What PPC management includes
You hand me an ad budget and a definition of a good lead or sale. I take responsibility for everything between those two points: account structure, keywords and negatives, ad copy and assets, bidding, budget pacing, landing-page recommendations, tracking hygiene and reporting. The retainer covers all Google Ads campaign types, so a Search account can add Performance Max or remarketing without a new engagement.
What it does not include: the ad budget itself, which you pay to Google from your own billing profile; building new landing pages, which is a separate service under PPC landing page design; and video or graphic production, for which I write the brief and you or a designer produce the assets.
Who should hire a PPC manager rather than self-manage
Self-managing works when someone in the business has the time to check search terms weekly and knows what a bad one looks like. It stops working when the account grows past two or three campaigns, when leads are coming in but nobody knows which keywords produced them, or when Google’s recommendations tab has been applied wholesale and spend has drifted to broad match. If your account has more than a few months of history, start with a Google Ads audit; if it is brand new, start with Google Ads setup and decide about ongoing management after the first month.
The monthly rhythm
- Week 0: tracking and baseline. Before I change anything I confirm that every conversion action fires once per lead, that GA4 and Google Ads agree, and that primary conversions are the actions you actually want. This is the conversion tracking setup step, and it is not optional.
- Weekly: search-term review. Every query that spent money is read, not sampled. Irrelevant terms go into shared negative lists; converting terms that are not yet keywords get added at the right match type.
- Weekly: bids and budgets. Budget moves toward campaigns that are hitting CPA or ROAS targets. Under manual or Maximize Conversions bidding I adjust by device, location and schedule; under Target CPA I adjust the target itself, gradually, so learning is not reset.
- Fortnightly: ad and asset tests. Responsive search ad headlines and descriptions are rotated against each other, sitelinks, callouts and call assets are refreshed, and losers are paused with a written reason.
- Monthly: report and plan. A Looker Studio dashboard plus a short written summary: what changed, what it did to cost per conversion, and what I plan next month. You see spend, conversions, CPA or ROAS and search impression share, not vanity metrics.
- Quarterly: structure review. New services, seasonality and market changes are folded into the campaign architecture, and Auction Insights is checked for new competitors.
Decisions I make on your behalf, and how
When to move to smart bidding. I switch a campaign from manual CPC or Maximize Conversions to Target CPA once it has produced enough conversions in the last 30 days for the algorithm to model; the exact threshold depends on the campaign, but I do not switch on the strength of a week of data. The Better Broking account moved to Target CPA after 30 days, which is a typical timeline.
Match types. Exact and phrase match carry the budget. Broad match is introduced only on campaigns already running smart bidding with a mature negative list, and it is measured separately.
Google’s recommendations. Auto-apply is switched off. I read the recommendations tab and apply the ones that serve your CPA target, which is a minority of them.
When to pause a campaign. A campaign that has spent roughly three times its target CPA without a conversion gets paused and diagnosed, not left to “gather data”.
What you receive
- A live Looker Studio dashboard with spend, conversions, CPA or ROAS, by campaign and month.
- A monthly written summary of changes and next steps.
- A change log inside the account so any future manager can see what was done and why.
- Ownership of the Google Ads account, GA4 property and GTM container, in your name from day one.
Mistakes I fix in most inherited accounts
- Conversion actions counting “every” instead of “one” per lead, inflating results and confusing bidding.
- Search Partners and Display Expansion left on in Search campaigns, quietly spending a share of budget outside Google search.
- No shared negative keyword lists, so the same waste is paid for in every campaign.
- Ad schedules and location targets copied from a template rather than matched to when and where leads actually convert.
Pricing
PPC management is a monthly fee separate from ad spend, set by the number of campaign types, markets and the tracking complexity of your account. Current ranges are on the Google Ads packages and pricing page. Every engagement starts with a free Google Ads audit so the fee is quoted against what your account actually needs, and you can see the rest of my Google Ads services before deciding.