A newly approved Ad Grant will spend almost nothing in month one, and that is correct. The first thirty days are for proving the tracking works and gathering the data that lets the account compete in month two. Trying to spend $10,000 immediately is how new accounts break their own compliance.
Week 1 — verify, do not optimise
- Confirm ads are actually serving. Check the campaign status column, not just that the account is approved. Newly approved campaigns sometimes sit paused.
- Test a conversion end to end. Submit your own form, make a small test donation if you can refund it, and confirm the conversion appears in Google Ads within a day. Assume nothing works until you have seen it.
- Check geographic targeting is set to Presence, not the default. Details in geotargeting rules.
- Read the search terms report — yes, in week one. Even a few dozen queries will show whether your keywords mean what you thought.
Expect $50–$300 in the first month. The account starts on manual bidding at the $2.00 cap and loses most auctions. This is not a fault and it is not something to fix in week one.
Week 2 — negatives and relevance
By now the search terms report has enough in it to act on. This is the highest-value hour of the month.
- Add negative keywords for everything irrelevant. New accounts collect a lot.
- Look at which ad groups are getting impressions and which are silent. Silence usually means the keywords are too obscure, not that the topic is unpopular.
- Check click-through rate per ad group. Anything under 3% this early signals ad copy that does not match the keywords.
- Do not add keywords yet. Understand what you have first.
Week 3 — the first real changes
You now have enough data to act rather than guess.
- Split any ad group whose keywords are not answerable by one headline. This is the single biggest lever on click-through rate.
- Pause zero-click keywords with meaningful impressions. They are dragging the account average toward the 5% floor.
- Add long-tail keywords taken from the search terms report — real queries people typed, not guesses.
- Rewrite the weakest ad in each of your two or three most important ad groups.
Week 4 — the decision that sets month two
Look at conversions over the full month.
| Conversions so far | Do this |
|---|---|
| 15 or more | Switch to Maximize Conversions. The account has enough to learn from |
| A handful | Switch anyway, and expect a longer learning period |
| Zero, and tracking is verified | The problem is traffic volume, not bidding. Add keywords first |
| Zero, and tracking is not verified | Fix the tracking. Nothing else matters until you do |
That last row is more common than it should be. A month of traffic with broken tracking is a month you cannot analyse and cannot use for Smart Bidding.
What not to do in month one
Do not add broad, generic keywords to force spend. You will breach the single-word and generic-keyword rules and sink CTR at the same time. Both are covered in the keyword rules.
Do not change bid strategy in week one. With no conversion data, Smart Bidding has nothing to optimise toward.
Do not judge the grant on month one spend. The number that matters at day 30 is whether conversions are being recorded correctly.
Set the routine before you finish
Before month one closes, put a recurring monthly task in a shared calendar: search terms report, negatives, CTR check, one ad rewritten, five keywords added. Thirty minutes.
That habit is what keeps the account compliant, keeps it out of inactivity deactivation, and compounds into the account actually working. Accounts that never establish it in month one rarely establish it at all.