PPC Client Onboarding Checklist: The First 30 Days, in Order

The first month with a new PPC client decides whether they stay three months or three years. Most agencies spend it on a kickoff call, a Google Doc nobody reads again, and a rebuild of the account that nobody asked for.

I have onboarded a lot of Google Ads accounts, some from scratch and most inherited from another agency. The sequence below is what I run now, in the order I run it. It produces three things by day 30: full access, one conversion action that means money, and a baseline the client has agreed to.

Everything after that is management. This is the bit before.

What onboarding actually has to produce

An onboarding process is not a welcome pack. It is the work that makes the account manageable, and it has three outputs.

Access you control. Every platform the campaigns depend on, linked to your manager account, with the client keeping ownership and billing. If you are still asking for a login in week three, you are not managing the account yet.

One number that means money. A single conversion action the client agrees is a real lead or a real sale, set as primary, with everything softer moved to secondary. Until that exists, every optimisation is aimed at the wrong target.

A baseline the client has signed off. The last 90 days, in the client’s own numbers, with a wasted-spend figure attached. This is the line you get measured against, so agree it before you move anything.

If a step below does not feed one of those three outputs, I have cut it. That is how a 40-item onboarding template turned into the one you can paste from this page.

Week 0: access, and the admin nobody enjoys

Do this before the kickoff call, not after. The kickoff is far more useful when you have already seen the account.

1. Google Ads. Link the client’s account to your manager account rather than taking a user login. Google’s linking process sends the client a request they accept from their side. Ask for admin access at the manager level. The access levels matter, because standard access cannot manage users or billing, and you will need both at some point.
2. Billing stays with the client. Their card, their invoices, their account. An agency that puts ad spend on its own card has taken on a credit risk for no fee.
3. Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager. Editor on GA4, publish rights on the GTM container. Half the conversion problems I find in week 1 live in a container nobody at the agency can open.
4. Search Console, Merchant Center, Business Profile. Only the ones that apply, but ask for all of them in one email. Each one you ask for later costs a week.
5. The CRM. Read access at least. The account’s conversion column will tell you how many forms were filled in. The CRM tells you how many of them were worth anything.
6. The previous agency’s work. Ask for the last three reports and any strategy document. You are not going to follow them, but they show you what the client was told, which is what the client believes.

Send all six requests in one message on the day the contract is signed. Keep a short note of the date each one lands. That note becomes the first line of the first report, because clients rarely know how long their own admin took.

Week 1: the account you inherited

Do not change anything in week 1. That rule is the one I broke most as a junior, and it cost me the baseline every time.

The account you have inherited is evidence. The moment you add negatives or pause campaigns, you have contaminated the numbers you need to measure yourself against later. Read first.

Run the audit on read-only. My full audit checklist covers every part of the account, and I go through all of it. The parts that matter most in week 1 are the ones that show whether anyone has been home:

• Change history for the last 90 days. Regular, small, human edits mean the account was managed. A wall of automated rows means you are the first person in it for months.
• Conversion actions. Count how many are set to primary. Primary actions are the ones Smart Bidding optimises to , and I regularly find five or more, including page views and button clicks.
• The search terms report. Read it in full for the last 90 days, and put a dollar figure on the spend that went to searches which could never have converted. That figure is the most persuasive number in the whole onboarding.
• Auto-applied recommendations. Google can apply its own recommendations automatically , and on an unmanaged account it usually has been. Note which ones are switched on. You will switch them off in week 2.

Take a snapshot before you touch anything. Export the whole account structure, campaigns down to keywords, and store it with the date on it. I use the account snapshot export , which pulls everything into one sheet, so the baseline is a file and not a memory.

Write the baseline. The last 90 days: spend, conversions on the one action that matters, cost per conversion on that action, impression share lost to rank, and the wasted-spend figure. Send it to the client in plain English and ask them to confirm it matches what they saw. This is the document that protects you in month three when someone asks what has changed.

If you want the audit itself run in a structured way, the account auditing playbook is the framework I use. It hunts for the single root cause behind an account’s problems rather than listing every symptom.

Week 1, the other half: the business context the account never had

Most inherited accounts were built by someone who never asked what a good customer looks like. The keyword list shows it. So does the conversion setup.

Book one hour with the client and get answers to these six questions. Write the answers down in the project, not in your head.

1. What does a good lead or sale look like? Not “a form fill”. The job title, the deal size, the product line, the service area. This is what the primary conversion action has to represent.
2. What is the margin, or the value of a lead? You cannot set a target cost per acquisition without it. If the client does not know, agree a placeholder number and label it as one.
3. What is capacity? A plumber who can take four jobs a week does not need forty leads. A campaign that wins forty will make them stop answering the phone.
4. What is the seasonality? Ask for the last two years of sales by month. The account’s own history will show you the ad side, but not the demand side.
5. What is the no list? The customers, products, locations and terms the client does not want. This becomes the first shared negative list and the first location exclusion.
6. Who else is spending? The two or three competitors the client actually loses deals to. The auction insights report will show you the ones Google thinks matter, which is a different list.

I collect this with the business context builder , which turns the client’s website and the interview into a structured brief with a confidence score on each fact. The point is that the brief exists, in one place, so the person writing ads in month four is working from the same facts as you were in week one.

Look at the landing pages with the client’s answers next to you. The biggest ad group usually lands somewhere that does not repeat the ad’s promise. Run the top three pages through a Postclick audit and you get the leaks scored before you have spent a dollar of the new budget. Landing page problems are the ones a new agency inherits and gets blamed for, so find them early and put them in the baseline document.

Weeks 2 to 4: stabilise before you optimise

Now you can change things. Not everything, and not fast.

The accounts I have seen go wrong after a takeover all went wrong the same way: the new agency rebuilt the account in week 2, the bid strategies reset, the learning periods restarted, and the client’s first month looked worse than the old agency’s last month. The client does not care that it was the right long-term move. They saw the number.

So weeks 2 to 4 have one job, which is to stop the account bleeding without resetting it. In order:

Fix tracking first. If the conversion action that means money is not firing correctly, nothing else you do can be measured. Google’s conversion measurement docs cover the setup. The conversion tracking audit checks the account against GA4 and the CRM, and tells you whether the account is over-counting or under-counting. Over-counting is the more common problem on inherited accounts, and it is why their reported cost per lead looked so good.

Make one action primary. Move everything else to secondary. Expect a short dip while Smart Bidding adjusts to the new target, and tell the client it is coming before it happens.

Switch off auto-applied recommendations. All of them. If any turn out to be useful you can apply them yourself, on purpose, with a note in the change history.

Stop the waste. The searches you priced up in week 1 become negatives now, added to a shared list built from the client’s no list. The negative keyword examples post has the lists I start every account from. Do it in one batch, record it in the change history, and note the projected saving. This is the first thing the client sees you do and it is the easiest thing to put a dollar figure on.

Leave the structure alone. Campaigns, ad groups, bid strategies and budgets stay where they are until you have 30 days of clean conversion data on the right action. The restructure, if it is needed, is a month-two decision and a month-two conversation.

This is the phase my 90-day onboarding playbook calls stabilisation, and its exit condition is conversion volume rather than a date. If you want an agent to tell you what work is appropriate for the account’s current phase, the new client onboarding agent reads the conversion volume and the time elapsed and returns three to five actions calibrated to that phase. It is how I stop myself doing month-three work in week two.

Day 30: the first report

The first report is the baseline document with a second column. It does not need to be pretty and it should not be long.

• The baseline figures you agreed in week 1, next to the first 30 days.
• The wasted-spend figure you found, and the amount of it you have now stopped.
• What changed, in plain English, with the date of each change. Tracking fixed, one primary action, auto-apply off, negatives added.
• What did not change, and why. The structure is untouched on purpose, and the client should hear that from you before they hear it from a competitor’s audit.
• What happens next. The month-two decisions, with the data you need to make them.

The point of the first report is to set the shape of every report after it. If you send a 20-page dashboard export on day 30, you will be sending one on day 300. How to build a client report worth reading is a separate post, and the report narrator turns the numbers into the plain-English version in a few minutes.

Four onboarding mistakes I have made so you do not have to

Rebuilding the account in week 1. Covered above, and still the most common. The client hired you for judgement, and the first display of it should not be a reset that makes their first month look worse.

Skipping the baseline. Without a signed-off starting line, every conversation in month three is a matter of opinion. With one, it is a matter of subtraction.

Optimising to the inherited conversion action. I once ran an account for six weeks against a conversion action that turned out to be a newsletter signup. The reported cost per lead was excellent. The client’s sales team had not had a call in a month.

Taking over billing. It felt like a service. It was a credit risk, and when the client paid late, the ads stopped, and I was the one explaining it.

The onboarding checklist, to paste into your project board

CLIENT: ______________   CONTRACT SIGNED: ________   DAY 30 REPORT DUE: ________

WEEK 0: ACCESS (send all six requests in one email, log the date each lands)
[ ] Google Ads linked to manager account, admin access       landed: ____
[ ] Billing confirmed as the client's own card               landed: ____
[ ] GA4 editor + GTM publish                                 landed: ____
[ ] Search Console / Merchant Center / Business Profile      landed: ____
[ ] CRM read access                                          landed: ____
[ ] Previous agency's last 3 reports + strategy doc          landed: ____

WEEK 1: AUDIT AND BASELINE (change nothing)
[ ] Change history, last 90 days: managed / automated only
[ ] Conversion actions set to primary: ___ (list them)
[ ] Search terms, last 90 days: wasted spend $______
[ ] Auto-applied recommendations switched on: ___ (list them)
[ ] Account snapshot exported and dated
[ ] Baseline sent to client and confirmed: spend ___ / conv ___ / CPA ___ / IS lost to rank ___%

WEEK 1: BUSINESS CONTEXT (one hour with the client)
[ ] Good lead or sale defined      [ ] Margin or lead value     [ ] Capacity per week/month
[ ] Seasonality, 2 years            [ ] The no list              [ ] Real competitors (2-3)
[ ] Top 3 landing pages audited, leaks noted in baseline doc

WEEKS 2-4: STABILISE (in this order)
[ ] Tracking fixed and verified against CRM
[ ] One primary conversion action, rest secondary (client warned about the dip)
[ ] Auto-apply recommendations OFF
[ ] Wasted searches added as negatives, projected saving $______
[ ] Structure, budgets and bid strategies LEFT ALONE

DAY 30: FIRST REPORT
[ ] Baseline vs first 30 days   [ ] Waste found vs stopped   [ ] What changed, dated
[ ] What did not change, and why [ ] Month-two decisions and the data needed

If you would rather have it run for you

How long should PPC client onboarding take?

Thirty days to a first report, with access in week 0, an audit and agreed baseline in week 1, and weeks 2 to 4 spent stabilising tracking and waste. Structural changes and bid strategy changes wait until there are 30 days of clean data on the right conversion action, which usually means month two.

What access do you need from a new PPC client?

Google Ads linked to your manager account with admin access, GA4 editor, Tag Manager publish rights, Search Console, Merchant Center and Business Profile where they apply, read access to the CRM, and the previous agency's last reports. Ask for all of it in one email on the day the contract is signed, and leave billing on the client's own card.

Should you rebuild an inherited Google Ads account?

Not in the first month. A rebuild resets the bid strategies and learning periods, and the client's first month with you looks worse than the old agency's last month. Read the account, fix tracking, stop the waste, and make the restructure a month-two decision with data behind it.

What should be in the first PPC client report?

The baseline you agreed in week 1 next to the first 30 days, the wasted-spend figure found and the amount stopped, every change with its date, what you deliberately left alone and why, and the decisions coming in month two. Keep it short. The first report sets the shape of every report after it.

What is a PPC onboarding checklist?

A dated list of the work that makes an account manageable: access to every platform, an audit on read-only, a baseline the client signs off, a business context interview, and the stabilisation steps in order. The one on this page is the version I use, and you can paste it into any project board.