launch are proven duds that need to be paused.

What bad agencies do: build the initial structure and treat it as permanent. Months or even years later, you're running the same campaigns with the same structure, regardless of what the data says.

7 Audience and targeting refinement

Monthly, your agency should be reviewing audience performance data. Which demographics convert best? Which geographic areas are wasting spend? Are there audience segments worth layering onto campaigns for observation or targeting?

This also includes reviewing device performance (mobile vs desktop vs tablet) and making bid adjustments accordingly.

What bad agencies do: target "All users" and never segment or adjust. They might not even have conversion tracking set up properly, making meaningful audience analysis impossible.

8 Conversion tracking audit

Conversion tracking breaks. It happens more often than you'd think — website updates, tag manager changes, CRM integrations failing silently. A good agency verifies monthly that all conversion actions are firing correctly and that the data in Google Ads matches reality.

What bad agencies do: set up conversion tracking once and assume it works forever. Then when numbers look weird six months later, nobody can explain why.

9 Competitor and market analysis

Your agency should have a pulse on what competitors are doing — their ad copy, their offers, their landing pages. Google Ads provides auction insights data showing how your impression share compares to competitors. A good agency uses this to inform strategy.

What bad agencies do: operate in a vacuum. They never look at the competitive landscape and can't tell you anything about what's happening in your market.

10 Reporting with actual insights

Monthly reporting is standard, but the quality of that report matters enormously. A good report includes:

• Key metrics with context — not just "you got 500 clicks" but "clicks increased 15% month-over-month while CPC decreased, meaning we're getting more efficient traffic"
• What was done — specific changes made, tests run, and optimisations performed
• What was learned — insights from the data that inform future decisions
• What's planned — the roadmap for next month based on current performance

What bad agencies do: send an automated dashboard or a generic PDF with vanity metrics (impressions! clicks!) and no analysis. Or worse, they schedule a monthly call where they narrate the numbers you can already see, without adding any interpretation or strategy.