Here is the whole ritual up front: check pacing, check creative decay, reconcile orders, check brand-search share, scan search terms. Fifteen minutes, once a week, in that order. Everything below is the thresholds.
You do not have a media buyer. Ads are one of nine jobs you have, and the honest failure mode is not bad decisions, it is no decisions: campaigns running on defaults for six weeks because Tuesday's you had a supplier problem and a shipping problem and ads looked "fine."
The ritual is designed for exactly that founder. Every check compares one number against one threshold. Either it trips and you act, or it doesn't and you move on.
Minute 0-2: Is spend pacing where I set it?
Open Meta and Google, look at the last 7 days of spend against your intended weekly budget.
Threshold: more than 15% off plan in either direction. Overspend usually means a broad campaign found expensive inventory. Underspend usually means an ad set is being throttled, often by a rejected ad you never saw a notification for.
Action if tripped: find which single campaign moved, and only that one. Do not reallocate everything based on one week.
Minute 2-6: Has any creative passed its peak?
For each of your top five spending ads, compare current CTR against that ad's own best week. The comparison to its own peak matters; cross-ad comparisons punish formats unfairly.
Threshold: CTR down more than 20% from peak, sustained a week or more. That is fatigue, and it bills you daily. Down more than 40%: the ad is done.
Action if tripped: 20-40% down, queue a variant this week. Over 40%, pause it today and let the budget flow to healthier ads. The full framework is in creative fatigue, and the Creative Fatigue Checker does the math for you.
Minute 6-9: Do the platforms' claims match my Shopify orders?
Add up Meta's and Google's reported conversions for the week. Compare against actual orders in Shopify admin.
Threshold: platform total more than 15% above real orders. That gap is channel overlap: both platforms claiming the same sales. It does not cost you money directly, but it inflates the ROAS you make budget decisions with, which costs you money indirectly.
Action if tripped: mentally discount your blended ROAS by the overlap share before making any scale-up decision this week.
Minute 9-12: What share of my Google spend is my own name?
Look at spend on campaigns bidding on your brand terms as a share of total Google spend.
Threshold: brand search above 25% of Google spend deserves scrutiny. Those campaigns show your account's prettiest ROAS while buying customers who already knew the way to your store.
Action if tripped: do not kill it (competitors may bid your name); right-size it. A 20% bid reduction for two weeks, watching whether total (paid plus organic) brand conversions hold, is the low-risk probe.
Minute 12-15: What junk am I paying for in search terms?
Open Google's search terms report and skim the actual queries that triggered your ads this week.
Threshold: any query that a buyer of your product would never type. Job seekers, DIY researchers, wrong-country searches, other brands' model numbers.
Action if tripped: add negatives. Two minutes of negative keywords is routinely the highest-ROI action in the entire ritual.
The part nobody says out loud
The ritual works. It is also the part of the job most likely to be skipped, because the week you skip it is precisely the week the supplier catches fire. Checklists degrade under real life; that is not a personal failing, it is why airline checklists are run by two people.
This is the job Ripplux was built to hold: an AI ads employee for Shopify stores spending $3,000 to $50,000 a month. It runs these checks against your real Shopify orders continuously, and instead of adding another dashboard to your nine jobs, it brings you the finding with the fix already proposed: this ad is 40% past peak, here is what it cost this week, approve the pause? You tap yes or no. Every executed action gets a receipt showing what changed. The weeks where nothing is wrong, nothing asks for your time.
Where this is going: the roadmap for the employee is a weekly email that runs this exact ritual for you and reports what it found and what it fixed, plus budget rebalancing across Meta and Google proposed for your approval. Outcome first, autonomy earned gradually.
Start with one manual pass
Run the ritual once by hand this week; it will teach you where your account leaks. If the 15 minutes reliably lose to your other eight jobs, install Ripplux free and let the employee run it instead, with a 14-day trial and your first audit on your own orders.
Rami Omran, Founder, Ripplux
Keep reading
- Is This Normal? Honest Ad Benchmarks: the thresholds, with sources and caveats
- Anatomy of a $10k/Month Store's Wasted Ad Spend: what six skipped rituals cost
- See the founding offer: while the cohort is open, founding stores lock Pro at $99/mo for life