Google Ads checklist: setup, launch and monthly checks

This is the list I work through on a Google Ads account before it spends anything, on launch day, during its first month and once a month after that. It is written for UK businesses running their own account, and for owners checking the work of whoever runs it for them.

Each line is a check, not a lesson. If a setting is unfamiliar, my Google Ads guide for UK businesses explains how the platform works and why accounts are built this way.

How to use this checklist

• New account: sections 1 to 8 before you switch anything on, section 9 on the day, then sections 10 and 11 as the weeks go by.
• Account already live: start with the final section, which sets out the order to check an inherited account in.
• Keep a dated note of what you checked and changed, so you can tell later whether a change explains a shift in results.
• Expect labels to drift. Google renames menus often. If a name here does not match your screen, look for the setting that does the same job.

1. Before you spend a pound

Most money wasted in small accounts is lost to decisions nobody made at the start. These checks need only your own figures.

• One goal, in plain words. “Boiler installation enquiries from south London” can be measured; “more visibility” cannot. The goal decides which conversion you track and which campaigns you build.
• What an enquiry or sale is worth. Work from gross profit, not turnover. If a typical job brings in £600 of gross profit and one enquiry in four becomes a job, an enquiry is worth up to £150 before advertising starts losing you money. Online shops can find the return they need to break even with the ROAS and break-even calculator.
• A test budget big enough to learn from. Look up typical click costs for your sector in the UK Google and Meta ad benchmarks, then do the sum. At £4 a click, £300 buys about 75 clicks; if one visitor in twenty enquires, that is three or four enquiries, too few to judge anything. Budget for more, or narrow the first campaign to one service or a smaller area.
• A page that can convert. If your site is slow on a phone or nobody has tested the form lately, fix that first (section 7).
• Someone to answer. Paid enquiries go cold quickly. Decide who picks up calls and replies to forms while the ads run.
• Sector rules checked. Most financial services advertisers targeting the UK must pass Google’s financial services verification, which depends on FCA authorisation. Gambling needs a Gambling Commission licence as well as Google’s approval, and prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the UK public at all. Every advertiser falls under the ASA’s CAP Code, so claims need evidence behind them.

2. Account ownership, access and billing

• The business owns the account. Create it with a Google login the business controls, ideally a shared address rather than one person’s Gmail. A freelancer or agency should reach it through their own manager account with access you granted, never as the owner.
• Access matches each role. Admin for one or two people inside the business, standard for whoever manages campaigns, read-only for anyone who only needs reports. Remove people the week they leave.
• Currency in British pounds, time zone London. The currency cannot be changed once the account exists. The time zone decides when each day’s budget starts and when your ad schedule switches on and off.
• Payments profile matches your records. The legal name and address the business trades under (as on Companies House for a limited company), your VAT number if registered, and invoices going to whoever keeps the books.
• A backup payment method, and the first invoice read line by line. Ads stop when the only card fails. Budget on the total you are charged, including VAT and any fees Google adds for ads shown in the UK, not only the click costs.
• Advertiser verification done promptly. If Google asks you to verify your identity or organisation, do it straight away; ads can stop showing when the deadline passes.

3. Conversion tracking and consent

Google’s automated bidding learns from whatever you tell it counts as a conversion. If that signal is wrong, every later decision rests on it, so I do not launch until this section is complete.

• Conversions are real business outcomes. A sent enquiry form, a call, a booking or a purchase. A visit to the contact page, or a click on a button that sends nothing, is not an enquiry.
• Primary and secondary set on purpose. Only actions you want bidding to chase should be primary; brochure downloads and newsletter sign-ups belong in secondary. If you import GA4 key events as well as using the Google Ads tag, make sure one enquiry is not counted twice.
• Count setting right. “One” for leads, so a person who submits twice is one enquiry. “Every” for purchases.
• Sales values sent without VAT. Shops should pass order values excluding VAT, and ideally delivery, or return on ad spend looks better than it is. For enquiries, a fixed value per lead allows value-based bidding later.
• Auto-tagging on. It adds a click identifier to each ad click so conversions can be matched to it. Check your site’s redirects do not strip it from the address.
• Enhanced conversions set up for lead forms. Enhanced conversions for leads sends a hashed email address or phone number from the form, helping Google match conversions it would otherwise lose and letting you report later which enquiries became customers.
• Calls counted. Turn on call reporting for call assets with a minimum call length that reflects a genuine enquiry, and track taps on the phone number on your site as a separate conversion.
• Consent handled the UK way. Under PECR, advertising cookies need consent, and Google’s EU user consent policy covers UK visitors too. Your cookie banner should set Google’s consent signals to denied by default and update them through Google’s Consent Mode when someone accepts. Decline cookies on your own site and confirm no advertising cookies appear.
• Tested end to end. Send a real test enquiry from a phone and check it reaches both your inbox and Google Ads. My walkthrough on how to check your conversion tracking works covers each step and the faults it usually turns up.

4. Keywords, match types and negatives

• Keywords grouped by what the searcher wants. Each ad group holds searches for one service and sends them to one page. “Emergency plumber” and “bathroom fitting” are different jobs and need different groups.
• Buying searches first. The service plus a place, “near me”, “price”, “quote”, “cost”. Research searches such as “how to” can wait until the core campaign pays its way.
• Match types chosen deliberately. On a small budget, phrase and exact match keep spend close to the searches you picked. Broad match can find useful searches you missed, but it needs dependable tracking and someone reading the search terms. The keyword match type tool formats a list into each match type and helps build negatives.
• Negative keywords in place before launch. For UK service businesses I start with jobs, careers, salary, apprenticeship, course, training, DIY and free, then add sector terms: NHS for private healthcare, council for services councils also provide, Gumtree and second-hand for products. Save them as a shared list.
• Your brand name kept apart. Searches for your business by name are cheap and convert well. Mixed in with everything else, they make the cost per enquiry look healthier than it is.
• No dead keywords. Keywords marked “Low search volume” will not trigger ads; replace them with wording people actually use.

5. Campaign settings

• Campaign type fits the goal and the data. For a service business starting out, begin with a Search campaign. Performance Max and Demand Gen spend across many Google placements at once, YouTube and Gmail among them, and lean heavily on conversion history. Shops with a product feed are the main exception.
• Display Network off in search campaigns. New search campaigns can include display placements unless you untick them, and that traffic behaves very differently. Decide separately about search partners; I leave them off at launch and test them later.
• Locations drawn around real customers. Target the towns, postcode districts or radius you actually serve and exclude places you cannot. Then set the location option to people in or regularly in those places. The default, presence or interest targeting, also reaches people elsewhere who have merely shown interest in your area.
• Ad schedule matched to who answers. If enquiries are handled 8am to 6pm on weekdays, schedule call assets for those hours at least. The schedule knows nothing about bank holidays, which differ between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so diarise those changes.
• Auto-apply reviewed. Turn off any auto-applied recommendation that adds keywords, broadens match types, or changes bids and budgets without a person deciding.
• Automated extras decided on. Check whether automatically created assets and search expansion features such as AI Max for Search are on. They can match you to searches beyond your keywords and rewrite your text, which you may not want before you have a baseline.

6. Ads and assets

• Responsive search ads whose headlines do different jobs. Each ad takes up to 15 headlines of 30 characters and four descriptions of 90 characters, which Google combines. Cover the service and place, the offer or a “from” price, a reason to choose you that you can prove, and a next step. The ad copy character counter shows what fits.
• Every claim can be backed up. “Best in London” or “cheapest in Kent” needs evidence under the CAP Code; paid search ads fall within the ASA’s remit like any other advert. Prices aimed at consumers should include VAT.
• Pinning kept to a minimum. Pin a headline only when it must always appear, such as wording a regulator requires. Every pin cuts the combinations Google can test.
• Sitelinks, callouts and snippets that are useful and true. At least four sitelinks to real pages (prices, reviews, a specific service, how to book), plus short factual callouts such as “Free written quotes” or “Evening appointments”.
• Call and location assets. A UK number in the format customers expect, scheduled for opening hours, and your Google Business Profile linked if customers come to your premises.
• Final URLs opened one by one. Each ad should land on the most specific page for its keywords. Open every URL on a phone to confirm it loads and does not bounce to the home page.

7. The landing page

My landing page checklist for paid traffic covers this in full. These are the checks I would not launch without:

• The main heading repeats what the ad promised, in close to the same words.
• The page loads quickly on a phone over mobile data, not just on the office wifi.
• The form works on a phone, asks only for what you need, and confirms it has been sent.
• The phone number can be tapped to call.
• The cookie banner does not cover the form or the call button on a small screen.
• A privacy notice is linked from the form, as UK GDPR expects whenever you collect personal data.
• Prices, offers and opening hours match the ads exactly.

8. Budget and bidding

• Daily budget worked out from a monthly figure. Google treats the daily budget as an average: it can spend up to twice that on a busy day, but will not charge more than about 30.4 times the daily amount in a month. For £600 a month, set roughly £19.70 a day and expect some days near £40.
• Budget concentrated, not spread thin. If the money buys only a handful of clicks a day, cut back to your best service and nearest area rather than running everything at a trickle.
• Bid strategy matched to the data you have. With no conversion history, I start with Maximise Conversions and no target, once tracking has passed its test, or with manual bidding on a very small account. A target cost per acquisition or return on ad spend comes later, when conversions arrive steadily, because a target set from guesswork either chokes delivery or lets costs run.
• Your ceiling written down. The most you can pay for an enquiry or sale, from section 1. Every later decision is measured against it.

9. On launch day

• Ads approved. Read the reason behind any “Disapproved” or “Approved (limited)” status and fix the ad or the page.
• Ads checked without searching for them. Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool inside Google Ads. Searching for your own ads repeatedly without clicking can lead Google to stop showing them to you, and adds impressions that mean nothing.
• One more test conversion now the campaign is live, confirmed as recorded.
• A last look at settings. Budget, locations, location option, networks, schedule and any end date, campaign by campaign.
• Launch noted. Record the date and what went live, and put the first review dates in the diary.

10. The first four weeks

• Search terms read every few days for the first fortnight. The search terms report shows what people typed before your ad appeared. Add irrelevant terms as negatives and promising ones as keywords; this is where most early waste is caught.
• Conversions compared with real life. Set the enquiries that reached you against what Google Ads reports. A gap either way needs fixing before you trust the numbers.
• One change at a time. Automated bidding needs a settled period to learn. Switching strategy, budget and targets every few days keeps resetting it and hides what worked. Note each change and its date.
• Impression share looked at. If your best campaign loses impressions to budget, move money to it from weaker ones. If it loses them on rank, look at ad relevance, the landing page and bids before spending more.
• Calls followed up. Ask whoever answers the phone to note which callers found you on Google and whether they were the right kind of customer.
• A decision at week four. Compare cost per enquiry, or return on ad spend, with your ceiling, then decide in writing whether to continue, adjust or pause.

11. Every month after that

Once the account has settled, this table is the monthly round. Put a recurring date in the diary so it still happens in a busy month.

Each quarter, go a level deeper: test a new ad or landing page against your best performer with a campaign experiment rather than swapping one for the other, compare the keyword list with the services you want more of, and set schedules ahead of the bank holidays and seasonal peaks coming up.

If the account is already running

If you have inherited an account, or want to check one someone else runs, resist starting with the ads. Work in this order, because each step changes how you read the next:

1. Ownership and access. Confirm the business owns the account and know exactly who can get in (section 2).
2. Tracking. Find out what counts as a conversion and whether it matches the enquiries you actually received (section 3). Until it does, no performance figure can be trusted.
3. Where the money went. Read the last 90 days of search terms, sorted by cost. Nothing shows waste faster.
4. Settings. Location option, networks, auto-apply, schedule and budgets, against sections 5 and 8.
5. Structure, keywords and ads. Only now, with clean data, is it worth reorganising.

If you would rather hand the account over partway through, my monthly Google Ads management takes this work off your hands, and the account stays in your business’s name throughout.

Updated 6 October 2026