Google Ads QA in agencies: roles, approvals and handoffs

With three clients, checking a campaign before it goes live is a habit: whoever built it reads it again, maybe shows it to a colleague, and publishes. With fifteen clients the same habit does not hold. Handoffs multiply, people change, the checklist lives in a sheet that gets opened when there is time. And when there is no time, it gets skipped.

This guide describes a way of organising Google Ads QA in an agency that survives growth in clients. It needs no particular tool. It needs clear roles, a handoff format and a record of decisions.

Where the process breaks

The problems an agency meets as it grows almost always look the same:

• a campaign goes live with a wrong setting, say a location left at the default or a budget copied from another client, and nobody reviewed it;
• an asset ends up in the wrong client’s campaign, because images and copy come from shared folders;
• the handoff between whoever prepares and whoever reviews happens in chat, and what was checked is never written down;
• the campaign comes back after going live, and the time to fix adds to the time to build;
• the founder knows how many campaigns are live, not how many were approved and by whom.

None of these come from incompetence. They come from a process designed for a few clients and used for many.

Three roles, even when there are two people

QA works when three responsibilities are distinct, even if in a small agency two people cover them:

Whoever prepares. Builds the campaign in the right client’s context, with the current brief, data and assets. Fills in the checklist and flags the points they are unsure about.

Whoever verifies. Rereads the campaign with the checklist in hand, without trusting the memory of the person who built it. Checks above all what can only be seen by opening things: every final URL, every headline, every location.

Whoever approves. Decides whether the campaign goes live. Sees what is about to be published, what was flagged and why. Their decision is recorded.

The rule that matters: the person who prepares is not the person who approves. When one person does everything, the check is an illusion.

What a handoff must contain

The junior to senior handoff is where most information gets lost. A handoff format, always the same, cuts down questions and back and forth. It must contain:

1. the reference to the brief and the version of the materials used;
2. the completed checklist, with an outcome for every item;
3. the choices made where the brief left room, such as match types or bid strategy, with one line of reasoning;
4. the open points, meaning what the preparer could not verify alone;
5. the state the campaign should start in, enabled or paused.

A handoff without open points is an incomplete handoff: it means the preparer decided alone even where they should not have.

One checklist, for every client

The temptation is to have a checklist per client. The result is that none gets maintained. A single list, valid for every campaign, works better, with a short section for each client’s specifics: mandatory languages, claims to use or avoid, locations excluded by contract.

The single list covers what always applies: right account and client, goal consistent with the brief, locations and location option, languages, daily budget against the monthly plan, bid strategy, dates, structure and ads, final URLs that respond, tracking template, tested conversion action, initial state, billing. The details are in the campaign launch checklist; the version to fill in with client, owner and date, printed for whoever approves, is the fillable Google Ads checklist.

Two checks deserve a note for people working across many accounts. The average daily budget can be exceeded on a single day by up to two times, within the monthly limit: when the client thinks in monthly terms, convert before setting the figure. And the default location option also includes people interested in the area who are not there: for local clients it almost always has to be changed.

Approval must be recorded

An approval in chat is not an approval. After a mistake, nobody finds the message, and whoever finds it discovers it said “fine by me” about an earlier version.

A useful approval records three things: who approved, when, and exactly what, meaning which version of the campaign, with which open points closed. The best place is next to the campaign, in a document or a tool the team uses anyway. The worst place is a conversation.

This is not about finding someone to blame. It is about understanding, after a problem, whether the process worked and where to improve it.

The client’s context

Many QA errors are not solved by more checks. They are solved by keeping apart what belongs to different clients. If each client’s assets, commercial data, negative keyword lists and Google Ads accounts live in their own context, the campaign is born in the right place and the odds of using the wrong file fall on their own.

In practice: one folder or workspace per client, with naming rules shared by everyone, and no “common” folder where materials in transit end up.

The first two days after going live

QA does not end with publishing. In the first 48 hours the things no checklist catches surface: unexpected search terms, spend out of scale, ads disapproved by Google over a destination problem. Whoever approves schedules this check at the moment of approval, with a name and a time, and does not leave it to whoever has time.

When the process holds, and when it does not

Three signs that the process works:

• campaigns come back before going live, not after;
• a new person can produce a complete handoff within the first weeks;
• the founder can answer “who approved this campaign and when” without asking around.

Three signs that it does not:

• the checklist is filled in after publishing, for completeness;
• approvals happen verbally, “we trust each other anyway”;
• the same mistakes repeat across different clients.

In the second case the problem is not the team. It is that the process designed for a few clients stayed the same while the clients grew. Rewriting it with three roles, a handoff format and a recorded approval is the first step. Moving it into a tool that makes it mandatory is the second.