Ever take over a new Google Ads account and struggle to get good performance, only to find they had put really dumb settings in place? I took over an account recently and started to set things up on a Friday. I fixed their conversion tracking issues (always step 1), set up a brand campaign and set up a general search campaign with their top keywords (a cross between volume and buying intent). I had paused every other campaign and left only mine running, so I thought everything would be fine for the weekend. I came back Monday and saw that traffic spiked, which was good. Until I looked at the search terms report... There was a ton of stuff coming from keywords I never added! I checked the target keywords and someone had added a bunch of Broad match keywords, including a one-word, super generic keyword that could have ANY intent! I knew that the owner, the marketing manager, my client (an agency owner), and possibly their sales manager had access to the account, so I went to the change history to see who had "tried to help". Turns out, it was Google! They added 165 BROAD MATCH KEYWORDS to one ad group!!!! The source was "Auto-applied Recommendations", which I never checked because I never turn them on. ALL OF THEM WERE ON!!!! I quickly turned them off and posted on LinkedIn about it, making the offhand commend that I would "add it to my checklist" (I don't have an actual checklist, which is why my dumb brain got into this problem). Someone apparently called my bluff and asked for the checklist, so I had to actually get organized and make one. I thought you might benefit from having it as well. I just went with everything I could think of off the top of my head that I would normally check when taking over a new account (bonus: it can be used to check new accounts after you set them up, as well). Because I created this with you in mind, I made it public and gave you commenting permissions. Please feel free to point out anything I may have missed while my brain was shutting down after a long day of reporting.