Quick answer
In the first 30 days a paid search agency should take access to accounts you own, record a dated baseline before changing anything, validate what each conversion counts, install spend controls, remove clear waste, and put a small number of attributable experiments in flight. Transformation is not the month-one deliverable. A trustworthy measurement setup and a documented plan are.
- A week-by-week plan for the first month
- What must be recorded before anything is changed
- Red flags that should end the engagement early
Most disputes we are asked to referee between a Vancouver business and its paid search agency trace back to the same thing: nobody wrote down what the account looked like on day one. Without that, month three becomes an argument about memory.
This is the operating plan we would expect any competent agency to follow in its first 30 days on a Google Ads account.
Week by week
| Week | Work | Proof it happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Access to client-owned accounts, dated baseline export, conversion audit, spend controls | A baseline document with dates and figures |
| 2 | Waste removal: negatives, irrelevant geography, disapprovals, broken destinations | A change log entry per item |
| 3 | Metro Vancouver demand review, landing page and offer assessment | A prioritised list with owners |
| 4 | First experiments launched, reporting format agreed, 60-day plan | Experiment design with a decision rule |
Baseline before changes
Export the trailing 90 days before touching the account: spend, clicks, conversions by action, cost per conversion, impression share, and the current campaign structure. Save it with a date. Everything the agency later claims to have improved is measured against this file, and it takes an hour to produce.
Conversion definitions come next
Ask what each conversion action counts and how it is validated. A great many accounts we review count a page view, a click on a phone number that never connected, or a form submission that was spam. Until the definition is agreed in writing, cost per conversion is a number without a meaning, and every optimisation decision inherits that ambiguity.
Spend controls
Daily caps, shared budgets where appropriate, geography tightened to areas you actually serve, and an alert for unexpected spend. These are dull and they prevent the most expensive first-month failures.
Experiments, not overhauls
Google announced AI Max experiments with brand and location controls, plus multi-campaign budget and ROI tests, rolling out in September 2026. Newer testing tools make it easier to run a clean comparison, which is welcome. They do not change the underlying discipline: state what is being tested, against what, over which window, and what decision each outcome triggers. A test without a decision rule is just a change.
Metro Vancouver demand
Check where clicks are actually coming from against the areas you can profitably serve. Radius targeting drawn around a downtown postcode will happily spend on enquiries you cannot service, and the report will call them conversions.
Red flags
- No baseline recorded before changes began.
- Ad accounts, analytics or conversion setup held in the agency's name.
- A full account rebuild in week one.
- Conversion actions that nobody can define precisely.
- Reporting that leads with impressions and clicks.
- No dated change log.
Why we wrote this one
Between August 8 and September 4, 2026, Google Search Console recorded 238 impressions for "ppc agency vancouver" at an average position of 11.89 with zero clicks, and 17 impressions for "paid search agency vancouver" at 4.53, for our own site. These are ThinkProfits visibility observations, not search volume and not a market estimate.
What 30 days cannot do
A month is not long enough to prove a strategy in most accounts, and anyone promising otherwise is describing luck. It is long enough to make the account measurable, remove obvious waste, and set up the tests that will answer the strategy question by month three.
Our Vancouver PPC agency and PPC advertising pages describe how we run this, reporting dashboards covers what the monthly pack contains, and digital marketing strategy is where budget allocation across channels gets decided.
Starting with a new agency soon?
Book a free 30-minute consultation. We will help you set the baseline and the first-month expectations before the work begins.
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