A Monday check on your Google Ads account catches misdirected clicks before they burn through your budget. Leave a mismatched keyword alone for two or three weeks, and it drains money without you noticing. Google Ads optimisation works best as a weekly habit, rather than a quarterly clean-up.
The search terms report is one of the first places to look. An unchecked report can reveal irrelevant searches that are still triggering your ads, which gives you a chance to add negative keywords or adjust your targeting. Most of these checks take only a few minutes when you work through the account in a consistent order.
This guide walks you through what to look at each Monday, starting inside your account and working outward.
Why a Quick Review Beats Guesswork in Google Ads Optimisation
A single mismatched keyword or a stalled ad group won’t tank your account in one day. Leave it a month, though, and that leak turns into a real dent in your ad spend.
A steady check-in habit catches problems while they’re still small. Once you’ve run this check a few times, patterns start jumping out on their own. A sudden spike in cost per click usually points to a shift in the auction.
Most account managers skim the top-line numbers without checking what’s driving them. We’ve watched someone blame a drop in ad campaign performance on the ad copy, when a broken landing page link was the actual cause. The Monday check exists to catch that kind of mix-up before it costs another week of spend.
What Should You Look at First in Your Campaign Performance?
An instant Monday review starts inside your Google Ads account, before you touch anything external. Your search terms, ad groups, and budget are the key metrics that tell you where last week’s spend went.
Let’s start with the three checks that catch most burned spend early:
Search Terms Report: Spotting Wasted Spend
Your search terms report shows exactly which search queries triggered your ads last week. Run a search campaign for “office chairs,” and Google might match it to “office chairs Brisbane” or “ergonomic desk chairs.” Sometimes it also matches loosely related terms that burn clicks instead of earning them.
A search term that looked fine in January can drift off-topic by March as Google’s algorithm adjusts its matching. Add negative keywords the moment you spot a search query that doesn’t belong.
A clean report keeps your budget pointed at queries that convert. Run this check every Monday before you touch anything else in the account.
Ad Groups, Budget Pacing, and Keyword List Alignment
Your ad groups should mirror how tightly related your keywords are. Closely matched keywords help you create ads that speak directly to the search intent behind each query. A single ad group covering “running shoes,” “office chairs,” and “kitchen blenders” will struggle to attract relevant clicks, even with strong ad copy. Split unrelated products into their own ad groups instead.
Budget pacing deserves regular attention alongside keyword structure. Open your Google Ads account mid-month and check whether you are on track to hit your monthly ad spend target or spending too quickly by week two. If you’ve already used most of your budget by the second week, review your bids, daily budgets, and campaign priorities before spending accelerates further.
Once your budget is on track, review your keyword list. Remove keywords that have not triggered clicks in weeks, and add new ones from your search query data.
Negative Keywords and Quality Score
Are your ads appearing for searches that have no chance of becoming customers? Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant searches, so you spend your budget on queries that are more closely related to what you offer.
Build a negative keyword list from your search terms report each week, and your ad positions improve as irrelevant impressions drop off.
Alongside negative keywords, review your Quality Score in Google Ads. It shows how relevant and useful your ads and landing pages are to the keywords you’re targeting. A low Quality Score signals a mismatch somewhere in that chain and raises your cost per click as a result. And a rising cost per click (CPC) is often the first sign something in that chain needs attention.
Quick Tip: Check your conversion count and conversion rate each week, then compare them with changes in Quality Score. A decline across several metrics can point to a broader relevance or landing page issue worth investigating.
Can Your Landing Page Handle the Traffic You’re Paying For?
What happens after someone lands on your page decides whether that click turns into a lead or a bounce.
Here’s what to check once traffic arrives:
Landing Page Load Speed and Relevance
Your landing page needs to load in under three seconds, or visitors may leave before they see your offer. A slow page can also waste your ad spend because fewer visitors reach the point where they can enquire or buy. Once the page loads, the next thing to confirm is whether it delivers what the ad promised.
Ad relevance works both ways. Google rewards closely matched ads and landing pages; visitors stay longer when the page matches what the ad promised. We recommend running a quick speed test every few weeks, especially after any design changes. A single slow-loading image can drag your whole page down.
Bottom Line: Speed and relevance work together. A page that loads fast and matches your ad copy gives every click a real chance to convert. So if you fix one without the other, you’ll still see drop-off.
Ad Extensions Doing Their Job?
These assets add extra links, phone numbers, or location details beneath your main ad. They give searchers more ways to interact with your business before they click. They also help you highlight specific services, offers, or pages that match different search intents.
Check your ad extensions monthly to confirm they still point to working pages. A broken sitelink extension sends visitors to a 404 page, which tanks conversion tracking and wastes the click you just paid for.
Extensions also feed into your ad positions. Google factors extension use into overall ad rank, so a well-set-up extension can push your ad above a competitor with a higher bid.
Long Tail Keywords and Search Intent
Long-tail keywords like “ergonomic office chair for lower back pain” often attract more qualified buyers than broad terms like “office chairs.” After all, the searcher already knows exactly what they want.
To find more opportunities like these, pull your search query data once a month and look for long-tail phrases already driving conversions. Build dedicated ad groups around the best performers instead of lumping them into a broad match group.
Long-tail terms often outperform broad keywords at a fraction of the cost. Adding the best ones to their own ad groups is one of the easier wins in a PPC account.
What About Performance Max and Other Ad Platforms?
The Monday check doesn’t stop at standard search campaigns. If you’re using Performance Max campaigns or advertising beyond Google, those need a look too.
Performance Max, Smart Bidding, and Automated Bidding
Performance Max campaigns run across Google Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail from a single campaign. Smart bidding handles the auction automatically, adjusting bids in real time based on signals like device, location, and time of day.
Automated bidding often needs broad match keywords and more conversion data to learn effectively. Exact match keywords can work here too, but they usually take longer to build enough volume.
New Performance Max campaigns may need time to build enough history, so avoid changing bidding strategies too frequently while the campaign gathers data. You should give each strategy enough time to produce meaningful results before deciding whether it needs a change.
The same approach applies to other PPC campaigns using automated bidding. PPC campaigns rely on your monthly ad spend, and frequent bidding changes can make it harder to see which adjustments are improving performance.
Beyond Google: Meta Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Search Partners
Other ad platforms can support your paid marketing strategy alongside Google.
Meta Ads reach social audiences through platforms like Facebook and Instagram, while Microsoft Ads capture search traffic beyond Google’s network. These channels can help you test new audiences and find additional conversion opportunities.
Search partners extend your Google Ads campaigns to other search engines and sites within Google’s network. Performance here often looks different from Google’s main search results, so check it separately rather than lumping it into your overall numbers.
Running ads across multiple clients or platforms means tracking performance across two or three separate dashboards instead of one. The Monday check stays the same either way. Look at what changed, ask why, and fix what’s broken instead of guessing.
Google Analytics fills in what Google Ads alone can’t show, especially around on-site behaviour after the click. Pair it with Search Console and your regular reporting tools for a fuller picture of account performance each week.
Start Your Week With a Clear PPC Plan
A Monday check doesn’t need to eat your whole morning. Run through your search terms report, check ad group alignment, and confirm your landing pages still match your ad copy. Keep an eye on conversion tracking too, since that’s what tells you if any of this worked. Checking conversion value alongside conversion tracking shows whether your target audience is worth what you’re paying to reach them.
Add this to your Google Ads optimisation checklist and run it every week rather than just when performance dips. Catching a broken landing page link or a drifting search term early beats spending a whole afternoon untangling a month of wasted spend later.
If you manage multiple clients or run a busy account solo, block out twenty minutes every Monday before anything else. A weekly check helps you spend less time diagnosing problems and more time acting on data.
Need help improving your Google Ads performance? Contact our team for a campaign review and find opportunities to improve targeting, tracking, and results.