Most PPC managers spend their days reacting. A budget spike here, a conversion drop there, an agency email asking why CTR fell 30%. The account never quite gets the systematic attention it needs because there is always something more urgent.
The problem is not effort - it is infrastructure. Without repeatable workflows for the things that matter most, every week starts from scratch.
These five playbooks cover the highest-leverage, most commonly neglected areas of Google Ads management. Each one is a concrete workflow you can run today, whether manually or by automating it with an AI agent.
1. Keyword Match Type Audit
The problem it solves: Broad match keywords bleeding budget on irrelevant searches while exact match keywords miss volume because they are too restrictive.
Keyword match types are the single biggest lever most accounts have for improving efficiency, and almost nobody audits them systematically. Broad match keywords look fine on the surface - they get impressions, they get clicks - but pull the search term report and you will find budget going to searches that have nothing to do with your product. Meanwhile, exact match keywords in the same account are throttled, missing qualified volume because the targeting is too tight.
The other silent killer is duplicates: the same keyword running as broad in one ad group and exact in another, competing against itself and inflating CPCs.
The workflow:
- Pull all active keywords with their match type, spend, conversion rate, and search term data.
- Flag broad match keywords with high spend but low conversion rate - these are your budget leaks.
- Flag exact match keywords with low impression share - these may be too restrictive.
- Identify keyword duplicates across ad groups competing against each other.
- Pull high-performing search terms that are not yet covered by any keyword - these are your gap opportunities.
- For each issue: switch broad to phrase or exact if search terms are scattered, add high-performing search terms as exact match, consolidate competing duplicates, and pause keywords with zero impressions in 30 days.
- Export the full audit to Google Sheets. Email a summary with estimated budget savings and opportunity size.
- Schedule a monthly repeat.
Why it matters: A single broad match keyword capturing unrelated queries can drain thousands before anyone notices. A single high-intent search term not covered by a keyword is free money left on the table. This audit catches both.
The combination of waste reduction and opportunity capture means this is often the fastest path to improving account efficiency without touching bids or budgets.
2. Google Auto-Apply Watchdog
The problem it solves: Google silently changing your account settings - bid strategies, budgets, keywords - without your knowledge or approval.
Google's auto-apply recommendations are one of the most under-discussed risks in paid search. If auto-apply is enabled (and it often is by default), Google can switch your bid strategy from manual CPC to Maximize Conversions, add broad match keywords to your tightly structured campaigns, or increase your daily budget - all without any human approving the change.
These changes do not always show up prominently in the change history. Many advertisers find out about them only after a performance drop or a budget overrun.
The workflow:
- Check the Google Ads change history daily for any changes made automatically by Google rather than by a human on your team.
- For each auto-applied change, extract: what was changed, old value versus new value, and when it happened.
- Flag high-risk auto-applies: budget increases above 20%, bid strategy switches, new broad match keywords added, audience expansion changes.
- Send an immediate Slack alert for any high-risk change with before/after values and a direct link to the campaign.
- Log all auto-applied changes in a Google Sheet with date, change type, old value, new value, and whether it was flagged.
- Send a weekly summary of everything Google changed without explicit approval.
- Schedule daily monitoring.
Why it matters: Auto-applied changes are designed to improve performance, and sometimes they do. But they can also destroy a carefully structured account. A bid strategy switch from Target CPA to Maximize Conversions can spike spend while the algorithm learns. A new broad match keyword can contaminate a tightly controlled search term universe.
The watchdog does not need to block every change - it just needs to make them visible. Once you know what Google is doing, you can decide whether to let it run or revert it.
3. Change-to-Performance Forensics
The problem it solves: Performance drops with no obvious cause. CPA up 40% and nobody knows why.
Every PPC manager has been here. Conversions fall off a cliff on a Tuesday. You pull the data, stare at it, and have no idea what happened. Was it a bid change? A landing page update? Did someone pause a keyword? Did Google auto-apply something? Was it a tracking issue?
Without a systematic way to correlate changes with performance, you are guessing. And guessing costs money.
The workflow:
- Define the metric that dropped and the approximate date it started: CPA up, ROAS down, conversions dropped, CTR fell.
- Pull all Change Events from Google Ads for the 3 days before the performance shift.
- For each change, pull before/after values and identify high-impact modifications: bid strategy switches, budget cuts, keyword additions or pauses, audience targeting changes, ad copy swaps, campaign setting changes (networks, devices, locations).
- Cross-reference with Google Analytics: traffic source shifts, landing page bounce rate spikes, conversion tracking gaps.
- Build a forensic timeline in Google Sheets: date and time of each change, who made it and through which tool, old and new values, performance metrics for 3 days before and after the change, likelihood score that this change caused the shift.
- Recommend which changes to revert and which to keep.
Why it matters: The root cause of most performance drops is a specific change, and that change almost always happened in the 48-72 hours before the drop. The problem is that accounts accumulate dozens of changes per week across campaigns, ad groups, and keywords - and correlating any one of them with a metric shift requires systematic review, not manual scrolling through the change history UI.
This workflow turns a guessing game into a structured investigation. It does not always identify the culprit with certainty, but it narrows the list from "everything" to "these three probable causes" - which is the difference between fixing it in an hour and spending three days on it.
4. Weak Ad Copy Finder
The problem it solves: Ads with below-average CTR dragging down Quality Scores and wasting spend on impressions that never click.
Low CTR is a tax on your entire account. Google's Quality Score system penalizes ads with poor CTR by raising their CPC and reducing their impression share. A single underperforming ad in a competitive ad group can inflate CPCs for every keyword underneath it.
The challenge is that "below average" is relative. You can not just sort by CTR and pause everything under 2% because the benchmark varies by ad group, industry, and search intent. You need to compare ads against other ads in the same context.
The workflow:
- Pull all active ads with performance metrics: impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions.
- For each ad group with multiple ads, identify ads with below-average CTR compared to the other ads in the same group.
- Analyze underperforming copy for common weaknesses:
- Generic headlines with no specific value proposition ("Best Service", "Click Here")
- Missing call-to-action
- No urgency or differentiator
- Headlines that do not match the keywords in the ad group
- Descriptions that repeat the headline instead of adding value
- For each weak ad, write 3 alternative headline and description variations that: include a clear benefit or differentiator, match the search intent of the ad group keywords, and use proven copywriting patterns (numbers, questions, urgency).
- Create a Google Sheet with weak ads, their metrics, issues found, and suggested alternatives.
- Schedule a monthly review.
Why it matters: Most PPC managers write ads once and forget them. The campaigns grow, the account evolves, but the original ad copy - written in a rush when the campaign launched - keeps running. Months later it is still there, underperforming, raising CPCs, and nobody has looked at it.
The weak ad copy finder forces a systematic review. It does not just flag problems - it generates specific alternatives, which is the part that always gets skipped when the audit is manual. Without the suggested rewrites, audits produce lists of problems that never get fixed.
5. Landing Page and Ad Mismatch Detector
The problem it solves: Ads that promise one thing but send visitors to a page that delivers something else - destroying Quality Score and conversion rate simultaneously.
This is one of the most expensive and most overlooked problems in paid search. An ad that says "Free Trial - Start Today" sending users to a pricing page that requires a credit card upfront. An ad promoting a specific product sending users to a generic homepage. An ad with a summer sale discount pointing to a page where the discount code has expired.
Each mismatch hurts in two ways: Quality Score drops because Google's system detects the relevance gap, raising CPCs; and conversion rate drops because visitors arrive with an expectation that the landing page does not fulfill.
The workflow:
- Pull all active ads with their final URLs.
- For each ad, visit the landing page and compare:
- Does the landing page headline match the ad headline?
- Does the offer mentioned in the ad appear on the page?
- Is the CTA in the ad consistent with the CTA on the page?
- Does the landing page actually load (check for 404s, redirects, slow load times)?
- Flag mismatches:
- Ad mentions a specific price or discount but the page does not
- Ad promotes a specific product but the page is a generic homepage
- Ad says "Free Trial" but the page asks for payment
- Landing page is broken, redirects elsewhere, or loads slowly
- Create a Google Sheet with: ad details (campaign, ad group, headline, description, URL), what the ad promises versus what the landing page shows, mismatch severity (high/medium/low), and suggested fix.
- Schedule a monthly check.
Why it matters: Landing page relevance is one of the three components of Quality Score, alongside expected CTR and ad relevance. Fixing a mismatch can drop your CPC immediately - no bid change required. And fixing the conversion disconnect (ad promise does not match page reality) is often the highest-leverage CRO action available without a redesign.
This audit also catches operational failures: expired promotions, broken pages, and accidental redirects that can run undetected for weeks while burning budget.
Running These as Automated Workflows
Each of these playbooks can be run manually, but the ones that deliver the most value are the ones run on a schedule - because the problems they detect are continuous, not one-time.
The Auto-Apply Watchdog is useless if you run it once. It needs to run daily. The Weak Ad Copy Finder catches newly launched underperforming ads only if it runs monthly. The Landing Page Mismatch Detector needs to run after every campaign or landing page update.
Manual execution means these get skipped during busy weeks - which is exactly when you need them most.
Toffu lets you run any of these as a scheduled automated workflow. Connect your Google Ads account, describe the workflow, and set a schedule. The agent pulls the data, does the analysis, and sends the output - to a Google Sheet, to Slack, to your email - without you having to remember to run it.
The five playbooks above cover the most common failure modes in Google Ads accounts: match type waste, unauthorized changes, unexplained performance drops, weak copy, and message mismatch. Systematizing them is the difference between an account that drifts and one that compounds.
Want to set up any of these as automated workflows? Start at toffu.ai/playbooks.