How to Scale Google Ads .... (profitably)

In this video, I'm gonna pull back the curtain on how we are profitably and efficiently scaling two real-life Google Ads campaigns. And for the first of these businesses, when they came to us, they were only spending $400 a month. We've already got them up to $4,000 a month, and they are on their pathway to be hitting $10,000 a month in ad spend. And the other, we've already scaled from $20,000 a month up to $33,000 a month, and they are on a fast-track path to be spending well over $200,000 a month while still keeping profitable. So that by the end of this video, you can see the exact strategies and processes we use inside of Define Digital Academy to not only scale Google Ads campaigns, but do it in a way that is hugely profitable for businesses. Now let's start with the core principles of scaling Google Ads in 2026. And the first strong point that I really, really want to focus on, because this one may have changed, is that you need to start with a smaller, more condensed account structure. Now, especially in 2026, as Google has been changing its keyword match types and the way that their match types operate, we're finding much more success by having a more streamlined or smaller account structure. And this is the big point you really, really need to understand, because Google is going to be moving more and more down this path where they are moving away from keyword targeting and moving towards keyword signals. And we're even seeing more and more updates even with exact match keywords where they're picking up more and more close variants and targeting users' search terms that don't have any of the exact keywords that you're targeting in the user search. So you need to stop thinking that by adding in your keyword targeting, even exact match keywords, is going to be targeting those actual keywords. And the real thing I want you to think about as we move more and more down into user search behavior changing is that as more and more users move across to conversational-based searches, it's going to be harder and harder to really, really focus or keyword snipe certain keyword terms. Now, yes, you can do it, and in some niches it still is very, very effective, but you just need to be aware of the changing nature of what's happening inside of Google Ads right now. And we went through this exact scenario with a larger enterprise client that came inside one of our Google Ads coaching programs just in the last week, where the first major action that we took was to consolidate different keyword themes that they'd set around sale, buy, and available. Now, historically, it would make a lot of sense for those to be in different ag groups. But in the current format of Google Ads, you're going to find you're going to get much better results in grouping those intent themes together. The main thing I want you to remember is that Google no longer targets the keywords that you're actually targeting. So it's not targeting that syntax, it's actually targeting the intent or the meaning. So you may ask, well, yes, we know about keyword targeting, but what does that have to do with a more streamlined account structure? Now I want you to hear me very carefully on this. I am not saying that keyword targeting is not important, but what we are finding more and more is that your conversion data is becoming far more important than any individual keyword targeting. So it's very much a partnership between not only your keyword targeting, but also your conversion data. Previously, a high-functioning Google Ads account would be focused around the guardrails that you put up by your keyword match types and your negative keywords. Whereas in the current environment, we're seeing much better results by using the conversion data. So high-quality conversion data as the guardrails for those campaigns. And that's where a lighter, more streamlined account structure comes into play. It allows you to build up higher volumes of conversion data much faster so that you can then also use those levers like target ROAS and target CPA to also act as guardrails to make sure that you're not wasting spend inside of your Google Ads campaigns. Now, as I said, we're going to be showing you some real-life examples of the account structures we are using. And I'm definitely not saying that you can't have multiple campaigns. It's just very much running through the philosophy that in 2026, Less is more. So first one, make sure you have a more streamlined account structure. Number two, you want to focus on scaling vertically first. And scaling vertically is essentially where you're finding campaigns where you are happy with the conversion metrics and you see you've got a lower search impression score, and it's purely about just spending more money where you're getting the better results. And what we generally look for here is when we're looking at the core criteria, because it's not just a matter of just throwing money when you get some positive results. You want to make sure that you are looking at data trends. Ideally, we like to look at at least 4 to 6 weeks of data trends. And if you're seeing that weekly average hold for a period of 4 to 6 weeks with a low search impression share, we then say, hey, start increasing the budget, because ultimately what you're going to be seeing there is increased spend is going to result in more conversions at the same conversion metrics. And so that can really solidify these first two points. Let's jump into a screen share so I can walk you through some real-life accounts. Now, as I said, we're gonna jump in and show you some real-life accounts so I can show you some real examples of that cadence structure that we're, that we're using. But I did also want to point out that what we've actually created inside of Define Digital Academy is that we've actually created a tool where it lets us know exactly which campaigns are ready to scale. This tool uses real-life data from your account, and then it runs through the framework that we were talking about where we give it 6 weeks of campaign data. It then goes through and It lets you know exactly which campaigns are ready for a budget increase. Now, that's one of the 5 tools that we've created inside of Define Digital Academy. It's all powered by Claude. And if you go to the link in the description below, you can actually get free access to one of those tools, which is our keyword and search term audit tool. And that runs a full SWOT analysis and also n-gram analysis and really highlights where you're wasting spend and where you could see some extra results inside of your account. And we've also got some for writing your ads, landing page expert, and also smart bidding. And those ones are available exclusively inside of Define Digital Academy, especially our Google Ads Mastery program. Follow the link in the description and you can get— and you can find out where you can get access to that free tool today and where you can also access the other tools if you wanted to. All right, so let's now jump into examples of those two points. I'm going to firstly show you the consolidated structure, and then I'm going to show you that first step of vertical scaling where you just add more budget to your current high-performing campaigns. All right, so this is the first business. They started with us spending underneath $400 a month. That was in August. We've already got them to just last month where they were spending just under $4,000. And while this has occurred, we've also made sure that not only are we scaling, but they are highly profitable for their structure. But what I want to show you in through here is that they've got a branded campaign, which we've only just started. But apart from that, their other campaign is purely one campaign with one ad group. Now originally they did have 3 ad groups, but this is what we're talking about. We merged it into one ad group, and that was purely because it was all going to the same landing page. And with the use of dynamic keyword insertion, we would have been able to make sure that everything was relevant, and it was a, it was a faster way for us to be able to scale this campaign or this account. For the second example, they started at $20,000 back in October when they started with us and now we're already up to $33,000. But I want to show you, even at spending $33,000, we're only running 3 different campaigns. And one of those campaigns is a remarketing campaign, which we're running inside of Demand Gen. So in terms of actual outreach, mainly it's coming through a search campaign and then a Performance Max campaign. Now I'm going to highlight this campaign in through here because this is a campaign that we've actually gone through and started to scale. Now I'm just going to bring this out to the last 4 weeks. And what I want to show you in through here is that essentially, especially in this part, we've started to increase the spend. So they're spending $5,000 that week, they went up to $7,000, and they saw the same, saw the same increase in uptick in conversions. What I want to show you in through here is the core data metric that you really want to look at is as long as you're happy with the conversion metrics. So that's going to be different for all different types of businesses. For this one, because they are in quite a specialized niche, we know that this number in here, the conversion value cost, needs to be between $20 to $30 to be profitable for this business now. And because we're running between that mark, that's when we start to increase the cost. The big metric I want you to go through and have a look at here is if you go to Modify Columns, we like to look at the search impression share. I'll generally add in the search top impression share as well. And the reason for why we know that we're really, really confident that we've got a lot more vertical scaling with this campaign is because even though we're spending quite a lot already, where search impression share is under 10%, So we've got— no, we've got a long— we know we've got a long headway before we start to hit that CPC resistance. Now, this changes for every niche, but if you're not familiar of what search impression share is, effectively that means that at the moment we're appearing on less than 10 out of every 100 searches. Generally we find, once again, it depends on the niche, depends on your keyword match types that you're using. If you're using exact match, the number can be higher. We're using some broad match in here, so we generally find once that hits at about 50 to 60%, that's when we need to start to look at some other strategies for scaling. But so far, what I want you to see from the first 2 points is, one, you don't need a complicated structure. Even at spending at $30,000 a month in spend, we've only got one search, one Performance Max, and we've also got some remarketing in play. And for that other campaign, which is more of a local service business campaign, we've been able to scale from $400 a month up to $4,000 a month Once again, taking away that $20 a day branded campaign, it's all been off the back of a one search campaign with one ad group. And this is the main lever we're looking at. Obviously, we're going through doing ad copy tests, making sure we've got correct keyword targeting, but purely we're just looking at the stat. Is this campaign profitable and do we have more room to grow vertically? So let's just add more budget into those campaigns. Now, that first stage of vertical scaling is the easiest, where essentially you're looking at what campaigns are performing profitably, let's just add some more budget there. You do want to make sure that you do follow some criteria. We don't like to add in any budget increases above 20% every 5 to 7 days, and generally we find that we can get away with 2 to 3 really quick budget increases, and then we might need to wait 1 or 2 weeks until we go through and add in another budget increase. So you do want to make sure that you're always looking at those conversion metrics, and if the results are starting to slip a little bit, you can just give it another week or two and it generally picks back up to where you were previously. Now, at some point you will not be able to just add more budget to your current existing campaigns. You will have to go to the next. And the reason for that is because you hit what I call CPC resistance. And that is essentially when you go to add in a budget increase. So let's just say, for example, you increase your budget by 10% and if you see your CPCs increase by 30% or you start to see your conversion metrics just blow out to become non-profitable anymore and it doesn't recover after a couple of weeks. If that's the case, you need to go down one of these two extra strategies. And the first step is what we call segmentation. And this is essentially where you're creating breakout campaigns either around the locations that you're targeting or by your products or your services. And the mechanics of how this works is you need to remember with that, with Google Ads, your budgets are set at the campaign level. So if you're inside a Google Ads campaign and you notice that you can't add any more money into certain campaigns, or you might have three different products or you might have 4 different product categories in one campaign, and you notice that only 2 of those product categories are getting any spend. And when you increase the budget, there's just no more spend going to those other services or product categories. You could break out those categories that have, that have low spend but high conversion metrics. And you can also do it by location. This is especially important if you're only dealing with one core product or one core service. If you're targeting a larger population base, say for example the whole of the United States, you could go down and build out state-based campaigns so that you can force Google to spend money where you're getting good results but not as much spend. Now, I will show you this inside of the Google Ads dashboard, but before we get there, what I do want to break out is I just want to give you sort of a map of what we're trying to do here. So if you can imagine with your account, you've got this as your— you've got this as your spend and you've got this as your conversions. So what I want you to think through here is in this quadrant up here, we've got high spend and good conversions. So these are our winner products or winner keyword themes. These ones from here are our losers. And the reason for that is that we have a high spend but low conversions. These ones are what we could call our zombies. And essentially that's where you're getting— you just don't have any spend and also no conversion. So it's kind of that unknown. But these ones are— some people call them our sidekicks, or we could call them our potentials. And what we're doing here with these potentials is that we're seeing that they've got good conversion metrics. So in that example we gave before where we needed that conversion value cost to be between $20 or $30, these ones could be— these ones would be any, any— in this example would be any states. It could also be products or services that are sitting between that $20 or $30, but they've got a low spend. So what we want to do here is we want to break these ones out and into a new campaign because we're forcing Google to actually start to spend more money. And then what we know from there is as long as those metrics hold, we're then building new winners into this winners column. What we can also do at the same time is if we wanted to, we could actually stop spending on the losers, and we could also add some more budget into these zombie products or the unknown keyword themes to find out which ones are losers, which ones are winners, and which ones are potential. So what we're doing with this structure is we're just looking to find out where are some areas where we're wasting money, stop spending money there. Where are some areas where we could spend some extra money to force Google to spend on those potential winners? And then when you've exhausted all those avenues, you can then move out to colder traffic. And this is what we call scaling horizontally. And that's generally when you're looking at reaching out on new audiences. You could do that through a Performance Max campaign, reaching out new top-of-funnel keyword themes. So rather than actually targeting what people want for your product, it could be benefit-driven keywords. And then of course you could reach out to completely different placements, starting on YouTube into Display Network or even into Gmail. And so that can be really, really clear, let's jump back into that screen share so I can show you how that works. All right, so let me firstly take you through the example of using segmentation to increase the performance of your account. Remembering what we're doing here is we're finding— and you can either do it by products or keyword themes. In this example, we're going to do it by locations, and we're simply going to break out campaigns in and target those areas so that we're forcing Google to spend more money in those areas. So I'm going to show it on locations, but the principle is still the same. The way that we would do this is we've gone into the locations Settings. What I generally do from here is I look at our cost per conversion. So we look at our conversion value cost metric. You could also do it by cost per conversion. And what we're doing from here is I'm going through and finding what are some locations which have an above average or above the account average conversion metrics. So we can see from here, I'm just going to pick the top 10. Now inside of Define Digital Academy with that scaling tool, you can also use it for locations. It is set to do via campaign spending, but we've also successfully run it around exporting this list of locations. But I'm just going to show you a real harsh version of the way that we can do it as well if you don't have access to that, that Claude tool that we've got. Is I've selected the top 10, and if we were just to bring it down by— and then we will rank it down by cost. So we first looked at what is the most profitable. Now we're looking at where are we spending the most money. And you can see from here, so let's look at some of these smaller states. So we can see from here that, you know, we've got a state like Georgia, also Illinois, where we're getting a whole heap of conversions, but we're only— we're not spending that much money. Even if you go down to somewhere like Washington, we spent $1,000 for 24 conversions. So what we would do from there is that you break and only have it to target Washington, pause it from this main campaign, and and then we're forcing Google to spend more money in that area. Now, the thing that I love doing it around, uh, locations is that you've already got a proven framework for keywords, a proven framework for your ad copy, and a proven framework for your landing page. It's just as simple as essentially pulling them out and creating new campaigns around those locations. So that's the way that you increase the scalability of an account by segmentation. The second option that you had, which was the fourth step to scaling profitably in Google Ads in 2026, is to really start reaching out to either new placements, especially through a Demand Gen campaign where you can reach out to the YouTube platform or you can reach out to the Display Network and also Gmail, or you could also reach out to some new keyword themes. And the way that you could do that is that if you're not currently using broad match keywords, you're only on exact, you could start to introduce broad max, you could start to introduce Performance Max, or you could even start to— or you could even start to leverage out historically would be Dynamic Search Ads. But obviously that is going to be out into AI Max. Now, all of those situations, I like to have them in separate campaigns so that you're not ruining the underlying performance of your current campaigns. But obviously, a first step in that is that you need to be able to find wasted spend in your account. So if you want to know the way that we find wasted spend and the best opportunities inside of our Google Ads accounts right now, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Thank you for joining me, and remember, if you want access to that keyword tool, if you want to also have a look at all the Google Ads optimization tools that are running inside of the The Fine Digital Academy, just follow that link in the description below. See you later.