Claude & Google Ads: Don't Automate Everything ($10k Wasted)
In this solo presentation, Aaron Young, founder of Define Digital Academy, explains why he avoids third‑party AI automation tools for Google Ads while championing large language models like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT as diagnostic aids. He argues that the core of successful campaigns is solid account structure and robust conversion data, not constant automated tweaks. He critiques the typical promises of AI tools—automatic keyword and negative‑keyword generation, ad‑copy split testing, and bidding‑strategy adjustments—showing that these often lead to over‑optimization, wasted time, and even harmful changes. Aaron outlines practical, low‑frequency optimization cadences (ad‑copy tests every 6‑8 weeks for small spend, every 2‑3 weeks for six‑figure budgets; bidding reviews every 2‑3 months). He then demonstrates how to leverage Claude for: (1) Google Ads SWOT analyses using keyword and search‑term data; (2) layering real business sales data with Google Ads metrics to uncover high‑value, under‑served regions; (3) rapid market‑research from forums and reviews to craft more resonant ad copy and landing pages; and (4) weekly segment audits across multiple accounts to spot bidding or copy issues. Throughout, he provides concrete prompts, mentions free tools (Keyword SWOT Analysis Tool), and promotes Define Digital Academy’s on‑demand and Mastery programs for deeper guidance. The overarching message: use AI as a smart assistant, not as a hands‑off automation solution, to avoid wasting thousands of dollars.
Chapters
On a weekly basis now, I get different AI companies, and the vast majority of them, I've never heard of them before, and they're reaching out via email, via LinkedIn, via Instagram, or any other social media platform. And while the companies are different, the message is all pretty much the same, in that they've got this brand new AI tool which is absolutely revolutionizing the way that people optimize Google Ads campaigns. It's saving thousands of dollars and saving countless hours for you to be able to optimize your Google Ads campaigns. And then of course they offer me a free trial in the hope that we could then do a collaboration. And what is becoming clear with these third-party AI tools is that it's been something that's been true since the Gold Rush in California, is that when there is a gold rush, and AI automation is the new gold rush, is that the people that get rich are the people that are selling picks and shovels along the way. And really that's what these third-party AI tools are. So on this video, I'm gonna break down why I don't use these third-party tools. And also too, I break down how we do use tools like Claude inside of Google Ads, because I do wanna make one thing very, very clear, and that is I'm very pro businesses and Google Ads professionals using tools like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT in order to help them with their Google Ads campaigns. But the key thing I do want to stress here is that these tools are not the strategic oversight, and that you should only be using these tools as a diagnostic tool to help you make faster and better decisions. And in some cases, this is allowing you to do research that was only available to large multinational companies previously. So I truly do believe that Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT are an amazing thing for Google Ads. You just don't need that third-party tool to plug in and try and get these results. All right, so now that I've made that clear, and I do want to make it really, really clear that as a business owner or someone running Google Ads, you should be using a tool like Claude in order to help you with your Google Ads campaign management, but you don't need these third-party tools. And the reason for it is this, and in this video I'm going to break down the reasons for why I don't think you should be using these third-party tools. And the first reason is, is that your account structure and your data, especially your conversion data, is far more important than any optimization that you can make inside of Google Ads. Now don't hear that as you don't need to optimize your Google Ads campaigns because that is definitely not true. Optimization is still a very, very important process for how to increase the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. But you don't need to be optimizing your Google Ads campaign as much as you think when you've got the right structure and when you've got the right data feeding back into your Google Ads account. Now, a lot of these tools, while a lot of them are very, very different, they all generally offer the same type of optimizations. And that is around your keywords, finding different keywords for you to use, and also adding in extra negative keywords. Also, it helps you with, with ad copy split testing and also your smart bidding strategies. But I just want to go down and break down all of these as to why you don't need them. And the first thing is, let's talk about your ad copy split testing. Now, ad copy split testing, even in the age of responsive headlines, is something that you still very much do need to use. We're inside of search campaigns, we actively run 2 ads as an ad copy split test. Inside of more creative-based campaigns like a Demand Gen or video campaigns, we're running in between 3 to 5 creatives. And in most of those cases, you can run a split test every single month. You don't need to be doing this definitely every week. If you are spending large volumes, so thinking 6 figures or more inside of your Google Ads account, you may be— need to have to do the split testing every 2 to 3 weeks. But then if you're spending that level, you've generally got enough team to be able to do these tests and checks anyway. Or if you're a lower spending business, you may not need to be doing this ad copy split testing any more than every 6 to 8 weeks. Then when it comes to bidding strategies, regardless of how much you're spending inside of Google Ads, this is not something that you mess around with on a weekly basis. In most cases, you're doing a review of your bidding strategy at most every 2 to 3 months. Once again, not a task that needs to be done every week, or in that case of bidding strategies, it's not even done every month. And then let's come down to the last one, which a lot of these AI tools really drill down on, is the ability for it to build out negative keyword lists for you and keyword lists. Now, I do know that you can put extra restrictions on this, but we saw a case just last week where the business had connected one of these tools, and in the space of 7 days, it had added over 498 different phrase match keywords, and then it also built out a countless list of negative keywords. Now, and it's this one which a lot of these AI tools really go, that's just going to save you so much time.. But when it comes to your keyword strategies and your negative keywords, yes, you do need to add some negative keywords. And yes, you need to have the right keywords targeting— targeted inside of your account. But gone are the days of you having to add hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of different negative keywords. And I go back to my starting statement that once you have enough conversion data and you're switching over to Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value, even if you've got Target ROAS or Target CPAs running, You don't need to be doing countless hours of adding in negative keywords, cuz the only real negative keywords that you want to be blocking out is putting up the guardrails so that you're not marketing for products or services that you definitely don't offer. And we're seeing many cases that campaigns are running better with less negative keywords inside of their campaigns. And this really comes back to what's changing inside of Google Ads in that as Google is changing their match types and as we start to see more and more people switch over to AI overviews and voice-related texts, conversational-based search, this whole negative keyword sniping thing is going to become less and less relevant. As I said, right now we still definitely do need some negative keywords, but in most cases it's not as much as you need. So that's the first, so that's the first reason as to why I don't like these third-party negative tools is because you just don't need to be optimizing as much as what you think you do. And in fact, inside of one of our Defined Digital Academy programs, which which is called On Demand. And this is a program where we run it as a done-with-you management program. You make the changes, but we're the strategic advisor and coach doing full audits and catching up with you on either a weekly or fortnightly or monthly basis, depending on what cadence you need. And we're giving you the exact steps of what you need to change. A common comment that we get from members after they've been in our program for 2 to 3 months, they start seeing some better results. They do ask that question, what was my agency previously doing? And that's because, as I said, it's really about getting your structure and your data right, and that is allowing businesses to scale faster with Google Ads. And before I go to the next point, if that's something you do want to see with your business, if you'd like to get some extra help, once you follow that link in the description below, and you can get some extra information about our on-demand program. All right, let's get back to the second reason for why I don't like these third-party tools. And it really comes down to is because it doesn't have the full context of what's happening inside of your business right now. Yes, inside of these tools you can build out some brand guidelines, you can build out what, you know, what your conversion metrics are, what your, what your business metrics are. But you need to remember, inside of Google Ads, we are running in an auction-based bidding system which has a lot of different factors coming into it. So it's not only what's happening inside of your account. You could have a large advertiser dump, you know, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 into your targeted keywords. You could have, you know, issues outside of the marketing world, just general geopolitical issues which can be happening. And these are all of the different things which you also need to keep an eye up as a business owner, because that can also be some factors you need to think about with the results of what's happening inside of your Google Ads account and why it's happening. And that's why I don't like the full automation of getting these tools to go through and make changes on your behalf, 'cause it just opens itself up to see some really, really bad things happen really quickly inside of your Google Ads account. So that's the reasons for why I don't like these third-party tools. But now let's talk about how you should be using tools like Claude inside of your business to really supercharge how you use— how you review and optimize your Google Ads campaigns. And the first way that you should be using Claude to help supercharge the results you're seeing with your Google Ads campaign is by using Claude to analyze larger segments of data. And I want to give you two clear examples of how we're doing this inside of Define Digital Academy and how we're teaching our students and members to use Claude in this way for their Google Ads campaigns. And the first way is to complete what I call a Google Ads SWOT analysis. Now, if you've run business for any matter of time, you would know what a SWOT analysis is. It's where you're looking at different strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And the way that you can use Claude to do this is you can download your keyword terms Also download your search terms and then go through and ask Claude to go through and do an analysis. And then go through and ask Claude to do some analysis of the different strengths and weaknesses and opportunities. And what they generally are is obviously where is— what keyword themes or what products are generating the most revenue for our business right now? Can we increase the spend there? What in terms of weaknesses, where are we wasting money? You can get Claude to do some analysis of the different keyword themes and search terms which are wasting money, or even products which are wasting money, so you can limit spend there. And then what are the opportunities?. Now those opportunities could be where you are getting some products or keyword themes where you're only spending a little bit. Say for example, you might only be spending 10% of your budget, but it might be giving you 20% of your conversions. So that's a great way that you can use Claude to give you a full analysis of where you're spending money inside of your Google Ads campaigns. Now you can obviously put a simple prompt together to do that, but we do have a pre-made one that we are giving away for free, and it is our Keyword Swat Analysis Tool. And if you follow that link in the description below, You can get free access to that tool right now. But there is also a more advanced way that you can do this. And the second way that we use, use Claude to look at large amounts of data is to layer in your real business data versus your Google Ads data to really help define some trends. And let me give you a real case example of how we did this just last week for a business. This was a legal services business. And what they have is they have a very big offline sales process. And for their business, it's all about the amount of debt that they get. So it's not just about about the number of conversions they get. It's about the number of debt that they're holding. And also from there is that yes, they already have offline conversions, but what we really wanted to see is we wanted to see this, is that when we look at their total leads and actual new customers or new clients, what are the states in America that they're coming from? We then also downloaded the data in from their Google Ads account, looking at the actual clicks and conversions. Based out and segmented by different states. And then we got Claude to run an analysis of merging or layering those two datasets together. And what we found was really, really interesting was that some of their highest placed clients were coming from states that weren't getting a lot of spend, and that data wasn't able to be found inside of Google Ads alone. And this is a really, really powerful tool that I call in terms of data layering that you can use Claude for, to run analysis from two different segments of data. So real business sales data and also Google Ads data, layering that together so that you can start to see the opportunities where you can make better decisions. And what we did internally from there is we broke out some individual state-based campaigns for those states that weren't getting much spend, but they were really providing some high-value clients for that business. Now, there's a lot of different variations that you could do it through different products, or you could do it through different countries, but I just want you to see that's something you can do to create your own prompts with Claude to get better results with Google Ads. And that is essentially the principle there is taking your Google Ads data, layering it with your real business data, and asking Claude to give you some analysis. The second area, which is a great way that you can use Claude for better results with your Google Ads campaigns, and you don't need a third-party tool, it is to help it to complete some market research so that you can write better ad copies and create better landing pages. And what the process is that you want to do here is that you want to ask Claude to go out and do some research inside of different Reddit forums, um, inside different Reddit groups, internet forums, Google reviews, and really look for what are the core pain points or desire points that your unique customers want. And then you're just making sure that your ad copy and your landing pages are speaking to those specific needs, problems, or desires. And the reason why I love this is because this was the type of market research that would usually take days. I've got a friend of mine who runs an ad copywriting business here in Australia, and And he said he used to have to take 2 days in order to complete this research. He now, he can now do it in under an hour just by running these prompts. And it's something that you can do without creating a third-party tool. You can just go through and say, look, these are my customers. These are our unique selling points. Can you do some extra research for different internet forums, chat forums, anything you can find out about my customers? And then you can obviously from there layer in your ad copy. Make sure that your ad copy and your landing page is speaking to those problems. Now, as I said, that is something that you could create really, really simple inside of your own Claude account. But we do offer a pre-built out tool inside of Google Ads Mastery. And also inside of Google Ads Mastery, we have just released a new masterclass which really runs through the full process that we do use with Claude to get better results for our Google Ads campaigns. And that is part of Google Ads Mastery. And all that information is in the link in the description below.. And just for watching this video, if you would like to get some extra help with your Google Ads campaigns, just follow in that link in the description below. You can also see where you can get a 20% lifetime discount just by using the code YouTube. And then that brings us to the last area, which I really do think does help. And this is very much specific for agencies or businesses who are running multiple different campaigns or multiple different, uh, multiple different accounts. And what you can do is you can use Claude to do a full analysis of your different campaigns to really pinpoint some different campaigns, where you may need to check your bidding strategies, or where you may need to check things like your ad copies or things like your conversion metrics. And a great way of going about and doing this is using the, the week-by-week segment function inside of Google Ads. And if you're unsure how you do that, when you're in the campaign level, just go up to the segment option, select week-by-week, and then what that allows you to do is you can see your Google Ads data on a weekly basis. And then you can go through and put in your own criteria for what you want Claude to go through and review and check for your business. But the main thing I really wanna stress here is that when you've got a proper optimization process for your Google Ads campaigns, you don't need to worry about these third-party tools. And if you'd like to know more about the right way to optimize your Google Ads campaigns in 2026, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. If you wanna see the step-by-step process for optimizing your search campaigns. Or if you'd like to see the step-by-step process to how to optimize your Performance Max campaigns, go through and watch this video right here. Hey, thanks for joining me. My name is Aaron Young. I'm the founder of Define Digital Academy. And as I said, if you'd like any extra help with your Google Ads campaigns, just follow that link in the description below and you can see all the different options and programs that we offer that help businesses like you who are just starting out in Google Ads. We've also got programs that go all the way up to businesses that are spending well over $100,000 a month. So thanks for joining me. Absolute pleasure. See you in one of these two videos right now. See ya!
