After onboarding 20+ brands, we've found one consistent pattern: the quality of the first 30 days predicts the quality of the entire engagement.
A clean onboarding with clear expectations, verified tracking, and a documented baseline leads to smooth optimization, confident clients, and long retention. A messy onboarding with missing access, broken tracking, and vague promises leads to confusion, frustration, and churn in month 4.
This checklist covers every step from signing the contract to delivering the first optimization plan. It's the same process we use at Tegra across all 50+ active accounts. No steps are skipped. No details are assumed.
These items should be completed before the official start date.
Everything starts with access. Do not begin any analysis until all access is confirmed and working.
Broken tracking is the single most common issue we find during onboarding. Verify before you optimize.
Run the full account health assessment. This produces the baseline you'll measure all future performance against.
Conversion Tracking Integrity (0-20)
Campaign Architecture (0-20)
Feed Quality - Ecommerce (0-20)
Keyword and Search Term Quality (0-20)
Creative and Copy Quality (0-20)
Before building the full strategy, identify 3-5 actions that can improve performance within the first 2 weeks.
Once the 30-day onboarding is complete, the account transitions to ongoing management.
"We didn't know tracking was broken." The Day 1-2 tracking verification catches this before any optimization starts. You can't optimize what you can't measure.
"The client expected results in Week 1." The kickoff call explicitly sets expectations. Foundation building first. Performance improvements follow.
"Scope crept without us noticing." The pre-onboarding scope document with the "not included" list prevents this. When the ask falls outside scope, you have a documented reference.
"We forgot to set up monitoring." The Day 4-5 operational setup ensures alerts and reporting are configured before the first optimization cycle begins.
"Nobody documented the baseline." The Day 2-3 performance baseline creates the reference point for all future reporting. Without it, "improvement" is subjective.
This checklist covers the same onboarding process we use at Tegra across all 50+ active accounts. The Google Ads AI Agentic System ($4,997+) includes this checklist plus 9 additional modules covering client acquisition, weekly optimization, feed QA, reporting, scaling, multi-market operations, and more - with decision trees, templates, and scoring rubrics for every stage of agency operations.