The Google Ads optimisation checklist for 2026

Forty-one checks in the order we run them on a new account, from conversion tracking to the weekly cadence. Written for a media buyer who has an hour and wants to know what to look at first.

Answer first

If you only do five things this week: fix conversion tracking until the numbers match your CRM; add campaign-level negatives to Performance Max now that Google allows them; move brand terms into their own campaign with a capped budget; turn on AI Max for Search only in campaigns with clean conversion data; and set a weekly search-term review that takes twenty minutes, not two hours. Everything below is the long version.

Section 1, tracking (do this before touching bids)

1. Every conversion action has a source you can name and a value you can defend.
2. Primary conversions are purchases, qualified leads or booked calls, never page views.
3. Enhanced conversions are on and matching above 70 percent.
4. Cross-domain measurement survives the hand-off to any booking or checkout engine on another domain.
5. Phone calls are tracked on the numbers people actually dial, not only the Google forwarding number.
6. Offline conversions import weekly with the GCLID, so smart bidding learns from sales, not forms.
7. The Ads number and the CRM number for last month are within 10 percent of each other. If not, stop here.

Section 2, account structure

8. Brand search sits in its own campaign with a capped budget and its own ROAS target.
9. Non-brand search is split by intent, not by product catalogue.
10. Performance Max has campaign-level negatives applied and brand excluded.
11. Every campaign has one clear goal; no campaign mixes lead gen and sales.
12. Location targeting is set to presence, not presence or interest, unless you sell travel.
13. Ad schedule reflects when the business can answer the phone.

Section 3, keywords and search terms

14. Weekly search-term review, twenty minutes, with a running negative list per intent.
15. Broad match is only on in campaigns with reliable conversion data and a target.
16. Informational queries are negated or routed to a content campaign with its own goal.
17. Search terms landing on the homepage are the first thing you fix. Twelve of them is a leak, not a strategy.

Section 4, ads and assets

18. Every ad group has at least two responsive search ads with distinct angles.
19. Pinning is used to control the headline, not to defeat the system.
20. Sitelinks, callouts and structured snippets exist at campaign level and say something the headline does not.
21. Image assets are on for every search campaign that has a product to show.
22. Message assets are on where the business sells by conversation.

Section 5, AI features, with guardrails

23. AI Max for Search is on only where sections 1 and 3 are clean.
24. Ads Advisor recommendations are reviewed weekly and applied selectively; auto-apply is off.
25. Performance Max channel reporting is checked monthly; if Display is eating spend without conversions, add exclusions.
26. Automatically created assets are reviewed before they run.
27. Any AI-written copy is checked against the actual landing page claim.

Section 6, bidding and budget

28. Every campaign uses a target that matches its goal: tCPA for leads, tROAS for sales, Max Clicks only for new campaigns with no data.
29. Targets are set from the last 30 days of real data, then moved 10 percent at a time.
30. Budgets are not limited by budget on the campaigns that convert best.
31. Portfolio bid strategies group campaigns with the same economics, never everything.

Section 7, landing pages

32. The page says the same thing the ad said, in the first line.
33. The form asks for three things first.
34. Mobile load under 2.5 seconds on a real phone.
35. One conversion path per page, and the thank-you page is where the pixel fires.

Section 8, the weekly cadence

36. Monday: search terms and negatives, twenty minutes.
37. Wednesday: budget pacing and any campaign limited by budget.
38. Friday: Ads Advisor and Performance Max recommendations, applied or dismissed with a note.
39. Monthly: tracking reconciliation against the CRM.
40. Monthly: one structural change at most, so you can tell what worked.
41. Quarterly: rebuild the audit from item 1.

What changed since 2025

Agentic features (Ads Advisor, Analytics Advisor) now propose and can apply changes inside the account, so item 24 exists. Performance Max exposes campaign-level negatives, channel reporting and search terms, so items 10 and 25 exist. AI Max for Search finds queries traditional keywords miss, with a reported lift in conversions for advertisers who turn it on with clean data, so item 23 exists and so does its guardrail. Average CPCs keep rising, which is why section 1 comes first: every leak costs more than it did.