What does a Google Ads agency actually do? Day in the life

One of the most useful exercises before hiring a Google Ads agency is to understand exactly what the agency will do with the hours you are paying for. The marketing materials describe outcomes ("we drive revenue"); the contract describes deliverables ("monthly report, weekly check-in"). The actual work — the rhythm of clicks, screens and decisions that makes up a week — is rarely visible to the buyer. This piece pulls back the curtain. For the broader picture, see our complete buyer's guide.

Where the hours go: a typical month per account

A mid-market Google Ads engagement (€10k–€30k/month spend) at a competent specialist agency consumes roughly 18–28 hours of agency time per month, split across the strategist and an account manager or analyst. Allocation is roughly:

• Reporting and meetings: 8–12 hours. Weekly check-in (1 hr), monthly review prep (3–4 hrs), monthly review delivery (1 hr), ad-hoc questions over Slack/email (2–4 hrs), QBR prep once a quarter (averaged: 1–2 hrs/month).
• Optimisation: 6–10 hours. Search term reviews, bid and budget adjustments, ad copy testing, asset refreshes, audience tweaks, negative keyword additions.
• Planning and creative: 3–6 hours. Monthly plan, new campaign builds, creative brief and review, landing page recommendations.

That's 4–8% of one strategist's monthly capacity. A strategist with 12 accounts is using the rest of their time on the other 11 accounts and internal work. If you ever wondered why a question takes 36 hours to come back, that's why.

Week 1: the heavy week

Monday. Monthly report wrap-up from the previous month. Pull the data into the agency's dashboard or template, write the commentary, send for internal review.

Tuesday. Monthly review call with the client. The strategist walks through last month's numbers, explains what moved and why, presents the plan for the new month, takes questions. 60–90 minutes including prep.

Wednesday. Larger optimisations land here: launching the new campaigns approved on the call, restructuring an ad group that was underperforming, refreshing creatives in a major asset group. This is the week your account actually gets touched.

Thursday. Search term mining for the month: pulling the raw search query report, identifying negatives, identifying new positive keyword candidates, drafting new ad groups for clusters that have emerged. 1–2 hours per account.

Friday. Catch-up. Slack messages from the week, anomaly investigation, the "quick question" that turned out to be a 45-minute analysis.

Weeks 2 and 3: the maintenance weeks

Weeks 2 and 3 are when most accounts are in "monitor and adjust" mode. The cadence is lighter — typically 1–2 hours total per account per week.

Monday morning. The strategist scans the dashboard across all 12 accounts in 30 minutes. Flag anything red, plan deeper attention to whichever account needs it most.

Mid-week. Weekly client check-in (often a Tuesday or Wednesday slot). Brief update: what happened this week, what's coming, any questions. 20–40 minutes.

Optimisation passes. Bid adjustments where Smart Bidding is showing strain, budget reallocation across campaigns, occasional ad copy iteration. 30–60 minutes per account per week.

This is also when the well-known "if I don't hear about it, it must be fine" pattern emerges. A strategist juggling 12 accounts and one larger pitch is naturally pulled toward the loudest client. Quiet accounts in weeks 2 and 3 get less attention than they should.

Week 4: the report grind

Reporting is the largest single hour-sink in a typical agency week, and it is the most automatable. Yet most agencies still hand-craft monthly decks because clients have come to expect them.

Monday. Data pulls begin. GA4, Google Ads, Merchant Center, sometimes Search Console, sometimes Looker Studio refresh. The senior analyst or the strategist normalises the numbers.

Tuesday–Wednesday. Commentary drafting. This is where a good agency earns its fee: not the pretty charts, but the narrative. "Here is what moved. Here is why. Here is what we are going to do about it." A mediocre agency writes one paragraph; a good one writes three pages of opinion.

Thursday. Internal review of the report by a senior, often a partner. Revisions. Final version sent to the client by end of day for the following Monday/Tuesday meeting.

The honest read: a competent monthly report takes 3–5 hours to produce. Most agencies could deliver the same insight as a live dashboard plus a 30-minute Loom, and it would be more useful. The deck persists because clients ask for it.

What gets done well in a typical agency week

Strategy and structure. Senior strategists are good at this. Campaign architecture, match type strategy, audience layering, geo and device segmentation — this is where the agency's experience shows. The first month of any new engagement is usually a structural improvement worth its weight in fee.

Creative direction. Strong agencies have an opinion about what to test in ad copy and asset groups. The opinion compounds over time; pattern recognition from running 50 accounts in your vertical is real.

Crisis management. When Google ships a platform change (Performance Max replacing Smart Shopping, a Smart Bidding recalibration), an experienced agency has already seen how other accounts in their portfolio responded and can pre-empt the worst.

The monthly narrative. A senior strategist articulating what happened and why is the highest-value 30 minutes of the month. This is the bit that justifies the fee.

What almost always gets neglected

The pieces below are the ones most agencies don't do well, not because they don't know how but because the weekly hours allocated don't allow for it.

Granular search term review. The raw search query report at scale is exhausting. Most agencies sample. A daily review at the scale Google Ads now produces queries is a job for an AI agent.

Daily anomaly detection. A spike in CPC at 2pm on a Tuesday is invisible to a strategist who looks at the account on Wednesday morning. By then the day's budget has been spent on a query that shouldn't have triggered.

Landing page feedback. The agency sees which landing pages convert poorly but rarely has time to write up the recommendation properly. The "your landing page is the problem" conversation gets deferred indefinitely.

Cross-channel attribution sense-checking. When LinkedIn and Google Ads claim the same conversion, who actually drove it? Real attribution analysis takes 4–6 hours and is rarely in scope.

Feed maintenance for Shopping. Product feed health, missing attributes, disapproved items, GTIN coverage. This is its own job. Most generalist agencies do it weekly at best.

Competitive monitoring. Auction insights deep dives, screenshotting competitor ad copy, watching competitor landing pages. Cited often, done rarely.

What the workflow looks like inside an AI-managed PPC service

The same monthly hour budget gets allocated very differently when the daily cadence is run by AI agents under human supervision. The shape of the week:

Daily. The agent runs structured passes: search term review, anomaly detection, budget pacing check, ad copy performance review, Quality Score movement. Findings and proposed actions written to a change log. Low-risk changes applied automatically; higher-risk changes queued for human approval.

Daily, 30 minutes. The operator reviews the agent's activity log, approves or rejects queued changes, notes anything that needs deeper investigation, replies to client messages.

Weekly, 60 minutes. Strategy review with the client. Live dashboard, written commentary from the agent and the operator on what moved, what was tried, what was learned. Same call, different shape — driven by data, not by a deck.

Monthly, 90 minutes. Strategic planning. Next month's experiments, channel reallocation, creative pipeline. The operator runs this; the agent prepares the analysis pack.

Same fee budget. Different cadence. Different blind spots. We compare the two models in detail in AI-managed PPC vs Google Ads agency.

How to tell if your agency is actually doing the work

You do not need to micromanage to verify. Four cheap checks:

1. Look at the change history in Google Ads. Tools > Change history. Filter by date range. Count the changes per week. Sparse weeks tell a story.
2. Ask for the search term review output. "Send me the negative keywords you added this month and the new ad groups you launched, with the searches that triggered them." A good agency has this ready. A weak one starts pulling it together when you ask.
3. Spot-check the report's specifics. If the report says "we optimised campaign X," ask what specifically was changed and why. Vagueness is the answer to the question you were asking.
4. Compare your monthly fee to ~7 strategist hours. If you are paying €3,500/month and getting 3 hours of strategist attention, you are paying €1,150/hour for that strategist. Worth a conversation.

The honest summary

A Google Ads agency, when good, gives you a senior strategist's pattern-matching and a junior analyst's execution for 5–8 hours of monthly attention. That is genuinely valuable if your account is in the strategist's sweet spot. It is genuinely undervalued attention if your account is volatile, complex, or below the agency's economic threshold.

If the math is suggesting you're not getting enough hours for what you pay, the answer isn't to find a cheaper agency — the cheaper ones give you fewer hours, not more. The answer is either to move upmarket (an agency where you are a meaningful client), to move to AI-managed PPC (where the daily cadence scales without scaling the fee), or to bring it in-house. Our agency vs in-house cost breakdown covers that math.

Where Logitelia fits

Logitelia's Growth Team is structured around the AI-managed shape described above: agent for the daily cadence, senior operator for strategy and review, flat monthly fee. If you want to see what that workflow looks like for an account your size, book a 30-minute call and we'll walk through it with a sample client log.