How to Monitor a Google Ad Manager Account: A Daily and Weekly Routine

Most account problems give warning signs days before they become serious. Simple, regular monitoring catches them. Here is a routine any publisher can follow.

Daily checks (10 minutes)

1. Revenue vs yesterday and same day last week. A drop of more than a few percent deserves a look.
2. Impressions and ad requests. If requests fall but traffic does not, a tag may be broken.
3. Fill rate. A sharp fall can mean a demand partner paused or an ads.txt line broke.
4. Top countries. A new country suddenly in your top five is a classic invalid-traffic signal.
5. Policy center. Any new issue should be read the same day; Google's policy center overview explains what these notices mean.

Weekly checks (30 minutes)

• Ad unit performance: find units with low viewability or very low CPM, using the metrics described in Google's reporting help page
• Traffic sources: compare analytics referrers with ad revenue by source
• ads.txt status: confirm the file is reachable and all partners are listed, following Google's ads.txt troubleshooting guide
• User list: remove people who no longer need access
• Change log: write down every setting change made that week

Monthly checks

Compare CPMs by country and device with the previous month, review floors and pricing rules, read Google's policy change log for updates, and reconcile reported revenue with payments.

Set up alerts

Manual checks miss things on busy days. Use scheduled reports by email and, if your analytics tool supports it, alerts for traffic spikes from single sources. Google's guidance on preventing invalid traffic includes segmenting reports by channel or ad unit so unusual activity stands out.

How networks monitor at scale

MCM parent networks face the same task across hundreds of accounts. H&T GAMING built GAM Sentinel for this. Its site describes checks every 30 minutes across 8 dimensions, automatic alerts and tickets, and optional enforcement when a child account breaks the network's rules. For a child publisher, that means problems tend to be raised quickly, which gives you time to fix them.

A simple rule

If you cannot explain a change in your numbers within a day, treat it as a problem until proven otherwise.

A free account review gives you an outside view of your account health today, and it's a reasonable place to start if your own monitoring routine isn't catching what it should. You can request one here.