--- summary: Weekly WREA paid-media governance review design for Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Auction Insights, change history, CRM profit, and Growth Marketer strategy. read_when: - "Planning or running the weekly Google Ads / Microsoft Ads review" - "Adding paid-search recommendations to the WREA growth operator report" - "Explaining how Auction Insights, change history, CRM profit, and Growth Marketer findings should be combined" --- # Weekly Paid Media Governance Review Memory and file-location rules for this workflow live in `docs/wrea-growth-review-memory-architecture.md`. ## Purpose This should be a weekly CEO decision pack, not a separate Ads-only dashboard. The aim is to decide whether WREA should protect cash, recover volume, hold steady, or cautiously scale. The right parent workflow is the existing WREA growth operator weekly report. Add a clear paid-media governance section to that report so paid search is judged against CRM profit, market conditions, Auction Insights, and the broader Growth Marketer acquisition strategy. ## Weekly Cadence Run after the previous completed Monday-Sunday week, ideally Monday morning once CRM and platform data have settled. Default audience: - Thomas: CEO verdict, cash risk, and decisions. - David or paid-media operator: exact campaign/ad-group changes to hold, reverse, test, or investigate. Avoid noisy daily reporting. If a material performance failure needs a midweek check, use a compact watch note, not the full weekly report. Do not create a standalone total-spend or budget-exposure alert. ## Evidence Stack Use CRM source economics as the business truth. 1. CRM source economics: leads, meeting-agent intros, estimated gross profit, cost per intro, intro rate, and trend by source. 2. Google Ads dashboard cache: campaign economics, trend chips, featured campaigns, attention candidates, and Auction Insights summaries. 3. Google Ads change history: budget, target CPA, conversion-action, status, and ad-group changes, including who made them and when. The performance window remains the completed review week, while the 28-day change-history window runs through the report generation date so current settings and their latest change events stay aligned. 4. Google Ads ad-group profitability: especially Agent National exact/phrase, Broad, Quality, Real Estate, and Agent Off-Peak groups. 5. Auction Insights: WREA vs OpenAgent, LocalAgentFinder, Domain, and other recurring competitors for impression share, top-of-page, absolute-top, lost rank, and lost budget. 6. Microsoft Ads: read-only platform performance plus CRM source economics. Platform conversions are lead conversions used by bidding, not intros. Use platform lead conversions and lead CPA for bid-learning health, CRM leads as the tracking cross-check, and CRM intros plus gross profit for commercial decisions. 7. Growth Marketer strategy: value-based bidding roadmap, conversion-signal volume floor, proxy gross-profit values, and organic/SEO/email demand capture. ## Google Campaign And Ad-Group Trend Standard - Cover every currently enabled Google campaign and ad group, keyed by immutable campaign/ad-group ID rather than name alone. - Record the configured bid strategy, target CPA, whether the target is an ad-group override or inherited campaign value, configured conversion-goal level (Lead or Intro), and the primary conversion action used for bidding. - Keep a persistent observed-target register. A changed target, goal, bid strategy, or enabled status must append a dated observation; do not silently replace the previous configuration. When exact Google change-event evidence is available, show the effective timestamp and user. Older settings without dated evidence are baseline snapshots, not invented history. - Judge the selected week alongside trailing 4, 13, and 26 completed weeks. Use 13/26-week profitability consistency to distinguish sustained deterioration from one-week noise. - Define every trend trace in the report itself. A weekly `+` or `−` is the sign of Google-attributed Intro gross profit for that ad group and week: uploaded Intro conversion value minus ad spend. It is not a target-CPA score. Show the oldest week on the left and the selected week on the right. - Show spend, not only cost per intro and gross profit, for every 4/13/26-week window. For 13 weeks, also show the ad group's share of total Google spend and its campaign's spend so Thomas can distinguish a material leak from token coverage spend. - Add a goal-aligned target diagnostic: Lead CPA versus target CPA for Lead-target campaigns, and Intro CPA versus target CPA for Intro-target campaigns. This diagnostic explains bidding health; Intro gross profit remains the commercial decision test. - Produce a ranked named action register before the complete data appendix. Separate: `act now — approval required`, `review next`, `watch — do not overreact`, `protect`, and `low-signal/consolidate`. Every underperforming row must name the campaign/ad group, 13- and 26-week spend/profit evidence, spend materiality, target diagnostic, confidence, and proposed next action. - Treat a pause/cap candidate as high-confidence only when 13- and 26-week Intro GP are both negative and spend is material. A one-week loss must not override positive 13- and 26-week economics; name it as a watch item and explain the trigger for escalation. - Include twelve completed calendar months plus the current month-to-date for campaign and ad-group evidence. Label the partial current month clearly. - Show all enabled groups in the evidence/report appendix even when they had no activity, so zero activity is not confused with missing data. - Add state-specific government-school holiday context when the ad-group name identifies a state. Treat it as context, not proof of causation. - Use the supplied Google Ads weekly export only as a deterministic validation/backfill source. A repeated target column in a segmented export is a current-dimension snapshot and does not prove the target was unchanged historically. Microsoft Ads remains campaign-level only until Thomas separately approves ad-group consolidation/analysis. Report campaign materiality and areas for further investigation; do not create Microsoft ad-group recommendations from this workflow. ## Recommended Weekly Report Sections 1. CEO verdict: one of `cash-protection`, `volume-recovery`, `hold`, or `scale-cautiously`. 2. Paid performance and pacing: Google Ads plus Microsoft Ads actual spend as context, configured target CPA, CRM cost per intro, CRM gross profit, and expected next-week run-rate. 3. Google campaign economics: 1-week, 4-week, 8-week, and 12-week trends for spend, CRM intros, cost per intro, gross profit, and gross-profit margin. 4. Google ad-group decisions: a ranked, named keep/cut/cap/test action register with spend significance, target-goal diagnostic, 13/26-week confirmation, and a clear approval boundary. Keep the complete enabled-group register as the audit appendix. 5. Change-history review: what changed last week, whether it matched the last recommendation, and which changes likely caused the performance movement. 6. Auction Insights: whether competitors are pressuring WREA, whether rank/impression-share loss matters commercially, and whether defending share is justified by CRM profit. 7. Microsoft Ads recommendation: spend, CRM intros, cost per intro, gross profit, and whether to keep, cut, or diagnose. 8. Growth Marketer note: what paid-search results imply for organic pages, valuation/report capture, email nurture, and future value-based bidding. 9. Operator action list: explicit instructions or questions for David, separated into `do now`, `watch`, and `do not change without approval`. 10. Trend/action ledger: unresolved issues carried forward from prior weekly reports, including how many weeks each issue has appeared, whether it is active this week, evidence across weeks, and the next owner/action. ## Performance-Based Paid Decision Rule Thomas removed the standing weekly spend limit and its daily alert conditions on 2026-07-30. Paid media is now monitored through performance rather than a separate total-spend threshold. - Report actual Google and Microsoft spend as context, not as a breach calculation. - Compare platform lead CPA with the configured campaign or ad-group target CPA. - Use CRM introductions, cost per introduction, lead-to-introduction rate, gross profit per introduction, and total Intro GP as the commercial decision layer. - Use the 13- and 26-week ad-group evidence to separate a sustained loss from one noisy week. - Do not create or send a standalone total-spend, budget-exposure, or trip-condition alert. - Any live campaign, budget, bid, target, or status change still requires the normal approval boundary. ## Decision Rules Do not scale just because volume is low. Volume matters because it feeds conversion signals and reduces volatility, but target CPA and CRM gross-profit performance remain the decision controls. Do not cut every low-volume campaign automatically. Low volume can be useful when a campaign is a learning or coverage test, but tiny token spend is only worth keeping if it answers a clear question. If a campaign cannot produce a useful signal at tiny spend, pause it cleanly. Do not treat Auction Insights as a bidding mandate. Losing impression share is only a problem when the campaign or ad group has profitable downstream CRM outcomes. If GP is negative, lower impression share can be a feature, not a failure. Do not use Google Ads platform intro counts alone for today/yesterday decisions. Offline intro uploads can lag. Same-day decisions should use CRM `meeting_agents_at` intros and estimated gross profit. Do not recommend live Google Ads or Microsoft Ads account edits as already applied actions unless Thomas explicitly approves. Do not let each weekly report forget the prior week. The weekly process should review prior report/evidence packets where available and call out recurring issues separately from one-week movements. Older reports may not contain the full paid-media governance pack; in that case, use the CRM source economics, recommendations, and Google/Microsoft summaries available in those older evidence packets. Do not send Telegram cover text by manually retyping a double-quoted shell string containing dollar figures. Generate `telegram-cover.txt`, review it, and send the file/stdin so shell expansion cannot strip amounts such as `$24.2k`. ## Suggested Command Flow Use exact dates in real runs. ```bash # CRM truth for source economics and same-day context /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/report_sales_funnel_condensed.sh --anchor-date YYYY-MM-DD --week-mode completed --weeks 12 --layout flat --format tsv # Refresh/download the latest Auction Insights evidence for the week where available /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/google_ads_sync_auction_insights_local.mjs --week-start YYYY-MM-DD # Google Ads changes, current settings, campaign profit, and ad-group profit /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/google_ads_change_history_review.sh \ --start YYYY-MM-DD \ --end YYYY-MM-DD \ --performance-start YYYY-MM-DD \ --performance-end YYYY-MM-DD \ --include-profitability \ --include-ad-groups # Microsoft Ads live read-only diagnostic /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/microsoft_ads_readonly_report.sh --report campaign --start YYYY-MM-DD --end YYYY-MM-DD --format json # Parent weekly report /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/wrea_growth_operator_weekly_report.mjs --start YYYY-MM-DD --end YYYY-MM-DD --format json # Send the reviewed Telegram cover text safely /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/scripts/send_telegram_text.sh --file \ /Users/tr/dev/tr-wrea-local-private/artifacts/wrea/growth-operator/YYYY-MM-DD-to-YYYY-MM-DD/telegram-cover.txt ``` ## Implementation Recommendation Phase 1, recommended: extend `scripts/wrea_growth_operator_weekly_report.mjs` with a paid-media governance module that reads Google change-history evidence, Google Ads cache/Auction Insights, Microsoft Ads read-only evidence, and CRM source economics. Phase 2: add scheduling/delivery through the existing weekly WREA growth/marketing review lane, with Telegram/HTML delivery, generated cover text, trend/action ledger, and quiet logs. Phase 3: after several weekly runs, add a pre-approved dry-run action mode that can draft proposed Google Ads and Microsoft Ads changes for review, but still requires explicit approval before account writes.