Reporting
Daily reporting should point to the next campaign decision.
Search campaign reports are useful when they connect account status, spend, search terms, CPC movement, and landing page performance to a clear operator action.
Daily read
Read fewer metrics, then write a better note.
A daily read should cover account status, campaign status, budget used, impressions, clicks, cost, CPC, search term quality, policy alerts, failed updates, and any page or tracking issue that affects spend.
The written note matters. It should say what changed, why it matters, and whether the operator should hold, adjust keywords, add negatives, change a CPC ceiling, pause a campaign, or request review.
First week
The first seven days of a Search campaign.
The first week is a learning window, not an optimization window. Operators watch five signals daily: search term quality (are the queries matching the landing page intent?), CPC drift (is the average CPC staying within the approved ceiling?), policy status (are ads approved or flagged for review?), spend pacing (is the daily budget exhausting too early or too late?), and impression share (is the campaign eligible for enough auctions to generate useful data?).
No keyword expansion, budget increase, or CPC ceiling change should happen in the first seven days unless the campaign hits a hard stop — policy disapproval, broken tracking, or landing page failure. The goal is to collect enough clean data to make informed decisions in week two.
Search term review
Search term reviews that do not become busywork.
Every search term gets one of four decisions: add (the term matches the landing page and shows buying intent — add as an exact match keyword), exclude (the term is irrelevant, informational, or targets the wrong product — add as a negative keyword), monitor (the term is borderline — check again after 50 more impressions), or page mismatch (the term is relevant but the current landing page is wrong — flag for page assignment review).
Operators process search terms in batches during daily reporting. Each decision is logged with the reason so the next reviewer can understand the pattern. Terms with fewer than 3 impressions are skipped unless they are obviously irrelevant. The goal is consistent, documented decisions — not clearing every line item.
Account health
Account health signals operators should not ignore.
Six signals require same-day action: ad disapproval (policy violation stops impressions — check the reason and fix or escalate), budget exhaustion before noon (spend pacing is too aggressive — review CPC ceiling and keyword match types), broken conversion tracking (tags stopped firing — verify the landing page and tag manager), failed API updates (a scheduled change did not apply — check error logs and retry), sudden CPC spike (new competitor or auction change — review impression share and consider pausing low-value keywords), and landing page errors (404, slow load, or redirect chain — pause the campaign until the page is fixed).
Each health check finding is recorded in the daily operator note with the action taken. Recurring issues across multiple days are escalated to the operations manager for a structural fix rather than repeated daily patches.