What PPC management should include each month

Search for Change history in your Google Ads account and set the date range to the last 30 days. That list is the closest thing to a timesheet your agency doesn't write, and if it is empty, so was the month. The rest of this page says what should be in it, week by week and month by month.

What should happen in the account every week?

• Read the search terms and block the waste. Proof: negative keywords added in the change history that week, and the same searches missing from the next report. If some of the searches are in Arabic, someone on the account has to read Arabic.
• Check budget and pace. Proof: budget or bid changes dated that week, each with a line in the update explaining why.
• Check ads and policy status: pause the weakest ad, add a replacement and fix disapprovals. Proof: ads created or paused in the log.
• Test the tracking. Calls, WhatsApp taps and forms should all still record, and the totals should sit close to your own enquiry log. Proof: a one-line tally sent to you every week.
• Chase lead quality. Ask sales which enquiries were real and tag them, so the account learns from outcomes and not only from form fills. Proof: qualified leads uploaded as offline conversions, or a note on why that isn't possible yet.
• Match ad hours to answering hours. The federal government keeps a Saturday and Sunday weekend with a half day on Friday, but private companies set their own week, so the schedule should follow yours. Proof: schedule edits whenever your team's hours change.

What should happen every month?

How can you check the work in 15 minutes without being technical?

1. 01Open Change history for the last 30 days. You should see entries in most weeks, made by named people at the agency. If the list is empty, the month was empty, and if every change landed on one day, the work is being done in a batch before the monthly call.
2. 02Filter to budget changes. Every increase needs a reason in the report. If the agency's fee rises with your spend, an increase with no reason is the first thing to question.
3. 03Filter to keyword changes and count the negative keywords added over the last four weeks, then open the search terms report sorted by cost. The top terms should be searches you'd happily sell to. If the same irrelevant term appears two weeks running, nobody is reading the report.
4. 04Open Conversions and read which actions are marked Primary and which Secondary. Only actions you would pay for should be primary, and none should say that no recent conversions were recorded. If a page view or a button click is primary, bidding is optimising for something you can't bank.
5. 05Compare Google's conversion count with your own enquiry log for the same days, calls and WhatsApp included. A gap in either direction is the finding: more in Google than in your log points to junk or double counting, and fewer points to routes nobody tracks.
6. 06Open Recommendations and look at Auto-apply. Nothing should be switched on that you didn't approve, especially for budgets and bidding. If something is, ask who enabled it and when.
7. 07Open Billing and match the month's cost with the figure in the report. If they differ, ask for the reconciliation in writing.

What a good log looks like depends on the size of the account, so use a made-up one as a yardstick: three campaigns over 30 days. A healthy history shows negative keywords added in each of the four weeks, a couple of budget moves, a replacement ad in each campaign and no edits to conversion actions. A worrying one shows dozens of edits on a single afternoon, or conversion settings rewritten mid-month, which deserves a question because Google says its bidding takes time to adapt to changes in conversion set-up.

If you can't open these screens because you aren't an administrator, that is the finding, and who should own the account comes before anything else. Treat the change history as a strong check rather than a complete one. Google's help page says it can omit some account-level changes and changes made by Google representatives, and entries under names such as 'Google Ads system' are, according to the same page, usually routine maintenance.

What do agencies bill as management that isn't?

A dashboard link, a call where someone reads out clicks and impressions, and an optimisation score near the maximum are not management. The score is Google's estimate of how well an account is set up, and it rises as recommendations are applied, so it tracks how many of Google's suggestions were accepted rather than how much money the account earned. Real management leaves a trail in the change history and a decision you can read in the report.

Scope is where fees quietly diverge, so ask each agency, including our PPC team, to put these in writing and say whether they are in the monthly fee:

• Landing page edits, or only advice on them
• Phone call and WhatsApp tracking, which the conversion tracking guide explains
• Arabic ad writing by a native writer, not translation
• Creative production for image and video assets
• Who covers the account when the usual person is away

If you are weighing a build-it-yourself routine instead, Google Ads in Dubai: how to set up an account that pays back has a 30-minute weekly version, and the pricing page shows where our own monthly services start.

Take the 15 minutes this week and email the agency whatever you find, with dates. The speed and the specifics of the reply are the real result of the audit.