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This knowledge base is an operations framework. It fixes the decisions that have to be reviewable: what a thing is called, what it is optimizing toward, what it cost, who approved it, and where the record was filed. Work through it once and every campaign after that has something to check against. It is not platform training. Nothing here teaches you to research keywords, write a headline, install a conversion tag, or configure a Google Ads account. Those are real skills, they are documented by the platforms themselves, and they change faster than any internal knowledge base can track.
The gaps below are deliberate. If a topic is listed here as out of scope, there is no missing page to go and find.

The split

The pattern repeats: this knowledge base records the decision and the name. The platform holds the execution.

Where the boundary falls in practice

Each row below is a topic our briefs and checklists refer to without explaining. The middle column is all this framework asks of you. The right column is who makes the call.
Auto-applied recommendations are the one out-of-scope item that can quietly undo in-scope work. Left on, they can rewrite ad copy, add keywords, and change bid strategies without anyone approving the change, which breaks the rule that a briefed value is what is actually running. Deciding they stay on is fine. Not knowing is not.

Why the boundary sits here

Two reasons, and both are practical rather than principled. Platform mechanics go stale. A page explaining how to install a conversion tag is wrong within a year, and a wrong internal page is worse than no page, because people trust it. Every platform detail this knowledge base does carry, campaign types, bid strategy names, creative specs, is dated on the page and reviewed against the platform. Judgement does not compress into a checklist. Which keywords to add, when to move off a maximize strategy, whether a weak ad strength is acceptable: those depend on live data that only the person watching the account can see. A framework that pretended to answer them would be overridden in week two and ignored from then on. What survives is the layer above: the decision was made deliberately, it was written down before spend started, and the result can be found later.

What to do when you hit the edge

1

Check whether a decision is being made

If the answer changes what the campaign is optimizing toward, what it spends, or what it is called, it belongs in the brief. If it changes how a briefed value gets delivered, it does not.
2

Record the decision, not the click path

“Exact and phrase only, broad off until CPA is stable” is a decision. “Open the keyword planner and click Add” is a click path, and it belongs in the platform’s own documentation.
3

Add a best practice if the answer keeps recurring

A choice your team keeps making the same way is a candidate for a best practice page, which records the default without pretending to be a tutorial.
4

Raise it if the boundary is wrong

The split above is a decision, not a law. If a gap is costing your team real time every campaign, it can move.
Last modified on August 10, 2026