What is Google Ads optimization, and how often should I do it?

Each row is a step in the sections below, done by hand in a sentence or two, with the guides that teach it in full.

Google Ads can email you any of its tables. Select the download icon above the table, then Schedule, and choose how often the report is sent: daily or weekly, for instance. The audit checklist is the long form of this page, with every problem worth looking for and where each is in Google Ads.

Read yesterday, not today. Google’s explanations for a change in performance aren’t shown for a date range that includes today, because there may be more data for the day.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Change history and set the dates to the days since you last looked. Read the changes to budgets, bids and statuses first, and who or what made each. The next section works a week of it.
2. 02Go to Campaigns › Campaigns and read the Status column. Eligible means the campaign is active and can show ads. Not eligible means it has nothing left to show: no ad groups, or all its ad groups, ads or keywords paused or deleted. Eligible (limited) means it’s showing ads only occasionally, because of its budget or a limited bid strategy, which the Limited by budget guide covers.
3. 03On the same page, set the date range to yesterday. Google compares it with the day before, and a value shown in blue with a dotted line has an explanation: hover over it and select View explanations. Read cost, impressions and clicks for a campaign that spent far more than usual or lost its traffic.
4. 04Go to Goals › Conversions › Summary and read each conversion action’s Status. Active means it’s working as intended. Needs attention means there are things to fix and it hasn’t stopped recording. Misconfigured means conversions have stopped recording entirely, because of a setup error or a broken tag.

Google Ads can email you about some of this. An automated rule can send an email when a condition is met: under Type of rule, select Send email. Google’s own example emails at 12:00 PM if a campaign with a daily budget of $100 has spent more than $50 that day. The alerts guide has the steps, and what a rule can’t compare.

If conversions fell and no status explains it, the not-converting guide tells a tracking fault from a campaign that stopped converting, and the conversion tracking guide has the test of a tag.

Change history lists the changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years, on a timeline beside your impressions, clicks, conversions and cost. Changes made by automated rules, through the Google Ads API and in Google Ads Editor are listed with the ones made in Google Ads itself.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Change history and select the dates in the upper right corner: the last 7 days, if you look weekly.
2. 02Filter the list by the type of change. Start with Budget and Status, then Bidding and Keyword.
3. 03For each campaign that changed, set the week’s first change against its last. A budget raised and set back is where it began, and a campaign paused and turned back on is running.
4. 04Read the User column for who made each change. It shows an email address for one made through Google Ads, and Google Ads API or a tool’s name for one made by a tool. The Tool filter narrows the list to one of them.
5. 05Weigh what still stands by what the campaign carries. On Campaigns › Campaigns, which opens on the last 30 days, sort by cost: a change to one of the campaigns that spend the most is the one to ask about.
6. 06To put a change back, select Undo in the User / Date & Time column of its row. Google says you can undo most types of changes made in the last 30 days.

Row by row, nothing here looks large. Set the budget the week began with against the one it ended with, and $160 a day became $120: $40 a day less, or $1,200 over 30 days. The campaign spent about $115 a day, so the new budget still covers a usual day and leaves little above it.

Whether that was meant is a question for whoever made it. It may be a tidy-up of budget the campaign never spent. A campaign that leaves budget unspent is often held back by its target, which the Target CPA guide covers, and the learning phase guide covers a target or a strategy changed too often to settle.

A week is the span Google’s own tools read. Its recommendation to raise a budget rests on the traffic you missed last week, its Insights page shows the last 7 days or the last 28, and its explanations set the last 7 days against the week before.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Insights and reports › Search terms. The report lists the searches a significant number of people made that showed your ads. Tick the ones you don’t sell and select Add as negative keyword: in a Search campaign they’re added as negative exact match by default. The wasted search terms guide shows which to block without blocking your own, the negative keywords guide covers match types and lists, and the find keywords guide covers the searches worth adding as keywords.
2. 02Go to Campaigns › Campaigns, select the filter icon, then Status, tick Limited by budget and select Apply. Then open Campaigns › Insights and reports › Insights, where budget pacing insights give each campaign one of three statuses for the month: limited by budget, budget remaining, or on track. The Limited by budget guide says which campaigns earn a raise, and the budget pacing guide projects the whole month.
3. 03Go to Tools › Troubleshooting › Policy manager, where Google lists the ads a policy affects and tracks your appeals. A disapproved ad can’t run until the violation is fixed and the ad is reviewed again. Then on Campaigns › Ads, read the Ad strength column, which rates each ad from Incomplete and Poor to Excellent. The disapproved ads guide has the fix and the appeal, and the ad strength guide what moves a rating.
4. 04Go to Campaigns › Recommendations and read what’s new: Google says it regularly discovers recommendations for you. Then select Auto-apply settings and the History tab, which says how many times each type was applied in the past week. The optimization score guide shows how to judge a recommendation before you apply it.
5. 05On Campaigns › Campaigns, set the date range to the last 7 days and read cost and conversions against the week before. Where a value is shown in blue, its explanation names what moved it: a bid, a budget, a conversion setting, a change in your change history, or a rise or fall in searches. If conversions fell while clicks held, start with the not-converting guide. To try a change on part of a campaign first, see the experiments guide.

Google sends an email when it disapproves an ad, with a View and fix policy issues link, so the weekly pass through Policy manager is for the whole account at once. Ad Strength is a prompt to read the ad, not a score to chase: Google says it isn’t used to calculate Ad Rank.

A month is the span Google names for judging how you bid. Its page on measuring Smart Bidding says to set a time frame of at least 2 full conversion cycles, and that it can help to assess over longer periods, like a month, or at least 50 conversions. A month also gives a keyword, an audience or a page enough clicks to judge.

1. 01Go to Tools › Budgets and bidding › Bid strategies and select the link in the Bid strategy type column to open a strategy’s report. Read what it achieved against its target, once all its conversions have been reported. Google recommends measuring a target CPA over the last 30 days, including at least 30 conversions. The Target CPA guide, the Target ROAS guide and the Smart Bidding guide say what to set.
2. 02On Campaigns › Campaigns, select the columns icon, open Competitive metrics and add Search impr. share, Search lost IS (rank) and Search lost IS (budget). The last two are the percentage of time your ads weren’t shown because of poor Ad Rank, and because of insufficient budget. The search impression share guide says which lost searches are worth winning back, and the Auction insights guide who you lost them to.
3. 03Go to Campaigns › Audiences, keywords, and content › Search keywords. Read each keyword’s cost beside its conversions, and add the Quality Score columns from the columns icon. Quality Score is a diagnostic: Google says it is not an input in the ad auction. The keyword guide shows which keywords to pause or bid down, the broad match guide covers match types, and the low Quality Score guide each of the score’s parts.
4. 04Go to Campaigns › Insights and reports › When and where ads showed and read its Devices and Matched locations tabs, and your ad schedule’s days and hours. Then open Campaigns › Audiences, keywords, and content › Audiences for your audience segments and demographics. The targeting guide shows how to tell a device or an audience that pays from one that doesn’t, with the location targeting guide and the ad schedule guide beside it.
5. 05Go to Campaigns › Insights and reports › Landing pages, which breaks your performance down by the page your ads send clicks to. Google says to check regularly how your landing pages are performing. The landing page guide shows how to compare one page with the rest, and the destination guide how to find a page that doesn’t load.
6. 06Go to Goals › Conversions › Summary again, this time for every action and not only its status. An action set as Primary is included in the Conversions column and used for bidding, so one counted twice bends every bid. The conversion tracking guide has the check, and the attribution models guide covers how each conversion is credited.
7. 07For Performance Max, go to Campaigns › Asset groups and read each asset group’s Ad Strength, which Google says to review regularly. For Shopping, go to Campaigns › Products › Products and read the Issues column. The Performance Max guide, the Shopping ads guide and the Shopping feed guide take it from there.

What the routine finds is a list. Make the change with the most money behind it first, then wait: two changes made together can’t be told apart afterward. Google’s pages say how long to wait.

• A bid strategy or a budget. Google says to allow 1 to 2 conversion cycles for the system to stabilize after major changes to bidding or budget before you make further adjustments. A conversion cycle is the time it takes for a click to result in a conversion.
• A target. Google’s page on how bidding learns says changing a target won’t trigger a Learning status, and to evaluate after 1 to 2 conversion cycles. Its page on the learning period lists a setting change among the reasons for one. The learning phase guide gives both.
• A Performance Max campaign. Google says to run a new one for at least 6 weeks, and after a significant change to allow 1 to 2 weeks, or at least one full conversion cycle.
• A recommendation you applied. Google reads the result a week after you apply a bid or budget recommendation, on the Recommendations page’s Results tab.

Recent days undercount. Google says conversion lag affects recent data more than old, and marks a date range it affects. So compare whole weeks that ended a few days ago, not the last three days with the three before.

To try a change before it reaches a whole campaign, an experiment splits the budget or traffic between the original campaign and the change: the experiments guide has the steps. And most changes that turn out wrong can be undone from Change history within 30 days.

Goldbeater runs its 163 checks on your account every day, for 270 problems. The routine’s weekly and monthly rows are read daily too. What a check reads stays as long as its question needs: 30 days for a search term, and 13 weeks for a keyword against its campaign.

For the routine’s first step, Goldbeater reads the last 7 days of your change history for a change to what spends the most: one of the ten campaigns that spent most in 30 days paused or removed and still so, one of the top three whose daily budget stands changed since the week began, or one of the ten keywords that spent most paused or removed and still so. It reads medium where the change carries a thousandth of your account’s spend, for a budget where it moved by a fifth or more, and low otherwise.

That is the week worked above. Goldbeater set the budget the week began with, $160, against the one it ended with, $120, so two cuts that each read as a nudge are raised as the 25% they add up to, with both in its table. The rule’s raise on Rugs — Broad and the night Competitors was paused raise nothing, since neither still stands. Had anything else changed within two minutes of the cut, the finding would list it.

The finding is a notice. Someone made the change on purpose or by mistake, and only you know which, so setting the budget back is offered and never recommended. A change you applied through Goldbeater says so, reads low and offers nothing.

The rest of the routine, as Goldbeater reads it:

• Each day’s breaks: a campaign that showed ads on each of the 14 days before and none yesterday, a campaign spending at least twice its highest day of the four weeks before, impressions or clicks under a quarter of their usual for that day of the week or over four times as many, and a conversion action that recorded on each of 14 days and then stopped. Goldbeater emails your workspace’s owners and admins the day a daily pass finds a new one.
• The week’s money: a search that cost $20 or more in 30 days and converted nothing, a campaign losing a fifth or more of its searches to budget and more to budget than to rank, an ad Google disapproved, an ad group whose best ad Google rates Poor or Average, and auto-apply switched on for a recommendation that changes bidding, a budget, targeting or ads.
• The month’s structure: a target CPA or ROAS that no week of the last 13 with five or more conversions reached, a keyword that bought under half the conversions its spend would at the rate of its campaign’s other keywords, a device, an audience or a landing page doing the same over 30 days, each only where chance doesn’t explain it, and a conversion action your bidding counts that recorded before and nothing in 30 days.

Where a setting fixes a finding, Goldbeater drafts the change. It reaches your account when you approve it in the change set and press Apply, and an applied change can be undone. The audit checklist has every check, line by line, and the common mistakes guide the ten to rule out first.

How often should I optimize my Google Ads account?

Look every day at what changed and what broke: change history, each campaign’s status, yesterday’s spend, and whether conversions still record. Once a week, read where the money went: search terms, budgets, disapproved ads and Google’s recommendations. Once a month, read targets, keywords, audiences, landing pages and conversion tracking. Google’s help pages give no figure for this; the three speeds follow from when its numbers are ready.

What should I check in Google Ads every day?

Four things, each for yesterday. Change history, for what was changed and by whom. The Status column on the Campaigns page, for a campaign that stopped showing ads. Cost, impressions and clicks against the day before. And the Status of each conversion action, for one that stopped recording.

How long should I wait after a change before making another?

Google says to allow 1 to 2 conversion cycles after a major change to bidding or a budget before adjusting again, where a conversion cycle is the time a click takes to result in a conversion. For Performance Max it says 1 to 2 weeks after a significant change, or at least one full conversion cycle, and at least 6 weeks for a new campaign.

Which Google Ads optimization tips matter most?

Three, in this order. Check that your conversions are counted right, since bidding and every judgment read them. Read the search terms report each week and add what you don’t sell as negative keywords. And change one thing at a time, so you can tell what each change did. Google’s own page on optimizing a Search campaign names bids, keywords and ads as the places to work.

Where do I see who changed my Google Ads account?

Go to Campaigns, then Change history. It lists the changes made to your account, campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years, and its User column shows the email address of the person who made a change through Google Ads. Most types of changes made in the last 30 days can be undone there.

Should I apply Google’s recommendations to optimize my account?

Read each one for what it changes. Google says the Recommendations page doesn’t predict whether your ads will do well: it uses data from the past to give you an idea of how a recommendation might improve your performance. Apply the ones that fit your goals, dismiss the rest, and read each week what auto-apply applied.

Is Google Ads optimization different for Performance Max?

The routine is the same and there is less to set. You read its asset groups and their Ad Strength, the search terms that led to conversions, and the products it advertises, and you steer it with its assets and audience signals. Google says to run a new Performance Max campaign for at least 6 weeks, and to avoid frequent changes to its budget or bid strategy in that time.