PPC Management Checklist: What Your Agency Should Be Doing Every Month

Most businesses paying for PPC management cannot tell whether their agency is doing their job. Campaign dashboards show clicks, impressions, and cost, but they do not show the work behind the numbers. A good PPC agency runs a disciplined monthly routine: reviewing performance data, making bid adjustments, expanding and pruning keywords, testing ad copy, and reporting on what changed and why. A mediocre agency sets campaigns live and checks in when the client asks a question. This checklist gives you the framework to evaluate what your agency is doing every month and what they should be doing if they are not.

Week 1: Performance Review and Data Analysis

The first week of each month should begin with a complete performance review of the prior month. This means pulling campaign, ad group, keyword, and search term data and comparing it against the previous period and the same period last year if data exists. Key questions the review answers: Which campaigns hit their CPA or ROAS targets? Which missed? What drove the variance? What search terms generated conversions? What search terms consumed budget without converting?

Conversion tracking verification should happen at the start of every monthly review. Tracking breaks when websites update, form systems change, or tag manager configurations get altered. An agency that is not checking whether conversion tracking is functioning accurately each month may be optimizing toward phantom or duplicated conversions without knowing it. A 15-minute tracking verification check at the start of each cycle catches these issues before they distort a full month of optimization decisions.

Quality Score review should also happen monthly. Campaign-level Quality Score trends reveal whether landing page relevance, ad copy relevance, and expected CTR are improving or declining. Declining Quality Scores mean rising CPCs for the same traffic volume. Catching this trend early prevents cost increases from compounding before intervention.

Week 2: Negative Keyword Management

Negative keyword management is one of the most impactful and most neglected monthly tasks in PPC management. As campaigns run, the search term report accumulates irrelevant queries that Google matched to your keywords through broad match or Performance Max. Adding these terms to the negative keyword list prevents future spend on them. An agency that is not reviewing and updating the negative keyword list monthly is allowing budget waste to compound every week.

Monthly negative keyword review process: export the search term report for the prior 30 days, filter for terms with zero conversions and more than one click, review each term for relevance, add confirmed irrelevant terms to the appropriate campaign or account-level negative keyword list, and document what was added and why. This process takes 30 to 60 minutes for most accounts. It is one of the highest-ROI tasks in the management calendar.

Shared negative keyword lists across campaigns should be reviewed quarterly to identify terms that belong at the account level rather than the campaign level. Keeping the negative list organized prevents the same exclusions from being added repeatedly and ensures consistent negative coverage across new campaigns as they are added to the account.

Week 2: Bid Strategy and Budget Review

Monthly bid strategy review covers: are Smart Bidding targets still appropriate given recent performance data? Have CPCs changed significantly, indicating increased competition or reduced Quality Scores? Is budget distribution across campaigns aligned with business priorities, or has the algorithm shifted spend in ways that do not match the business’s current goals?

CPA target adjustments should happen based on performance trends, not intuition. If a campaign has been consistently achieving CPA 20% below target for 30 days, tightening the CPA target directs the algorithm to increase bid aggressiveness and capture more volume at acceptable cost. If a campaign is exceeding CPA target consistently, the target may need adjustment or the campaign may have structural issues that bid strategy changes cannot fix.

Budget pacing review ensures that daily budget caps are not artificially limiting high-performing campaigns. Google’s recommendation engine often identifies campaigns that are budget-constrained. Monthly budget review should evaluate whether the constrained campaigns justify increased investment based on their current cost per conversion and conversion volume.

Week 3: Ad Copy Testing and Rotation

Ad copy testing is the monthly task most agencies deprioritize once campaigns are stable. Stable campaigns with good performance stop getting copy attention. This is a mistake. Responsive search ad asset performance changes over time as user behavior and competitive messaging evolve. Monthly ad copy review catches underperforming assets before they drag down account-level CTR and conversion rates.

Monthly ad copy tasks: review asset performance ratings in all active RSAs, identify headlines and descriptions rated “Low” and replace them with new variants, review CTR by ad position to identify headlines that underperform expectations, and test one new copy angle per ad group that has not been tested in the previous 90 days. Document which headlines are in test, what hypothesis they are testing, and the performance threshold at which a determination will be made.

Ad extensions review belongs in the monthly copy cycle. Sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets should reflect current offers, seasonal messaging, and the business’s current priorities. An agency running the same ad extensions it launched with six months ago is leaving impression share and CTR improvements on the table.

Week 3: Landing Page Performance Review

Landing page performance review connects ad spend to conversion rate at the page level. Monthly landing page tasks: review conversion rate by destination URL, identify pages with below-average conversion rates relative to account benchmarks, check Google Ads landing page experience scores, run Core Web Vitals tests on primary landing pages, and verify that page content still matches the ad copy that drives traffic to it.

Seasonal landing page updates are often missed because agencies do not have a calendar trigger for them. A summer promotion offer on a landing page in November damages conversion rate and trust. Monthly review catches stale offers, expired specials, and outdated social proof before they cost conversions for another month.

Competitor landing page benchmarking should happen quarterly as part of a deeper review, but monthly awareness of major competitor changes (new offers, new page structures, new trust signals) allows your agency to respond before competitive changes have a full month of impact on your account’s relative performance.

Week 4: Keyword Expansion and Pruning

Keyword expansion uses search term data to identify high-converting queries that are not yet targeted by exact match or phrase match keywords. Monthly keyword expansion process: review search terms that converted in the prior month and are not currently in the account as explicit keywords, evaluate search volume and CPC for candidate keywords, add the highest-potential terms as new keywords in the appropriate ad groups.

Keyword pruning addresses terms that have consumed budget without contributing to conversions. Keywords with more than 50 clicks and zero conversions over 90 days are candidates for pause or bid reduction. The threshold varies by account and keyword value: a high-CPC keyword may warrant a lower click threshold before pausing, while a low-CPC term may justify a higher threshold. Document the pause rationale so the decision can be revisited if business conditions change.

Match type strategy should be reviewed monthly as Google’s broad match continues to expand its reach. Broad match keywords in 2025 serve on a much wider range of queries than they did historically. This means broader keyword portfolios may need more negative keyword coverage to maintain efficiency. Monthly review of broad match term data is the early warning system for this category of budget waste.

Week 4: Monthly Reporting and Strategic Review

Monthly reporting should communicate performance against goals, explain what changed and why, and outline the specific actions taken in the month. A report that shows metrics without context is not useful. A report that explains the metric trend and the management decision made in response to it demonstrates active account management.

Reports should include: month-over-month performance comparisons for key metrics (cost, conversions, cost per conversion), year-over-year comparisons where applicable, a summary of changes made during the month and their anticipated impact, competitive observations if meaningful changes were noted, and the priority actions planned for the next month. This narrative structure demonstrates that management decisions are connected to data, not arbitrary.

Strategic quarterly reviews are separate from monthly operational reports. Quarterly reviews assess whether the overall strategy is still aligned with business goals: have competitors changed their approach? Has the product mix shifted? Has the customer acquisition economics changed? Monthly operational work keeps the campaigns running well. Quarterly strategic reviews determine whether the campaigns are running in the right direction. At Redefine Web, every client account gets both.

Red Flags That Your Agency Is Not Running This Checklist

Signs that your PPC agency is not doing monthly management work: search term reports show the same irrelevant terms appearing month after month without being added as negatives; ad copy has not been updated in more than 90 days; bid strategy settings have not changed since launch despite performance data that would justify adjustment; landing pages still show seasonal content from a previous period; monthly reports show metrics but no explanation of changes made or planned; you cannot get a specific answer about what optimization work was done last month.

These signs do not necessarily mean the agency is incompetent. They may mean the account is understaffed, the team managing your account is juggling too many clients, or the agency’s process is not structured for ongoing optimization beyond initial setup. Asking specific questions about monthly deliverables at the start of a new agency relationship prevents these problems from developing. Asking the same questions after a year of poor results costs you the results you missed.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should a PPC agency update ad copy?

Ad copy should be reviewed monthly and actively updated at minimum every 60 to 90 days. RSA asset performance ratings change as Google collects more data. Headlines and descriptions rated “Low” should be replaced with new variants within the next review cycle. Ad copy that has not been updated in 6 months is costing performance through stale messaging and untested creative angles.

What should a monthly PPC report include?

A useful monthly PPC report includes: total spend, total conversions, cost per conversion, month-over-month comparison for each metric, year-over-year comparison if applicable, a summary of specific changes made during the month, performance by campaign, the reasons for any significant metric changes, and the priority work planned for the next month. Reports that only show numbers without narrative context do not give you the information needed to evaluate whether the account is well-managed.

How often should negative keywords be updated?

Negative keywords should be reviewed and updated weekly for new campaigns in the first 60 days, then monthly for established campaigns. Accounts running Performance Max or broad match strategies need more frequent negative keyword review because these formats generate a wider range of matched queries. An account with no negative keyword additions in the past 30 days is likely accumulating budget waste on irrelevant searches.

What is a reasonable PPC management fee?

PPC management fees typically range from 10% to 20% of ad spend, with minimums ranging from $500 to $2,000 per month depending on account complexity and agency positioning. Flat fee models are common for smaller accounts: $750 to $1,500 per month for accounts spending $3,000 to $10,000 per month. Higher-complexity accounts, multi-channel campaigns, and larger spend volumes justify higher management fees. The right question is not whether the fee is low but whether the agency’s work is producing returns that exceed both the fee and the ad spend.

How do I know if my PPC agency is actively managing my account?

Ask for the account change history log in Google Ads. Every change made in the account is timestamped and recorded. If the change log shows minimal activity in recent weeks, the account is not being actively managed. A well-managed account shows regular changes: bid adjustments, negative keyword additions, ad copy updates, audience refinements, and landing page improvements. Activity in the change log is the clearest evidence of ongoing active management.