How to Optimise Google Ads Search Campaigns [Updated for 2026]

If you need better results with your Google Ads search campaigns, in this video I'm going to walk you through the exact optimization process that we use to drastically increase the performance of Google search campaigns for our community members and also for our clients and businesses like yours. Now, when it comes to optimizing your Google search campaigns, it's important to note that there's 4 key levers that you can do, or 4 key focus areas that you can use in order to increase the performance of your Google Ads search campaigns. And I call this my STAB framework for optimizing Google Ads. And what the STAB framework is, is if you take all of the hundreds of different optimization actions that you can complete inside of a Google Ads search campaign, it's important to note that they are all broken down into 4 core categories. And let me grab my iPad so I can show you what these are. So when we look at it here, as I said, we call this our STAB method for optimizing. And the first thing is our spending and segmentation. And what you're looking at doing here is— people like to overcomplicate Google Ads, but let's be honest, the easiest way to see success with Google Ads is find what's working and then spend more money in those areas. Find where you're wasting money and stop spending money in those areas. Now, the way that you could do that is if you find a winning campaign, purely just increase the budget. But then if you find inside that campaign you've got 3 or 4 ad groups and one of those ad groups is just not are working, you know, spending a lot of money with no conversions, you can just turn off that spending. And that's what we call in our spending and segmentation. And that's where we're really looking to find the winners and find the losers. Spend more money on the winners and then also stop spending money on the losers. Sometimes when we get more advanced, we may want to break out new campaigns, but that's purely what we're doing with the spending and segmentation. The next part is our targeting, and that's red on red, so I know that's a little bit hard to see, but you can see the red section there. And this is all about things like what keywords or what user search terms are triggering our ads. Also as well, remember, it's not just about the keywords. You can also adjust the targeting by your different locations, also by your different audiences, and also by your different devices. Now it is important to note that especially with targeting, when you do move into the world of smart bidding— so if you're using Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value— they will override some of these settings, not the keyword targeting, but especially any existing bid adjustments you had. So it's just important to note that yes, while you can go through in the early days and add in different bid adjustments, that when you move over to smart bidding, smart bidding is going to take over any of those bid adjustments you had. So that's why the main movement we're going to be focusing on is your keyword targeting. Then the next part is your ads and landing pages. And what you really want to be looking at in through here is with your ads, we're going to be focusing on your click-through ratio how many times people see an ad versus how many times they click on it. But with your landing pages and with Google Ads success in general, remember, it's not just about them clicking on your ad. That for success with Google Ads, they also need to be moving over to a high-converting landing page. So if you are not seeing results with Google Ads, don't just blame Google. Remember, it could be your landing page. And then finally is your smart bidding, which are those bidding strategies that you can use inside of your Google Ads campaign. So in this video, I'm gonna take you through these 4 areas. Now, now what you're seeing here is my optimization checklist. And that checklist has actually been downloaded well over 120,000 times by different businesses and a lot of agencies who are using that as a guideway for how they can optimize their Google Ads campaigns. And it's completely free. And if you would like access to that checklist, just follow that link in the description below. Also, we'll add as well, when you're in the description, you will also see a form where you can get extra help from Define Digital Academy. And just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm the founder of Define Digital Academy. And we started for one reason, which was to help business owners like you and brand owners like you get better results with their Google Ads campaigns. And regardless of whether you're just starting or whether you're spending well over $100,000 a month inside of Google Ads, we've got different options and programs that can help you and your in-house teams to see better results with Google Ads. And if that's you, just fill out that How Can We Help You form, and one of my team members will be in contact with you as soon as possible. All right, so with all of that said, now let's jump into a screen share because I do want to make this super, super practical, and I'm going to show you how we walk through that STAB framework: spending and segmentation, targeting, ads and landing pages, and also bidding, so you can get better results with your Google Ads campaigns. Let's go. All righty, so we are now inside of a Google search campaign, and let's start with that first option, which was the S, so the spending and segmentation. Let me firstly focus on spending, and what you can see from here, this is the easiest way to optimize a Google Ads campaign I'll see better results. And simply, when you've got a campaign that's working, just increase the budget. And you can see from here with this individual search campaign, we've been able to increase their spend from $300 a month all the way up to where they're sitting at $4,000 or $4,500. And you can see the conversions have gone at the same pace. Now, obviously there were other optimizations that we completed, which we're going to go through now, but that's just a pure example of the, you know, sometimes we want to overcomplicate it. If you're happy with the results that you're getting, just increase that budget. Now, there are some important guidelines. When it comes to increasing your budget inside of Google Ads, you do want to follow what I call the 20% rule, and that is where you increase your budget by an increment of 20% every 5 to 7 days. So if, for example, on $100, increase to $120, wait 5 to 7 days, increase it again by another 20%. The only thing I would add is if you're coming off a really, really low base, so like $5 or $10, I'm happy for you to go up in increments of $5 or $10, even if it's over that 20% rule. But one other thing you do want to look at, and this is what I call the— you just want to review the search impression share. Now what your search impression share metric is, is your search impression share is, it's a score out of 100 and it's given a percentage format. And if you see a search impression share of, say for example here, 37%, that means that out of every 100 searches, your ads are currently appearing on 37 of them. But what I want to show you in through here is you can see with this business, as we started increasing their budget, it was quite easy because they had a very low search impression share. But as you can start to see that as we started to increase that search impression share, the CPC started to increase. And really, once it started getting above that 45-50%, it really started skyrocketing. So there is a limit to how much you can increase your, your budgets. Generally, if your search impression share is under 40%, you can increase your budget by 20%, and you're gonna see pretty much the same conversion metrics, which is what you saw in this period through here. So when it comes to that next part where you just can't simply increase your budget, you can do the second part of that S or the, the STAB method, which is adding in some segmentation. Now what you're doing with segmentation is you're essentially breaking out a new campaign. And the reason why you're doing this is you need to remember inside of Google Ads, your budgets are set at the campaign level. So, and there's two core ways that you could do this. One, you can break it out by different product categories, or you can break it out by location. So let me show you both examples. Is it, this is an e-commerce brand and they've got 4 core product categories. So what we've done through here is we did 2 things. One, this is one product category, and we've broken out a secondary campaign which is targeting 5 particular states in the, in the US. And what that's allowed us to do is, as you can see from here, it's allowed us to continue increasing this spend while also maintaining their conversions. But what they've also done from here as well is that we also broke out 3 other campaigns, which are these ones in here. And what they are, they are for different product categories. So the way that you're thinking about it there is that you can have different campaigns for different product categories. A perfect example would be is let's just say you've got one search campaign that has 4 different product categories, and you see that within that, and they're all based by different ad groups, and you can see that of those 4 ad groups, 2 of them, they're getting some conversions, but Google isn't spending much money there. Is what you can do is that's when you then break out that segmentation campaign. And what that allows you to do is force Google to spend money where you know it's converting, just Google isn't spending there. And that's another way that you can increase the performance of your Google Ads campaign. So that's the S. The next way to optimize your Google Ads search campaigns is by targeting. Now, as I said, you can go through and also do this by locations and bid adjustments and audiences. But because now for success with Google Ads, you're very much leaning into smart bidding strategies, and smart bidding strategies will override a lot of those bid adjustments. So what you really want to be looking at is by cleaning up the search terms which your keywords are triggering for. And the way that you do that is if you go into one of your individual campaigns, go into Insights and Reports, and then go into your search terms. I generally like to do this once every 7 days. Now, if you've got a new campaign, you may want to do this twice a week, but the reason for— I don't want to do it every single day is because what you can do is that you can also use what we call the change history. So if you go too far with these optimizations, what you can do is you can pull up the change history and— sorry, because we've got the last 30 days, we're not seeing it there. But what you can actually do is you can start to see what is happening in there. And if you need to undo any of these changes, you can go through and undo them. So what we generally do, get the last 7 days. Now I've had to pause a lot of these just for privacy concerns, but what you're essentially doing is you're getting the search terms And what you want to do is you want to add any as negative keywords which are irrelevant. Now I'm going to do this with an individual ad group. I do like to do it at the ad group level. And what you really want to be looking at is you want to be looking at— so let's just say, for example, this is a keyword that we want to add as a negative keyword. We would select it and then add it as a negative keyword. So that's the easiest way of going about it and going through and defining your negative keywords. You can also add that at the campaign level, or if you wanted to, you can also add that as a negative keyword list. The benefit of a negative keyword list is that you can just continue to grow that list, and then if you break out another campaign— so let's just say, for example, you want to use that location segmentation— you can just assign that list to multiple different campaigns. So that's the best way of going through and doing your, doing your targeting. Now, that optimization checklist which I showed you before, which is this one over here, it does have a lot of different other things that you can do. Which has got everything in there for you here, especially if you go into the search campaign. Now let me take you through the big one, which is your ads. Now when it comes to your landing pages as well, it's important to remember that what's happening outside of Google Ads is just as important as what's happening inside of Google Ads with your landing page. Now, if you are, if you do have a Google Ads campaign which is not converting, I am going to show you another video that you can go through and watch at the end of this video because that goes more into how to review your, your landing pages. But what you want to be doing with your ads is that you want to be going through and running proper split testing. So what you can see from here, this is in one ad group, and what we do, as you can see, we've got just over the last couple of months we've been going through and we've paused this ad. Now the reason why we pause this ad is if you look at the core metrics, especially the cost per conversion, these other two ads had a cost per conversion of $50, this one was $47, this one is $200. The— and also as well, you can see the click-through ratio was a little bit lower. Now, when it comes to testing your ads, the framework that we use is that we like to have 2 ads running in an ad group at the same time. And the core difference is, is that you only want one difference between these 2 ads. So let me just go through to the last 30 days. Now, the reason for why we don't test more than 3 ads— so we've only got 2 ads running at the same time— is that we've found that if you're inside of a search campaign, as soon as you start running 3 or 4 ads, Google very much just puts the spending to the top 2 ads. So that's why we run 2 at a time. But you do need to make sure that with this testing is that you've only got one core difference. And the reason for that is because, especially the way that Google Ads is structured now with 15 different headlines and 4 different descriptions, you really want to do some hard tests so you know what's happening. The way that we frame this is that we would generally start with these ads, and you can see from here These ads are actually exactly the same. The only difference is, is that one of these ads has a keyword, uh, one of these ads has one of the headlines pinned into position 1. So that's generally what we go through is we'll start by pinning one of the headlines, seeing if we're getting a better result, and then we can start going through and pinning call to actions in position 2 to see what's again what gets the best result. Most important thing is, is that you're only testing one thing at a time. Otherwise, you don't know what the driver is. The other thing that I would add in there as well is that people— I want to know, you know, how much data do you want to be getting before you make that change? You can see here we've got a current test running. As a general rule, the test needs to run for at least 4 weeks, but in most cases we're finding it needs to run for about 8 to 10 weeks. And you— we would like to see at least 1,000 impressions on an ad before we make the decision. And with the two metrics we're really looking at is our click-through ratio and our conversion metrics. So ultimately, for me, inside of a business, if I was to pick a winner now, um, even though this ad has a lower click-through ratio— remembering we're not in the business of getting clicks, we're in the business of getting conversions— and you can see this ad is already performing to be the better ad because it's got a conversion rate which is 5% higher, and that cost per conversion metric is at $34. Let's just go to the last 7 days to see if Google has started prioritizing that one. Now Google is still prioritizing this, uh, winning ad. Once again, it's slipping around here. Let's go 14 days. Yeah, so this ad is still the winning ad, um, as I said, just be— just based on the pure conversion rates. But if we start to find that Google is showing another ad even though for us this one's getting better conversions or better conversion metrics, we will just do a hard test and just pause that ad so that we can then run with this other ad., in there. So it is important to note that you do, uh, really use your own business sense in it, remembering conversions is the name of the game, and that's the core driving factor that we look at. Um, people do ask what are some general metrics that you should be looking at for search campaigns in 2026. You want to have a click-through ratio above sort of 6%, and you want to have a conversion rate of at least 5%. Now, we've been working with this business for well over 12 months now, so that's why we've been really being able to drive up these numbers to a click-through ratio above 14% and a conversion rate of above 10%. But as you can see from here, this one just didn't work. It was a really, really low conversion rate. So that's why it's important to make sure you're continuing with your testing. So that's how you go through your ad copy split testing. And now let's focus on the last thing, which is your bidding. So this is a big topic, and I'm gonna actually also include a video where you can actually see this, see some extra teaching about bidding. But what I do want to let you know is that I just want to show you how bidding can affect, can campaign. You can see from here we made two core changes. In October last year, we went from maximize clicks to maximize conversions, and then in February this year, we added in a target CPA. Now what I'm going to show you in through here is how that actually affected the campaign or affected the account. So remember, in October last year is when we added in the, the cost— we added in, went from maximize clicks to maximize conversions. And what I really want you to show through here is that it does actually affect your CPC. So you can see from here, our CPC went up from $3 up to $4.80. So it was a big jump. But let's look at the cost per conversion, because once again— but you can see once we added in that Maximize Conversions in October, this cost per conversion really started to drive down. So one thing I do really want to stress here is that when you do move over to a Maximize Conversion bidding strategy, it is going to increase your CPC. But CPC is not the name of the game anymore. It's those cost per conversions. That you're really looking at focusing on. And then in February is when we added in that target CPA. But what I really want you to focus on is remember our target CPA was set at $75, is that that's what the account was telling us it was performing at. So some businesses get— some business owners get stuck in that they want to set a target CPA too early. But as you can see from here is that we were able to drive down that target CPA. Uh, let me just bring it down to a weekly basis. Through here because remembering we didn't introduce that target CPA until mid-February. So as you can see, we're able to bring it down and then we introduced it because we were seeing some, uh, really, really stable results in through here. All right, thank you so much for joining me. I know there's a lot there to cover, so there's some extra teaching you can get right now. If you want to learn more about Google Ads smart bidding strategies, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Or if you want to learn more about our ad copy process and how we do proper ad copy split tests, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Hey, thank you so much for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy. And remember, if you want to get access to our Google Ads optimization checklist or any of our Claude AI-generated optimization tools, or drop us a form and let us know how we can help you further with your business in 2026 with Google Ads, just follow that link in the description below. Thanks for joining me. See you next time.