PPC account management is the ongoing work of running paid search and paid social accounts once they exist: watching what queries actually spend your money, cutting the waste, testing creative, adjusting bids and budgets, and keeping the measurement honest enough that the numbers mean something. It is unglamorous and it is where most of the value sits, because an account left alone drifts, and it drifts toward spending more for less. This guide covers what a well-managed account looks like week to week, how the service is priced, the reporting that tells you whether anyone is actually doing the work, and how to check the account yourself.
The weekly and monthly rhythm
Competent management has a visible cadence. Weekly: read the search terms report and add negatives for the queries that spent without converting, check that spend is pacing to budget, review any campaign whose cost per conversion has moved sharply, and check that landing pages and tracking are still working. Monthly: review the account structure against how demand has actually arrived, refresh ad creative in the assets that are underperforming, revisit bid strategy targets against realised conversion volume, and reconcile platform-reported conversions against what your own systems recorded. Quarterly: revisit the account structure properly, prune campaigns that never earned their budget, and test something structural rather than cosmetic. If an agency cannot describe its cadence in that kind of detail, ask what it did in your account last week.
The things that quietly waste money
Four failures account for most avoidable spend. The first is missing negative keywords, because broad and phrase matching will keep finding new ways to spend on queries you never wanted, and Google documents how match types expand. The second is conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing, such as every form fill including spam, or the same lead counted twice through two tags, which then trains automated bidding toward noise. The third is a bid strategy chosen without enough conversion volume to support it, which produces erratic spend and unreadable results. The fourth is neglected creative: responsive search ads need a steady supply of tested headlines and descriptions, and an ad group running the same assets for a year is slowly losing auctions to competitors who did not stop.
How the service is priced
Three structures dominate. A flat monthly fee is the easiest to compare and the easiest to hold to a scope. A share of media spend is the most common and the most conflicted, because the manager's income grows with your budget regardless of whether the extra spend was productive; if you accept it, cap it or step it down above a threshold. A hybrid, a floor plus a smaller share, is a workable middle. Whichever you choose, insist the proposal separates the management fee, the media budget and third-party tool costs into three lines, and ask what the fee does if you pause spending. Large in-house accounts sometimes buy account management alongside a broader account-based programme, in which case make sure the paid search fee is still visible as its own line rather than absorbed into a bundle.
How to check the account yourself
You do not need to be a practitioner to audit attention. Open the change history and look at how many changes were made in the last thirty days and what kind they were, since a managed account shows regular, varied activity and a neglected one shows a burst at onboarding and silence afterwards. Open the search terms report and read the top spending queries, asking yourself whether you would have wanted to pay for each one. Check the negative keyword lists exist and have grown. Look at whether ad assets have been added or replaced in the last quarter. Finally, compare platform-reported conversions with the enquiries your team actually received, since a gap between the two is the most important number in the account and the one least likely to appear in a monthly report.
Questions people ask about ppc account management
How often should a PPC account be touched?
Meaningful accounts benefit from a weekly rhythm: search terms reviewed, negatives added, pacing checked, anomalies investigated. Very small accounts can run on a fortnightly cadence. What matters is that the cadence is agreed and visible in the change history, not that changes are made constantly for their own sake.
Does automated bidding remove the need for management?
No, it moves the work. Automation optimises toward whatever conversions you feed it, so the manager's job becomes ensuring the conversion data is correct and valuable, setting sensible targets, controlling which queries qualify at all, and supplying the creative the system tests. Bad inputs make automation faster at spending badly.
What is a reasonable management fee?
It should track account complexity, campaign count, market count and platform count rather than your revenue or your budget alone. Ask two or three providers to price the same written scope and compare the management line only. A percentage of spend can be reasonable at scale but is frequently poor value at small budgets.
Should I ever pause an account entirely?
Sometimes, in a genuinely dead season or when the business cannot serve more customers. Be aware that pausing loses momentum and that automated strategies need conversion data to re-stabilise afterwards. Reducing budget while keeping the best-performing campaigns live is usually a better lever than switching everything off.