What Should I Check in My Google Ads Account Every Week?

You open Google Ads on Monday, see spend near budget, and close the tab. Three weeks later you find the lead-form tag broke in a site update and broad match has been buying job-seeker clicks ever since. Top-line spend tells you the money left. It never tells you what it bought.

A weekly Google Ads check should cover five things, in this order: whether conversion tracking still counts real sales or leads, whether spend is pacing where you intended, which search terms you paid for, whether each campaign is hitting its CPA or ROAS target, and whether any ad or landing page has broken. Structure, audiences and bid strategy changes belong in a monthly review.

Is conversion tracking still counting sales?

Tracking goes first because every other number in the account depends on it. If conversions are wrong, your CPA is wrong. Your bid strategy is also optimizing toward the wrong signal, and every judgment you make later in the check rests on a figure that isn't real.

Start by comparing conversions in Google Ads with the leads or orders your CRM or store recorded for the same week. The two will never match exactly, and that's fine. What you're watching for is a sudden change in the gap, which almost always means something broke.

Then look at which conversion actions are set as primary. A common failure is a demo request, a gated download or a page view counted alongside completed purchases. That inflates your conversion numbers and teaches automated bidding to chase the cheapest action it can find. Duplicate tags after a site change cause the same distortion by counting one lead twice.

Finally, check that every route a lead can take is tracked: forms, pop-ups and phone calls. An untracked route makes the campaign feeding it look worse than it is, and that's how good campaigns get cut.

Is spend going where you meant it to?

Check spend campaign by campaign against your plan, not as an account total. An account that lands on budget can hide one campaign overspending while another is starved.

Two patterns matter most. The first is a campaign limited by budget that is converting at or better than target, which is the clearest case for moving money towards it. The second is a campaign spending its full budget with few or no conversions, which needs diagnosing before it gets another week. If that second pattern describes most of the account, you're dealing with the wider problem of spending the budget without producing leads, and it deserves more than a weekly tweak.

Budgets set once and never revisited drift away from performance, because the market moves even when the account doesn't. Weekly is the right rhythm for small reallocations. Daily changes tend to overcorrect on noise, and monthly lets a losing campaign burn three more weeks.

What did you actually pay for this week?

The search terms report is where wasted spend shows up first. It's the core of any weekly Google Ads checklist, and it's the step most often skipped because it takes the longest.

Sort by cost, highest first, rather than by clicks. One expensive irrelevant query matters more than 20 cheap ones. Then sort each term into one of three groups:

• Relevant and converting. Leave it, or consider adding it as its own keyword.
• Relevant but not yet converting. Leave it for now, because it needs more data rather than a verdict.
• Irrelevant. This is the only group that gets a negative this week.

Look for patterns rather than individual queries, because a pattern lets one negative do the work of dozens:

• Informational words like "what" and "how" in campaigns meant to sell.
• Job and career queries.
• "Free" when you charge.
• Competitor names you never chose to bid on.
• Locations outside your service area.

Keep a running log of every negative you add and why. Over-excluding is a real risk. The log is how you find out next month that an exclusion quietly cut off traffic that would have converted.

For low-volume terms, a single week rarely tells you enough. Act weekly, but judge borderline queries against a longer window. If irrelevant matches keep turning up week after week, it's worth working through how to tell whether your ads are showing for the wrong searches as a diagnosis in its own right.

Are campaigns hitting their targets?

Compare each campaign's CPA or ROAS with its target, not with last week. Week-on-week comparisons exaggerate noise, especially on automated bidding. One bad week isn't a signal. Two or three consecutive weeks drifting the same way is.

While you're here, confirm that each campaign's bid strategy matches how you judge it. A campaign set to maximize clicks will never hit a CPA target it was never told about. That mismatch is common in accounts that have changed hands.

Then check the creative and the destination:

• Ads and assets. Look for disapprovals or limited status, particularly on your highest-spending ad groups.
• Landing pages. Click through the final URLs of your top-spending ads. A 404, a broken form or an out-of-stock page still charges you for every click that lands on it.
• Product feed. For e-commerce accounts, check for disapproved or errored products. A product that drops out of the feed simply stops serving, and nothing in the spend numbers will tell you why.

Broken ads and broken pages are the cheapest problems in this list to fix and among the most expensive to miss.

What belongs in a monthly review instead?

The weekly check is deliberately narrow. Its job is to catch what breaks or drifts between reviews, not to redesign the account.

Some work moves too slowly to review every week:

• Campaign structure. Check whether your naming and ad groups show which campaigns bring your best customers, and whether you can move budget between them easily. This changes over months.
• Audience lists from your CRM. Customer uploads for remarketing and exclusions that keep recent buyers out of acquisition campaigns only need a monthly refresh.
• Bid strategy changes. These need time to settle. Switching every week means the algorithm never finishes learning.

The opposite problem matters too, because some failures can't wait seven days. A broken conversion tag or a disapproved top ad costs money every day it goes unnoticed, so a weekly rhythm alone leaves a gap. Our Companion closes that gap with a proactive daily brief grounded in live spend and performance data. It flags what changed and what needs attention, so a broken tag surfaces the next morning rather than at Monday's review.

Conclusion

A weekly Google Ads check doesn't need to cover everything. It needs to cover the five things that go wrong between reviews, in an order where each step makes the next one trustworthy.

Tracking validates the numbers. Pacing tells you where the money went, and search terms tell you what it bought. Targets tell you whether that purchase was worth it. Ads and pages catch the silent breakages. Everything slower goes in the monthly review, and everything faster needs a daily signal.

To see how agents adjust bids, budgets and creative continuously within spend and scope guardrails between your reviews, look at SproutMe Execute.