Field guide
The PPC operations field guide
A working PPC manager’s guide to the operational layer of paid-media work. Specific, repeatable, and explicit about the failure modes.
The operational layer of paid-media work is under-published. This guide is the operational layer — the daily, weekly, and quarterly decisions that turn an account plan into actual bids in actual auctions. Written from the seat of a working PPC manager.
Section 1: The daily rhythm
Five to seven client accounts in production. The work each weekday morning:
Overnight check (15 min)
Pull the past 24 hours of performance across all accounts. Look at three metrics per account: spend pacing (on track / under / over), conversion volume (vs. trailing 7-day average), and CPC drift (vs. trailing 7-day average). Anything more than 1.5 standard deviations from the trailing average gets flagged for investigation later in the day.
Flagged-account investigation (30–60 min)
For each flagged account, identify whether the anomaly is signal or noise. Common signal sources: a competitor entering the auction, a Quality Score shift, a platform-policy change. Common noise sources: a single high-converting day affecting the rolling average, a weather event affecting click volume.
Smart Bidding stability check (15 min)
For accounts running tROAS or tCPA, check whether the model is converging on the target or oscillating. Oscillation usually means the target is set wrong or conversion data is inconsistent. Don’t intervene unless the oscillation persists past 14 days.
Client communications (60 min)
Reply to overnight client questions, send weekly check-in notes for the accounts that have them today, push reports for the accounts with reporting cadence today. The volume varies by account; the discipline is making sure no account goes dark for more than a week.
Optimization work (afternoon)
The actual changes. Ad copy tests, audience signal updates, asset group refreshes, negative keyword additions, search-term mining. One to three changes per account per week is the right cadence — more than that and you’re fighting the model; fewer than that and you’re not learning.
Section 2: The weekly check-in
Every account gets a 30-minute video call with the client weekly. The call structure that has survived contact with calendar reality:
- 0–5 min: Three decisions made this week, with reasoning. Not a report, not a dashboard tour — specific decisions and the rationale.
- 5–15 min: Performance vs. target. Are we above, at, or below the targets we committed to last quarter? If below, what’s the diagnostic?
- 15–25 min: What I’m planning for next week, and what I need from the client (creative assets, landing-page changes, conversion-event additions).
- 25–30 min: Anything else — platform changes, vendor questions, strategic context the client needs to know.
The client doesn’t need to see the dashboard during this call. The dashboard is for monitoring; the call is for context. Most under-performing client relationships are built on dashboard-walkthrough calls where the agency mistakes pulling reports for adding value.
Section 3: The monthly retrospective
The first Monday of each month, every account gets a 60-minute retrospective. Three questions:
- What went well? Be specific. “ROAS improved” isn’t specific. “The shift to Performance Max on Shopping traffic captured 23% more conversions at the same CPC” is specific.
- What didn’t go well? Same standard for specificity. Resist the urge to attribute losses to external factors before asking whether the operator missed signal.
- What will I do differently next month? Concrete, not aspirational. “Run Smart Bidding longer before intervening” counts. “Be more strategic” doesn’t.
The retro is written up and stored. After six months, the document is the most useful artifact in the account — you can see your own pattern of recurring mistakes and successes.
Section 4: When to intervene, when to wait
The single most common failure mode is over-intervention. The temptation to adjust bids is constant; the right answer is usually patience. Three principles:
Section 5: The platform-change response protocol
Google, Meta, and Microsoft change ad-platform behavior on a near-weekly cadence. Most changes are non-events; some are material. The response protocol:
- Read the announcement immediately, but don’t act yet.
- Wait 48 hours for the operator community to react. Reddit’s r/PPC, the Twitter accounts of working operators, the agency Slack channels. Most platform announcements look bigger than they are; the community quickly settles on whether a change is actually material.
- If material, test on one client account first. The smallest client where the change applies. See how the platform actually behaves before standardizing.
- If the test produces an unambiguous result, standardize across the portfolio. If ambiguous, run for another 14 days before deciding.
- Update the newsletter. The platform-change newsletter at smartgoogleads.com exists to document this process for readers in real time.
Section 6: The quarterly account audit
Once per quarter, every account gets a full structural audit. The checklist:
- Conversion event taxonomy — is every tracked event still meaningful? Are there events missing?
- Bid strategy — is it the right one for the current spend tier and conversion volume?
- Audience signals — are first-party audiences still being uploaded? Are they up-to-date?
- Negative keywords — how many new search terms entered this quarter? Are negatives keeping up?
- Landing pages — any pages slowed down, any 404s in the linked URLs?
- Creative variants — is the asset rotation healthy? Any variants severely underperforming?
- Brand exclusion lists for Performance Max — still enabled?
- Reporting integrations — are all the data sources flowing?
- Conflict-of-interest declarations — any new tools added requiring disclosure?
The audit takes 4–6 hours per account. It pays for itself in catching the slow degradations that don’t trigger weekly anomaly alerts.
Section 7: When to call in strategy
The PPC manager runs operations; the strategist sets direction. Three signals to escalate to strategy:
- Performance is below target for three consecutive monthly retrospectives. The operational fixes aren’t working; the account needs a strategic re-evaluation.
- A material platform change (new campaign type, deprecated feature) requires re-architecting the account.
- The client’s business has changed materially — pricing shift, product launch, geographic expansion — in a way that invalidates the original account plan.
Operations and strategy are different jobs. The escalation discipline keeps both seats honest about what they own.