A good plan is the key to successful Google Ads. The best advertisers create one monthly, and perform ad hoc checkins on a weekly or even daily basis. They follow 3 steps in their planning: evaluation, checklisting, and completion. This means evaluating current performance, developing a todo list of actions, and completing them in order to reach goals.

In evaluation, compare key-performance indicators to your goals. Follow this prioritized order for both evaluation and completion of your checklist. Are you: 
1) Spending your daily budget over time?
– Budget < or > Cost / the number of days you’re viewing
2) Hitting your goal CPA?
– Cost / conv. > Goal CPA
Note: if Cost and CPA meet your goals no other evaluations are needed
3) Getting conversions?
– Conversions = 0
4) Getting impressions and traffic?
– > Impr. and Clicks columns = 0

From here, create a checklist of tasks to complete. Refer to the list below:
1) Spend
     – Over: reduce budgets to reduce daily spend, reduce bids to pay less for Clicks 
     – Under: alter bids to reduce Avg. CPC, increase targeting or change settings to reach new visitors,  improve ad rank by rotating ads or creating keyword ad groups
2) Over goal CPA
     – Reduce bids, add negative keywords to decrease cost, change settings or monitor targeting to improve ROI, decrease Avg. CPCs by rotating ads or creating keyword ad groups, increase targeting to find lower cpcs, increase conversion rates with landing page revisions
3) No conversions
– Increase bids or targeting to increase clicks and conversions, increase traffic by rotating ads or creating keyword ad groups, increase conversion rates with landing page revisions, confirm conversion tracking is setup correctly 
4) No impressions or traffic
– Increase targeting to increase impressions, increase bids to improve ad rank, change settings to reach a wider audience, rotate ads if they’ve been disapproved

Use this checklist to complete tasks that improve volume and ROI. A few days after each (find their dates under Change history), evaluate the results of the change. As you reach goals on daily spend and CPA, completing tasks will go from useful to detrimental. The old adage applies here— if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Start with a monthly plan; enter Google Ads, set the calendar to last month, and begin evaluation. If you’re achieving your spend and CPA goals, no adjustments are needed. If not, evaluate for issues. After looking at last month’s results, create a checklist of tasks to complete that improve performance. Complete that checklist, but make sure to evaluate results after each task to track progress. Repeat as necessary.

Google Ads isn’t rocket science. If you don’t get conversions you’ll never make money. If you spend too much you won’t turn a profit. This planning course gives you a good outline of tasks to complete, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all. Take this advice as a guideline, and adjust tactics as you feel comfortable.