Stop 3 of 9 · Weekly
Search terms and placements with Cowork
Delegate the weekly cleanup across twelve accounts, review the proposal against the never-negate list, and apply the survivors by hand.
What it is
The search term and placement cleanup is the most valuable hour in Nour week and the one she skips first when a client calls. It is also the most delegable: identical steps, twelve times, on structured reports. Cowork is where that job goes. Cowork is delegation, a multi-step job over your files and connectors that you brief once and review at the end.
The brief
Cowork does what it is told, so the brief carries the shape of the answer, not just the request. Three parts: where the data is, how to group it, and what to hand back.
The folder Exports/Weekly has one subfolder per client, C01 to C12, each with a Google search terms report and a Performance Max placement report for the last 30 days. For each account: group every search term by intent, using the categories emergency, brand, competitor, price shopping, DIY or informational, job seeker, and unrelated. Total cost, clicks and conversions per group. Then propose two lists. Negatives: terms with spend over $25 and zero conversions that sit in a group we do not want, with the match type you would use and the rows behind each one. Exclusions: placements with spend over $40 and no conversions, mobile app placements first. Cap each account at the twenty proposals with the most wasted spend. Write one file per account to Proposals/ThisWeek, plus one summary table across all twelve sorted by dollars. Check every term against never-negate.md in this Project and flag anything that touches it. Change nothing in any account.
The review
Fifteen minutes, three passes. First the summary table: which two accounts hold most of the money this week. Then the flags: anything Claude marked against the never-negate list gets read in full, because that list exists to protect the terms that convert by phone. Then the top twenty for the two accounts that matter.
Nour marks each line keep, drop, or change to phrase match. Dropping is not failure. A proposal she overrules twice becomes a new line in never-negate.md, and the delegation gets better without her rewriting the brief.
Here are the eight proposals I marked drop from this week cleanup, with my reason on each. Find the pattern across them, write the one or two rules that would have prevented all eight, and give me the exact sentences to add to never-negate.md.
Applying
The survivors are applied by a person, in the platform, the same day. No bid, budget, status, negative, audience or placement change happens without a human clicking it, and this stop is the one people most want to skip that on, because negatives feel harmless. They are not. The applied lines go in the guardrail log with who approved them and a 14-day outcome date.
From my marked-up proposals, produce the apply sheet: one row per approved change, account, campaign, the exact term or placement, match type, and my initials. Sort by account so I can do one login at a time. Then list what I dropped and why, for the log.