Do NOT Let AI Manage Your Google Ads (Do This Instead)

Do not let Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or any other third-party tool run and optimize your Google Ads campaigns. And yes, that's true even in 2026. And if you only get one take-home message from this video, it's that don't waste your time on this current wave of third-party tools reaching out and saying that they can guarantee better results with Google Ads just by plugging in their tool and automating your optimizations inside of your Google Ads accounts. Now, the reason why I wanted to record this video is it's actually getting a little bit crazy out there. And pretty much on a daily basis, I'm getting offers for me to put my name behind and to become an affiliate for these third-party tools. Now, I'm not even gonna name any of these tools because I just don't wanna give them any type of highlight. Now, I want you to hear me correctly. I'm not saying that you should not be using tools like Claude in order to speed up your optimization processes inside of Google Ads. We are using Claude every single day inside of Define Digital Academy, and it truly has revolutionized how we optimize our Google Ads campaigns. But I do wanna make this clear point of difference very, very clear. We only use Claude as a diagnostic tool. We are not connecting Claude to our Google Ads accounts and getting it to make changes inside of our Google Ads account. So the relationship that we have with Claude and the way that we view Claude about Claude is that it's a diagnostic tool, but we are still the strategist of the Google Ads campaign. Now you could go through and also use Gemini and ChatGPT, but right now we are finding Claude to be the most powerful tool to complete these tasks. But I'm not against you using ChatGPT or using Gemini for this same process, which I'm about to take you through in this video. So, 'cause what we're gonna be talking about in this video is I'm gonna be really taking you through the frameworks that we use for optimizing Google Ads accounts or getting assistance from AI tools like Claude for our Google Ads accounts. And then I'm also going to show you some tools that we have built and how we're building these tools so that you can go through and replicate this in your own business or in your own agency. And this is a framework which we teach inside of Define Digital Academy. And we also did a live day of training when I was over at Google Marketing Live. We— while we're over in America, we did a live day of training where I rolled this out to business owners and also agency owners about how to use Claude the right way. So let's let's firstly go into the framework of how you should be partnering Claude and Google Ads together. All right, so firstly I wanna take you through the 3 foundational rules that we use and which really helps us guide and dictate how we use Claude. The first thing is that do not give Claude control. As I said to you before, we do not use any type of connections which is allowing Claude to go through and actually make live optimizations or changes inside of our account. I'm really, really strong on this. For me, Claude is a diagnostic tool and it is an amazing diagnostic tool. Now there's a couple of reasons for this, but the core reason is, is that for me, you should not be inside of your Google Ads account every single day making live optimizations. Remember what we talk about, which is the Google Ads success loop, where you go through, you review the data, you make optimizations, and then you need to wait. And one of the problems with a lot of these tools which are going through is they're making decisions far too quickly. And there's just not enough data in there. And there's a lot of intricacies that you need to be thinking about with your data, thinking about your acquisition windows, also offline trends, which Claude might not be taking into account. So that's the first thing. Don't give Claude 100% control. It's a diagnostic tool. You are the boss and you are directing Claude, not the other way around. Secondly, don't follow every output. Now, I absolutely love Claude and I think it's an amazing tool, but I don't follow everything that it says. And the reason for that is because there are some levels of nuance that you need to see with the data. Claude is amazing at aggregating that data together so that we can make the best decisions, but it may give you some recommendations which don't line up with your business goals. And even if you've given Claude these guardrails, remember, as powerful as these tools are, they still do hallucinate and they still do— they can still give you some wrong information. And this is the other thing, and what I really want you to get you into is that don't forget your own insight. And this is what we're really wanting to cause here, especially as the business owner, no one knows your business like you do. So we wanna be looking at that offline data and really seeing what is happening in our business. And that's why we wanna use Claude as an advisor, you're still the strategist in charge. Now, there are some things that we do do inside of Claude. And we also look at, we always looking, look at adding in 7 different context inputs for Claude. This is— includes our brand voice, sales call transcripts, optimization recordings, customer reviews, our customer personas, goals and profit margins, and conversion hierarchy. Now that is a lot of information there, but you may not want to add in all of this. But what we're really saying in through here is you need to make sure that when it comes to Claude, you want to really make sure that you're giving it the full business context that you've got for your Google Ads campaigns. And that's because we talk about the overlay analysis. So what I mean by this is you want 3 different levels of information coming together. Your Google Ads data tells you what is happening inside of the Google Ads platform. The real business data tells you what's happening inside of the business. And that's where Claude is amazing at really overlaying Google Ads data and your real business data to give you the overlap. And that's where the best strategy lives. Now, Previously, before, there was just so much information that you could really only see the Google Ads data. Whereas what Claude is allowing you to do, it's allowing you to put that data together with real business data so that you can see everything that you need to see in order to be able to make the best decisions for your business. Now what we've done inside of Define Digital Academy, we've actually taken all this process and built out 5 optimization tools that we use for every single account. That we go through with Google Ads. And you can actually access this one for free, which is our keyword and search term audit. And if you'd like to get access to that free keyword and search terms audit, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. And then we will also give you access to a masterclass, which I'll take you through the full framework of how we're using Claude properly, the right way, and seeing amazing results in 2026. But I want to spend the rest of this video really taking you through to give you some ideas of how we are building tools inside of Claude so that we can see the best results for our, for our business and also our members' business and our clients' businesses. And, and what I really want to highlight in here is with our keyword and search term audit. Now, I won't spend too much time on this one because I've released another video which really takes you through how we use this, and at the end of this video I'm going to show you where you can watch that video. I really want to focus on that ad copywriter and landing page expert, and these are the ones which I believe as business owners and also as agencies or freelancers watching this video, this is the power of Claude. So especially for our landing page expert, it's actually going out and doing some research for Reddit forums. If it's in the tourism space, TripAdvisor, for anything in tourism, it also will go through Google reviews and Yelp reviews, all of this information. And then it brings back data which really matches headlines with customer pain points. Now I wanna give you an example, and this is, this is an ad copy landing page writer that we used. And this was in a really highly, highly regulated niche. It was in a lawyer-based niche inside the US market. And what we did is that we added all of our ad report. We also added in all of our actual sales calls. And then we also added in some extra notes that we verbally spoke into what we wanted what we wanted Claude to go off and do. And the big problem we were trying to solve here is that we're trying to match their ad copy and their landing page to the most common pain points that people were feeling inside of their service-based niche. Now, in this one, we've had to go through and actually blur out these core actual headlines just for customer privacy. But as you can see from here, even inside of the legal niche, we had only 2 different headlines disapproved. So it's really, really powerful in going off and doing that research. Now, for— and what this has given us is this has given us 25 different headlines that we can start split testing over the next 3 to 4 months. And what I really love about this is that it also adds in, as I said, it really went in and matched the customer's pain points or their customer avatar's pain points with things like the fear and dread of collector calls, Also shame and isolation relief. Also about hope, actually giving them a way out of the, you know, that this business actually provides for them. And that's for me is the real power of Claude is because in order for many small businesses or even small agencies, they just wouldn't have the manpower to go off and do this type of research. One of my friends in the industry who we've had on this channel before, who specializes in ad copy and creating offers for businesses, he said that this type of research that they would do would take 2 days for them to complete. Now, because that was their specialty, they had the, you know, the investment and the team to complete that. But for many small businesses, they just don't have the time to be diving through Reddit forums and Facebook groups in order to find this information. But that's why we've created this prompt, or these 2 prompts, which is the Ad Copywriter and Landing Page Expert, because it allows you to really harness the power of Claude to go off and get that information. And as I said, we've been using this in larger clients. It definitely works for smaller clients, but this client is scaling up to $200,000 a month and they're heavily, heavily regulated. And as I said, from the 25 different headlines that we provided them, only 2 were rejected by their actual legal team. So it is highly, highly pow— is highly, highly powerful. And that's what I love about Claude. But as I said at the top of this video, we are not using Claude to go through and make these optimizations. Mm-hmm. We are then manually going through and doing the research. Now I want to show you one of the other great opportunities that we're really seeing with Claude is it's able to go through and analyze a whole heap of search term and keyword data, especially in larger accounts, really, really quickly. And that is this free tool, which is the Keyword and Search Term Audits tool. And what this is built off of is this is built off a SWOT analysis. Now many of you would know what I'm talking about with the SWOT analysis, but this is looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And purely what we're doing here is we're trying to find out where is Google spending the money and where can we get better results. And you can see from here is that what we do from there is that we go through and we upload search term keyword reports, search term reports. We've even gone through and done this for, you know, periods of 12 months. So especially if we're auditing an account, this becomes really, really powerful. And what it does from there is it then goes through and gives you all this data analysis. Once again, I do need to go through this quickly for privacy. Yeah. But it then breaks it down into these core areas: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, so that you can go through and make the correct decisions for your business. And this is the whole purpose of this video, is I absolutely love Claude, and I absolutely love the opportunities that it's providing us. But please just don't go through and take the easy route out. As I said, Claude and these other AI tools are an amazing opportunity for you, the business owner, or you, the freelancer or an agency, to really go and do things that you able to do previously, especially around going through and trying to find customers' pain points, matching your headlines to those pain points, and really doing large analysis on your account in a mere matter of minutes. But please don't just then go through and blindly follow all of these recommendations, because for success with Google Ads is you do truly need to understand the core foundations of not only how Google Ads works, but how you build successful campaign structures inside of Google Ads. And that's something that right now, and I don't know if it will be able to do in the future, Claude and these other tools simply can't do. So my main message is please embrace these tools like Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini, but don't go through— but, but don't buy into these third-party tools which are promising amazing results with Google Ads because ultimately you don't need them. Use Claude as your research analysis or your account analysis assistant don't use it as the top line strategy. You are the person who's still creating the winning strategies for your business and your clients' businesses. Hey, thanks so much for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy. And remember, if you want to get access to the tools that we've built and we're using inside of Claude, especially that free one, which is that SWOT analysis and search the keyword tool finder, go through and follow that link in the description below, because you're also going to get access to that masterclass that we've released about Claude and how we're using it inside of our businesses. right now. Thanks for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. And if you do wanna stay on YouTube and watch some extra training about how we're using Claude and Google Ads, go through and watch this video right here. See ya. See ya.