My Expert Tips to Get More Sales with Google Ads

I've been running Google Ads since 2010, and I've run Google Ads campaigns for small businesses who are running on budgets, in some cases less than $500 a day, all the way up to large businesses and brands that are spending well over 6 figures every single month inside of the Google Ads campaigns. So what I want to do in this video is I really wanted to break down my top 4 expert tips, which is really going to allow you to run better Google Ads campaigns and And the best part about it is that these principles are gonna work regardless if you are just starting in Google Ads or whether you are a seasoned expert. And these principles will also apply if you're spending under $1,000 a month or if you're spending over $100,000 a month. And it also doesn't matter what type of business you're in, whether you're in lead gen or e-commerce or a super, super niche business that no one else has ever heard of. These principles will work for you. Now, I do need to stress that as I take you through these 4 principles that we— that I use when I view Google Ads campaigns. I do need to let you know that these are more top-level principles, so I'm not going to be going through any keyword targeting hacks or what settings you should be using inside of your Google Ads accounts. This video is very much about those top-line principles that I use whenever I look to optimize, or whether I look to take on a new business and run their Google Ads accounts. Now, just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm the founder of Define Digital Academy, and Define Digital Academy exists for one purpose, and that is to help you and your business scale and run profitable Google Ads campaigns. Now, if you're already starting to see some success with Google Ads, so, so especially if you're spending over $5,000 a month already in Google Ads, but you are having some issues with getting to those next spend levels and profit levels, I do want to encourage you to find out more about our on-demand program. And the reason for why I highly recommend our on-demand program is that you actually get access to me me and my Google Ads coaches, and it's in a one-on-one setting. So you don't need to worry about group coaching calls or, or group feeds, which those things are excellent. But I do know that sometimes as a business owner, you need to be able to have a trusted expert to be able to really come in and diagnose and give you the exact steps what you need for the next levels of success with your business. And if that's you and you'd like to find out more about our on-demand program, just follow that link in the description below. And so that we can have a further talk and it would be my absolute pleasure to help you and your business scale to the next level. But right now, let's get back into this video where I'm going to be taking you through those 4 top-line principles that I really look at, that I really use for success with Google Ads. And the first one is probably the most important, and this is a principle which I call follow the money. Now I know in many cases some Google Ads coaches and experts and agency owners, they really try to confuse things and make things more complicated than what they actually are. But if you break it down to its simplest, the easiest way to see the highest levels of success with Google Ads is to spend more money where you're getting the best results and to stop spending money where you're wasting money. And that's the same not only for Google Ads, but for any ad platform. Find out what's working, spend more money there. Find out what's not working and stop spending money there. So what you wanna be doing inside of Google Ads is you wanna find those keyword themes or those services or products which are converting spend more money there. Then find out those— and we call them our winning products or services— and then find your loser products or services. And these are the ones where you're not getting the same levels of success. So what I want to take you through now is my 4-quadrant analysis of our spending success in Google Ads. And what we want to find through here is essentially we're trying to find out what are our winning products or winning keywords and what are our loser products or keywords. And what happens from here As you can see down the bottom here, this is where we're spending our money. So our ad spend, and this top one is our conversions. So what I want you to think through here is that there's then 4 different quadrants of products or keywords or search themes. And these ones up here are our winners. And the reason why they're our winners is because we're spending a lot of money, but also getting a lot of conversions. Then from here, we want our— these are our losers. Now our losers are because we're spending a lot of money, but we're not getting any conversions. These ones on here we call our potential. And the reason why they're our potential is because we're getting a lot of conversions. We're just not spending much money there. So we just don't know. And then these ones, which is what we can generally call our zombies, and that is we have no idea. We're not spending any money, but we're also not getting any conversions. Now I want to show you how this works. When I go through and review a Google Ads account, this is what I'm looking at in terms of search themes or keyword themes, products or services. I'm trying to find out What are our winning products or services? Because generally inside a Google Ads account, you will see some level of success. Now, they may not be hitting their full level of profitability, but they generally have some keyword themes or some products or some services which are converting. We call them our winners. And what we wanna do is we just wanna spend more here. So now we can do this simply just by increasing the budget if that campaign is set aside, or we may have to add in some different segmentation to do that. Then what we wanna do from here, we just wanna start spending more money into our winners column. When it comes to our losers, we just want to stop the bleeding and stop the spend. So in some cases, some businesses are happy for just us to turn off that tap because we're wasting money. But for other businesses, this may be a core product which is important to them. So then we go through and do an optimization cycle to see if we can increase that. We will, if we can, lower the spend on that until we work that out, and then we can spend more money there. With these potential ones, what we want to do from here is we want to increase the budget because we want to see which one of these potential keyword themes, products, or services can become winners. Then we can spend more money on them. And the same with the zombies is that we don't know, because we're not spending any money, whether they're losers, whether they're potentials, or whether they are winners. And what we want to do from there is we just want to increase that spend when we find those new winning products or services. So at its core level, that's where I look to see success with Google Ads. Firstly, work out Where are we spending the money inside of Google Ads? What are our winners? Spend more money there. What are our losers? Stop spending money there. What are our potentials? Let's see if we can spend more money there. And where are, where are opportunities, those zombie products or services that we're spending nothing to find out whether they're winners or losers. Now it comes to the second core principle that I look for success with Google Ads, and that is before I even look at the Google Ads account, I want to firstly understand the business. For success with Google Ads, you need to have areas of knowledge. Yes, you do need to know how Google Ads works, but you also need to understand the business. And what I mean by that is that you need to understand how the business makes money. And too often a mistake that I see is that people go to optimize the Google Ads account or structure the Google Ads account first before taking the time to understand the business, what's important to the business, and how the business operates. And let me give you a perfect example of this, is that a number of years ago I was brought in to do a consultation for for an e-commerce brand that was spending well over $100,000 a month. They were spending upwards of $250,000 a month. And after I had spoken with the owner about how their business makes money, I saw the big mistake that their current agency was doing. And what the agency was doing is they were trying to chase a 350% ROAS target. But when I actually spoke to the business owner about how the business operates, I could see that for this business, what was the actual moneymaker for the business it was a 24-month care plan that happened once the person had bought an initial unit. So just by going through that meeting and looking at the Google Ads account, I then asked the business owner, you know, why are we chasing this $350,000 ROAS goal? And it purely just became because that's what the agency and the owner thought that they could achieve. But what I then asked them is, is that what is more profitable to your business? Is it the upfront unit sales or is it the ongoing maintenance plan? And the business owner said, it's the ongoing maintenance plans. So I said, well, why don't we restructure your Google Ads account so that that upfront sale is just breaking even, even if it's making a slight profit? So we dropped that goal that we only wanted to achieve a 200 ROAS inside of their Google Ads account. And what happened from there was the business entered into new levels of profitability because we were focusing on the right thing. Too often when you go through and review your Google Ads account You can just be looking at those arbitrary numbers, or what I call vanity metrics, of really looking at, you know, what is your ROAS, what is your cost per conversion, you know, what is your conversion rate. And all of those metrics are important, but they don't tell the full story. So that's why before you even go through and look at your Google Ads account, you want to take a step back and really go, what does my business need? How does my business make money? And then you can go through and design the right account structure for you. So what you want to be thinking about is what are your most profitable products and services, and how do people get into those products and services? I know for us internally, we've got 3 tiers of membership, but our top tier of membership is not something that we advertise. And the reason for that is because it generally takes people on a journey of being with us for about 12 months before they get into that top tier of membership. So for us, when it comes to advertising campaigns, we're not focusing on that top tier. We're focusing on a lower cost point of our product. Now there's many advantages for that because we know we can, one, get cheaper traffic, two, there's more traffic for it, and three, we have some real clear guidelines on what our cost per conversion needs to be because we've got our long-term data. So this is where you wanna be really taking a big think about things like your average order value, your lifetime value. And that's a big one that I see with a lot of businesses is what you wanna be thinking about with Google Ads is what is the long-term effect of signing up a new client inside of your business? Because in many cases, and this is not the true for everyone, in many cases, especially if you've got a product or service which has a high repeatability, so you know if someone buys your product once, they're gonna be buying it another 3 or 4 times over the next 12 months, all you really need to be doing is for that first-time acquisition, you just need to be breaking even. And what the benefit is, is that many times what you can do is that you can get more sales or more newer customers when you've got a lower ROAS goal or a higher cost per conversion. The other things you need to be thinking about is do you have seasonality factors? And all of these things really come into play as to, you know, how many different types of campaigns you're running, what types of campaigns you're running, and whether you're going to be running seasonal campaigns or always-on campaigns. Now, as I said in this video, I'm not going to be going into all the dynamics of that, but at the end of this video, I will show you where you can watch some more teaching on that. Because let's get to point number 3, and that is that you need to understand that every campaign needs to have a purpose. Unfortunately for many Google Ads campaigns, and this is especially true when you've been running Google Ads for a while, your Google Ads account can become a bit of an overcomplicated mess. And what I mean by that is you start a campaign, you don't get some results, so then you add in another campaign, and then you add in another campaign, and then you add in another campaign, and it just becomes more complicated than what it needs to be. It's really, really common for us to have larger accounts that are spending, you know, in some cases over $200,000 a month, and they're only running 3 campaigns. We've even got other campaigns which are only running one campaign and one ad group. So what I want you to think about, especially in 2026, is that less is more in, in many cases when it comes to Google Ads. Now, I'm not saying that you should only have one campaign. What I'm saying is you— every campaign needs to have a clear reason to exist. And when I'm doing an audit with a Google Ads account with a business owner, that's what I'll do is I'll sit down with them as the first question and go, You've got, say for example, 6 campaigns in your account. Can you tell me what is the purpose of each of these campaigns? And if you can't clearly articulate why you have each of those campaigns, you need to probably relook at your campaign structure and look to consolidate where you can. So number 1, follow the money. Number 2, understand the business and how it makes money before you plan your structure. Number 3, understand that every campaign needs to have a specific purpose. And that brings us to number 4. Which is you need to understand the core principles of scaling. Now, when it comes to increasing your budgets or scaling inside of Google Ads, some people like to make it super, super complicated. But regardless of all the different types of strategies that people can give you about scaling your Google Ads campaigns, you need to realize that there is only two mechanisms that you can use to scale your Google Ads campaign. It's what I call vertical scaling and horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is essentially Finding out what works, what I was telling you before, and spending more money there. Horizontal scaling is starting to reach out to newer networks or new audiences. Now that's it at its core principle, but I did want to finish this video just showing you some real examples there. So let's now jump inside of a Google Ads account so I can explain this part of scaling a little bit further for you. All right, so as I said, when it comes to scaling your Google Ads campaigns, you really need to understand those principles of vertical scaling horizontal scaling. Now with vertical scaling, as I said, the core principle here is you're spending more money where you're getting the best results. But there are some extra, I guess, nuances you need to understand when it comes to vertical scaling, because there will come a time where you just can't continue to throw more money into the same campaign. And that's when you can go through and add in some different segmentation. And the segmentation is, is remember that quadrant graph that I was showing at the start of the video where you're finding out some of those areas where you are, those potential products or services or locations where spending a little bit of money, but you want to force Google to spend some more money there. And what I want to show you in through this example is that with this business, they've got 4 different types of products, really clear specific products, which are these 4 campaigns in through here that is spending the vast majority of their budgets. But what they've got through here as well is they've got these 2 other what we call location-based segments. And what we've got from here is that this campaign and this campaign It's targeting the exact same keywords, same ad copy, same landing page. The only difference is, is that this campaign is targeting 3 states that this top campaign just wasn't spending any money in. So this account is run in the United States, so we've just broken out some different states from there. And that's the same with this one through here. Is it this campaign and this campaign? Same product, same keywords, same landing pages, same ad copies. The only difference is is that this campaign is targeting a collection of about 4 or 5 different states in the Southeast pocket of United States of America. And what this has allowed us to do is it's allowed us to scale this much faster because now we can spread those budgets across 2 different campaigns. And what I love about this type of strategy is what you generally find is that you see very, very quickly the same amount of results. Let's just move this across to the last 30 days, and it's these two campaigns. So what I've just done here is that I've just gone across to the last few days, is that very, very quickly this new campaign is getting great results. It's fitting well underneath where this business needs to be. Conversion metrics, the cost per conversion metrics is under $150. So we've been able to increase the, the spend a lot quicker by breaking it out into some different targeted locations. So that's one way of going through the scaling. The second way of going through the scaling is what we're calling our horizontal scaling, and that's where potentially you'll look to reach out to new types of campaigns. So if you've only been running search campaigns, you may then look to add in a demand gen campaign which is doing remarketing or retargeting on the Display Network, or you may want to add in a demand gen campaign focusing on top-of-funnel YouTube videos or even top-of-funnel Discovery Network. So what you want to be thinking from there is, is that you are then looking to reach out to colder types of audiences or looking to reach out to new networks. So moving away just from the Search Network and moving into Display and YouTube as new mediums of advertising inside of Google Ads. Thank you for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy. Now, two things before we go. One, if you'd like to see some more training here on YouTube about how you can scale your Google Ads campaigns I want you to go through and watch this video right here. And finally, remember, if you are a business owner or you're working in an in-house team and you're getting stuck with your Google Ads and you really want to break through to that next level of spending and profitability, I do highly recommend that you follow that link in the description below and sign up for our on-demand campaign so that we can walk with you one-on-one to see better results with your Google Ads. See you next time.