This is written as an operating document rather than an article, because its value is that it happens every week in the same order.
## The weekly pass
Open the search terms report for the trailing fortnight. Negate irrelevant themes at campaign level and irrelevant single terms at ad group level. Promote any term with repeat conversions into its own keyword. Log every change with a date and a reason.
## What the weekly pass never touches
Bidding strategy, budget shifts and structural changes. Those are monthly decisions with their own review, and mixing them into a weekly hygiene pass is how accounts become impossible to read three months later.
Where this applies
- Google Ads
Work with Northbeam Studio
This documentation comes from the work Northbeam Studio does. See what they offer, the results they can evidence, and how to start a conversation.
More from Northbeam Studio
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- PlaybookA landing page experiment system for paid trafficPaid traffic gives you enough volume to learn quickly and enough cost to punish guessing. This is the intake, prioritisation and readout process we run so tests compound instead of resetting every quarter.
- FrameworkAllocating a B2B paid budget across three channelsSearch captures existing demand, professional social creates it, and retargeting only finishes what the other two started. A budget that ignores those roles will always look inefficient somewhere.
- GuideAdvertising on community forums without being rejectedCommunity platforms punish marketing language faster than any other channel. The creative that works reads like a useful comment and the targeting is subject-first, not demographic.
- PlaybookBuilding an account-based audience worth advertising toUploading a list is not targeting. This is how we build, size and refresh account lists so professional social spend reaches the buying committee rather than the whole industry.