Google Ads Management Retainer

What's included

Weekly

• Search term review with negative keyword additions
• Budget pacing checks against monthly targets
• Bid strategy monitoring and learning phase status
• Disapproval and policy issue resolution
• Anomaly review on spend, conversions, and cost per acquisition

Monthly

• Ad and asset testing with results read at proper significance
• Landing page and message match review on the pages taking spend
• Audience and exclusion list maintenance
• Structural changes where the data supports them
• Competitor and auction insight review
• Reporting with commentary, covering what changed and what it did

Ongoing tracking work

• Conversion tracking verified monthly rather than assumed
• Offline conversion imports monitored for silent failures
• Reconciliation between Google Ads, GA4, and your CRM
• New conversion actions added as your funnel changes

Platform change management

• Auto-applied recommendations kept off unless you want them
• New features and beta rollouts assessed rather than adopted by default
• Advance notice on platform changes that will affect your account

How it works

• Named person on your account, not a rotating pool
• Monthly call plus an async channel for anything urgent
• Change log so you can see what was done and when
• No long lock-in, since work that has to be contractually enforced isn't worth keeping

Why it matters

Most management retainers become reporting retainers. Someone pulls numbers, writes a summary, and the account itself gets touched twice a quarter. The tell is a search terms report nobody has opened in six weeks and a negative list that stopped growing last year.

The other thing usually missing is tracking maintenance. Conversion setups break, offline imports fail silently, and a management retainer that never checks is optimizing an account on data that stopped being true in March. Verifying it monthly is unglamorous and it's the difference between managing an account and watching one.