How to Find Wasted Spend in Google Ads

The absolute easiest and fastest way in order to improve the performance of any Google Ads account is to simply find where you are converting. So what are the highest converting search terms and keyword terms? And spend more money in those areas while at the same time finding any underperforming keywords or search themes and start spending less money there. Essentially what you want to be able to do is find what's working, spend more money, find what's wasting your money, spend less money there. However, especially if you are a larger business and you've got a whole heap of different keyword themes or search themes, or you've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of different products, this can be a little bit confusing in order to really isolate how you can move more money into certain areas and pull back in others. And it's for that exact reason that we created a free tool which you can get access to, which is our Google Ads Keyword and SWOT Analysis Tool. And what this tool was especially designed to do is to do exactly that. Find out what is working in your account, find out what is not working in the account, so that you can then start to look inside of your account and either turn off certain ad groups or redistribute some certain budgets around your different campaigns, or even add in some different campaign segmentations. It's important to note that what I'm about to show you is a diagnostic tool, but it does use your live account data. And the way that we've created it is so that it gives you the information so that you can then go through and really decide for yourself what are the best next step optimizations for your business. And because I want this video to be as practical as possible, let's jump into a screen share. Alright, so the first thing I want to show you is this is an exact account where we ran through the process which I'm about to show you really, really soon. But I just want to show you the benefits and the reasons for it. What I want to show you is that this keyword analysis we ran from the 16th of March, and what was happening with this business, they were just spending their money in the wrong areas. So there was nothing wrong with their conversion funnel, their landing pages were working, their offline sales process was working, but the problem was is they just were not getting enough conversions. So what we did is that we ran this analysis which I'm about to take you through through. And as you can see, in the first week after the changes, they went from 2 conversions to 3 conversions, 4 conversions, and then the last week they saw 7 conversions. So that's over 3 times the amount of conversions. And just so you know, this business needs 25 conversions a month. So within 3 weeks, we've moved them from drastically underperforming to now where they're at the level where they are now getting enough conversions to practically grow their business. And just while we're on the screen, you can also see from here the cost per conversion metrics have also been going down. And the main mover that we we did was that yes, we increased the budget, but that was on this individual campaign because we actually turned off other campaigns. So what I want to show you in through here is yes, we did start to spend a little bit more, but the main part you can see from here is that this conversion metrics have been going up across the whole account. All right, so let's now talk about the process that we used. The process that we used was part of our new Google Ads optimization toolkit, and it does have 5 different elements. So it can go through and review which campaigns are ready to scale. It can also go through and review your ad copy, your landing page, and also Smart Bidding settings. But the one we're focusing on today is actually the free one, which you can get for free, and that is our Keyword and Search Terms Audit tool. And we're going to take you through this. And if you want to get access to this free tool, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. I'm going to be showing you the Claude version, but we've also got a version that you can use in Gemini. And in the link in the description below, you're going to get access to both either the Claude or the Gemini version depending on which one you want to use. All right, so let me now go through and show you how you go through and complete this. You'll go through and click this. You do need to open it up inside of your own Claude account. But what it does do is it copies this prompt straight away, and then we just go through and click go. While that's loading, what's going to happen from here is it is going to come through and ask us some initial questions, and you do also need to give it some data from your account. Remember, it's really, really important that this is just a diagnostic tool. We're not saying that you follow blindly the recommendations, but it is run off your own account data. What we are going to do is you do need to give it some keyword— we do need to give it some keywords or some search terms. The way that you do that is you go into your current Google Ads account that you want to review. Ideally, I like to include a good 60 days. We're going to be adding in through here, we've got about 10 weeks of data. So we're going to go through, click Apply. I also highly recommend from here that you do also add in the conversion segmentation, which you go to Segment, then Conversions, Conversion Actions. And then you want to be going into two different areas. You want to go into your keywords, and you can download those into a CSV file. And what you can also do, if you go up into Insights and Reports You can also add in your search terms and you can download those into a CSV file. Now the example that I am going to show you is running both a Performance Max and a search campaign. So it's important to note that obviously keyword terms will only pick up on the search campaign, but with the search term report, it does give you some analysis across those two campaigns. So we then go back into Claude and I've got my search term and my keyword report. I'm just going to add that straight into Claude and then we just need to write little responses. Sometimes you just go, one, we're doing both. Keywords and search terms audits. In this case, it's not an e-com brand. We did have a video last week which I showed an e-com example. So if you stick around to the end of the video, I'll show you where you can watch this one as well. But obviously for e-com, most brands will also be running some search campaigns. So this is a really relevant video for you as well. When it comes to the n-gram focus, I generally like to add in that I want 2 and 3 words. If you're unsure what the n-gram analysis is, I'm just going to press go on that. I'll explain that while that's loading. The n-gram analysis basically groups together 2 or 3 words that are in the same search term, and it groups that data together. You'll see what I mean when it comes through. But the reason why I like it is it starts to let you know about different themes that users are searching and what your ads are appearing on. While that is running, what I generally go and do is I'll generally go off, make a coffee, make a cup of tea, get a drink, whatever I need to do. It does, especially when you are running it through Claude, if you're using an extended model like we are here, it can take sometimes, depending on the amount of data, 2 to 3 minutes, sometimes even up to 5 minutes to run. One thing I do notice that if If we do run this through on Gemini, it does run a lot faster, but I do find that Claude as a rule right now will give a little bit more of a detailed response. Now also, while this is running, let me just explain once we see the data, some of the different optimization options and actions that you can make. Remember what I said at the top of this video is that when it comes to success with Google Ads, one of the easiest way to improve the performance is to spend more money where you're getting better results and to limit that spend where you're not getting the best results. One thing you do need to keep in mind when it comes to Google Google Ads, your spending is limited or set at the campaign level. One of the most common ways that we can do this is that if we see some keyword themes or some products or some services that are getting a high level of conversions, so above average conversion metrics, but real low spend, you can do two things. One, you can just increase the budget in the current campaign that's performing in. But if you increase the budget and you notice— so let's just say you've got two core products or two core services that when you increase the budget, it just goes to the higher volume service. That's when we do recommend sometimes you may want to add in a segmented or breakout campaign. But just remember when you do that, that when it comes to increasing budgets or decreasing budgets, that you do want to make sure you're not making drastic changes, especially if you've got a high-performing product or service. You want to make sure that if you pull anything out or pull, say for example, an ad group out of that high-performing campaign, you're not increasing that budget or effectively increasing that budget by more than 20%. So just keep in mind those little nuances and really remember that this is just a diagnostic tool that's giving us. But let's dive in and have a look at this report. So firstly, what you can see from here, it's breaking down our 2-word n-gram analysis, and we can see from here all of the different keywords which have 2 words in them, and we are seeing the different clicks, cost, conversions, and CPA. And then we'll— it will start to flag some underperformers. So saying, say for example, our card company is, you know, a $1,700 spend with a really, really low ROAS. Also as well, these ones by credit Sues you, company sues. Once again, slower. Debt lawyer, card lawyers. Now these are the things that you just make a really clear decision on because there's a couple of options here. We could purely just go, if we know they're not our services, we can look to add in some extra negative keywords. Or if that is actually, say for example, a service that we do want to really, really focus on, what we would need to do there is to really look at potentially going through and reworking in our ad copy and also potentially changing our offer or our landing page. Once again, we're getting the same data here. And purely this is breaking it down by cost. This is looking where we're spending the most amount of money and is this giving us the results. So we can see from here, this line here is the one that we probably really need to look at. We can see that it's spending significant amount of money. I mean, nowhere near when we look at it in the total account, it's probably less than 10%, but that probably is a theme that we do need to block out. And I know in this case, the way that we would block that out is by adding in some extra negative keywords because that's actually not a relevant service for this campaign. So remember how I was saying that this is a diagnostic tool? It's not just simply just applying everything that it says. You need to really think about what this account is wanting to achieve, but you can see it's presenting it to you in a really, really easy way so that you can make those decisions in a much faster and more educated fashion. Then it does go through and does some other checks to just make sure that there's no duplicate keywords. When it comes to duplicate keywords, the main thing that I do really, really want to focus on here is that with the duplicate keywords, you just don't want to have the same keywords being targeted across different campaigns. And the reason for that is because, as we saw before, if we see that the one campaign is not performing and we want to turn that off, or we want to add some optimizations, if you've got multiple— got the same keywords being targeted across different campaigns, that's where you can see a problem. Once again, you need to think about the actual setup of this account. If it's across multiple locations, so they're targeting different locations, that's okay. Remembering you need to be thinking about how this works with the current account setup that you have. It does the same thing then because for this example I gave both a search term analysis and a keyword analysis. I won't go through the search term analysis, but it's gone through and done it again for the actual search terms. Because what I want to bring you down is to the SWOT analysis. Now if you're unaware what a SWOT analysis is, it's that well-known marketing term of looking at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Once again, we're not going to just go through and blindly apply all these, but it lets us know what's happening. So we can see here, on a whole, we're getting a good ROAS for the and I do know that this account is performing really, really well. It's pulling out what is working, but let's just go into the weaknesses. So we can see here that there's some things about the card company, debt lawyer, where we've got higher CPAs or lower ROASs. So what we need to look at through there is we need to go, how can we go in and improve that performance? Now, once again, this isn't making the changes for us, but it's highlighting that this is a current area where we need to go through. Now, this account's spending about $30,000 a month. So as you can see, especially when you're getting into a larger account, this report becomes invaluable because it really allows you to see really, really quickly where you can spend some more time. It does also pull out some long-tail potential keywords that we can go for, and then it also does let us know some threats. So you can see here there's some close variant matching pulling in irrelevant search terms, especially things like phone numbers and competitor brands. So as you can see from here is that I do want to make it clear, once it— as I've been saying a couple of times in this video, it's a really good diagnostic tool. The reason why we've created it so it uses your own data so you can then go through and follow our optimization frameworks. Remembering when it comes to Google Ads, it's not about optimizing in your account every day. You want to see the data, make some optimizations, and then wait for that extra data to come through. Remember, as I said, if you want to get access to this Keyword and SWOT Analysis Tool, just follow that link in the description below. And if you want to also see that e-commerce example of how we use this product, go through and watch this video right here. Hey, thank you for joining me. See you next time.