Monthly Search Management for Regulated Advertisers

We hold nine management accounts at a time. When the tenth arrives, either someone has left or the prospect waits. That constraint is the product: regulated search accounts fail on the weeks nobody is watching, and a manager carrying twenty of them is watching none. What a month contains: One structural change at a time, run long enough to read. Most months that is a single test, such as match type consolidation across one ad group cluster, a landing page variant behind a claim the policy allows, or a bidding strategy moved off target ROAS onto conversion value with a floor while seasonality distorts the signal. Four changes at once produce a month of movement and no knowledge, which is how most accounts arrive here: eighteen months of activity, nothing accumulated. Weekly, we read search terms against the buyer map, clear disapprovals before they age into an account-level flag, and reconcile platform conversions against your CRM. In staffing that means matching the conversion count to placements in Bullhorn or Greenhouse, because applications are a vanity number when most of them are unqualified. The certification calendar: This is the part shops forget and the reason accounts go dark in week 30. LegitScript certification renews annually. Google grants healthcare certification per country rather than globally, so a client certified for Singapore who opens Australia is uncertified there on day one. Digital asset advertisers are certified country by country, and in Singapore that means holding a Monetary Authority of Singapore licence or a listed exemption. Employment advertisers in the United States and Canada run under restricted personalized advertising rules that quietly remove targeting other categories keep. We hold the renewal dates and file before them. What we report: Incremental contribution by market. Spend against licensed markets. The test log, with the result of every closed test including the ones that failed. Certification status for each entity in the group. In writing, monthly, before the call rather than during it. What we do not report: last-click ROAS as a headline, impression share as a performance metric, or a slide counting the optimizations performed. Volume of activity is not evidence of judgement and we will not decorate a month with it. Access we need: Admin on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, read on GA4 and the CRM, and either publish rights on the landing pages or a named developer with a five working day turnaround. We decline accounts where the pages are frozen. In regulated search the page is half the compliance surface, and managing bids on a page we cannot touch is managing the small half. Not included: Creative production beyond ad copy and page copy. SEO. Paid social. App store advertising. Any media outside search and shopping. Suspension recovery for a flag that predates us, which is separate work with separate risk; bundling it into a retainer only disguises how much of it there is. Who should not take this: Companies who want the retainer to include headcount. This is two senior people part-time, not a team you rent, and the org chart it fits is one where someone internal owns the channel. Anyone whose budget moves more than 30 percent month to month on someone else's decision. Structural work needs a stable base to read against, and we would spend the retainer explaining variance. Anyone who wants weekly calls. We hold one call a month and answer written questions inside a working day. Clients who need more contact than that are usually buying reassurance, which we are poor at providing. Companies whose ceiling is legal rather than tactical and who want us to find a way around it. We will tell you what the policy forbids, in writing, and we will not help you dress it up as something else.