Using AI for Google Ads Optimisations [Beginners Guide]

2026 is the year that the AI revolution has well and truly taken over Google Ads, and it feels like everyone is talking about Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT.

And while I'm very pro businesses and agencies and freelancers using tools like Claude, I do have some very strong frameworks and guidelines that I believe should be used for managing your Google Ads accounts. So that's why in this video, I wanted to bring on Daniel, who's one of our Defined Digital Academy coaches, so we can have a real discussion about about how you can start using these tools like Claude into your workflows for Google Ads. Now, I do want to stress right at the start of this is that, is that if you are well down the journey of utilizing Claude and Gemini inside of your workflows for Google Ads, this is probably not going to be the video for you. Whereas we really wanted to start this video because we really wanted to focus this video on people who haven't really ventured into this world of utilizing AI tools in their Google Ads management. So it is very much a starting discussion on how you start this process so that you can see the best results with your Google Ads campaigns in 2026. So right now, let's jump into the discussion with Daniel.

Okay, as I said before, we've got Daniel, who's one of the Google Ads coaches here inside of Define Digital Academy. Daniel, great to have you on the channel for the first time.

Great to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, and what we wanted to talk about is we wanted to have a bit of an open discussion just on how we are internally using different AI tools. For our Google Ads management. Now we will sort of say a bias. A lot of what we're talking about is we're talking about we use Claude internally, but we're not, we don't want to be specific on an individual program. It's more really, we're just talking about the guidelines because my concern with this, and I'll throw it over to you soon, Daniel, is there is a lot of messaging going around about AI in Google Ads running your optimizations. And there's a couple of guidelines that I'm still pretty strong on and I don't see these changing anytime soon.

I'm going to get you right back to the discussion with Daniel real, real soon, but I do want to let you know that if you are interested in utilizing AI tools like Claude with your Google Ads workflow, that inside of Define Digital Academy, we already have 5 pre-built tools that you can use. And the best news is, is that one of these tools, which is our keyword and search term SWOT analysis tool, is completely free. And you can get free access now, and all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below. And in that link, not only do you get free access, it'll also let you know about how you can access all the other tools, which include our ad copywriter, our finding out which campaigns are ready to scale, our landing page CRO expert, and also our smart bidding coach. And the best thing about all of these tools is they're not only built off all of our frameworks that we use inside of Define Digital Academy, but they are built so that you can quickly import your own real-life campaign data.

So that you're getting the best results that are specific for you and your business.

So we're going to get back to the discussion right now, but remember, if you want free access to our keyword and search term analysis tool, all you need to do is to follow that link in the description below.

So yeah, while I'm very pro using AI and I absolutely love it, I don't see myself anytime in the future directly connecting Claude with Google Ads. And my main reason for that is because I still very much see it as a diagnostic tool. And what I mean by that is I really like to use Claude to really drastically reduce my my analysis time so that I can make the best strategic thoughts. And the reason, I guess, a big part of my view on that is even if we look at inside of Google Ads dashboard recommendations and let's look at something like smart bidding, for example, like the recommendations it gives from smart bidding, that's obviously all AI generated and it has been AI generated or AI built within Google Ads for a long time. I don't even trust those inside of actual Google Ads. And what it comes back is for is that you've got to also know the business context. And also that was that is that there is a little bit of, I guess, probably real-world experience in really running that through. So I'd love to throw over to you as to, you know, one, your guidelines on it, and, you know, what you like about it, what you don't like about it.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more of it's an analysis tool. It helps reporting. It helps speed up that process of looking through data. It can be your data analysis, but you need to kick it back up to yourself so you can interpret the data yourself. Even if you get an executive summary with Claude or Gemini or however they're leapfrogging. And if you watch this video now or in 6 months from now, it could be different. But like your point with Google's AI internal system, that's not necessarily what we're trusting. And as well as Claude, if you're training Claude in a certain way, it can run rogue where we need to have some real-time data to interpret it and really speed up our time. I was thinking of an analogy of a farmer, pre-industrial revolution, the industrial revolution. You might be able to farm a field in a day or an acre in a day, seed it, harvest, whatever. After you got a John Deere, it might speed it up. Even now with our modern technology of farming, whatnot, you might be able to cover 90 acres, but still you don't want to run rogue if you don't, if you are not interpreting the data of what's happening. On inside the account or inside the business, the seasonality factors, XYZ. So it can easily run rogue and I, I'm really strongly against allowing AI to make decisions that affect the business, but to use it for, to interpret what's going on inside the accounts.

One of the things that I've been doing as a rule now is pretty every client call that I have, I record it. And so what I am doing is that then when I'm going into Claude to do the data analysis, I'm firstly uploading that full transcript. Script, then I'm also, you know, obviously one of the, the, you know, obviously because we've got so much education inside of DDA, we're also, we've also trained it off our internal principles.

So it is still, it's, it makes it a lot better for context.

The big thing that I like with Claude is I would say it's, it's giving us opportunities that most businesses wouldn't have been able to use before. And I'll give you the perfect example. So I remember talking to an ad copywriter last year. He had a whole business, you know, 6-figure business on just purely just ad copy. And he said he would spend 2 days alone just plowing through Reddit forums, Facebook groups, all of those things. Whereas now internally in one of their tools inside of DDA, we've got that whole process built out and within about 3 to 5 minutes it does all of the research for you. So, and then with the ad copy and the landing pages, it's matching through and it's actually showing me the Reddit forum where users said this, so let's connect the headline to that. And that's something that most businesses, especially small businesses, just didn't have the time to do. Like they don't have time, you know, business owners don't have time to spend 2 days doing research to match those pain points with the messaging. And that's where I see the real opportunity for it is, is it's opening up opportunities for like real life, for example, user tests, usability tests, pain and benefit matching, copywriting, all of those things which we know you need for Google Ads, for successful Google Ads campaigns. It's putting that in the reach of everyone who's prepared to, you know, just run that prompt in a smart way.

I completely agree. If you're leaning into it, you're getting, you're getting large agency support within internally where you can train up, create skills like, like you mentioned about ad copy to even landing pages on what's converting, looking at Reddit, looking at past reviews. You can analyze that. You can look through all your reviews within a couple of minutes and know what, what were your pain points? What were your 5 stars? What, what were areas of weakness as well as your competition? So there's just a ton of different ways that you can use this for research to help you make better decisions and be able to do more work quicker to the point of spending 2 days and otherwise 5 minutes. It's like you can really kick up a lot more activity. And if you're leaning into it and not necessarily fearful of it, that it can really supercharge your output.

Because let's be honest, like that example of doing, you know, 2 days research, I don't know of any small businesses that were doing it. And even medium-sized businesses, it was very much, that was the domain of large businesses who had the budget to order, you know, to be able to get consultants at that level. The other thing I would say, and this is what I push back a lot about people, you know, even when I started releasing some of their core tools publicly, people saying, oh, why don't you connect it through and save so much time? For me, it also comes back to really understanding for me is I still think a lot of good, like one of the risks of that for me is that you're going to over-optimize your Google Ads account. And it's really coming back to even now, especially like I think most Google Ads accounts now, especially if you're using some of these tools, you could be in the account once a week. Let's be honest with it now in that sense of you don't want to be in there every day. And this is the thing that I always come back to is remember what I call the Google Ads success loop is that you analyze your data, you make your optimizations, and then you need to wait. And especially when you're dealing with things around, if you've just gone through and changed your ad copies, you're not going to be seeing that data for at least 30 days. If you're in a low spending account, that could be even pushed out to 45 to 60 days before you've got enough data to really get the proper split test. So I think that's the other side of it as well, is that you don't— that's why I'm against connecting it because you're not going to be inside of your Google Ads account every day anyway.

Yeah. And I see that especially with the over-optimization as the other ditch that people get in if they're never in the account or if you see when you audit accounts, when you see that they're over-optimizing, you've got to let the data catch up to you. And we are seeing that with the ability to do more, that it's give the data some time. And that's crucially important. We can analyze the data, but we need enough time so we can do something with that data. Yeah.

Let's go through some real test cases of how you've used it. Because what I do want to do as we continue through this is I do want to get really, really practical on, I guess, the best practices for someone, especially if they're new to using a Claude tool to analyze their Google Ads campaign. So do you want to talk to me through just some of the test use cases that you've found where Claude or a similar tool has really not only saved you time, but probably also saved you bacon in a sense of picking up errors or mistakes and things?

Yeah, one that we've been working on together is one in the financial industry and with heavy regulation and compliances. A rather large account. What we were able to do, what I was able to do, was make sure that our, our copy was compliant. As this was a large account with, let's say, over, over 50 ads with, you know, 15 headlines, there's quite a bit of line items that we need to go through. So I was doing an initial run-through of what I saw in the account structure and using Claude as I'd upload our Google Sheets or whatever, what the Excel sheets inside to say, look for this, this, and the other thing. Make sure that this is compliant in this sector versus this sector. And it really saved up hours of time. You could have spent a week going through that compliance stock where it took a couple of hours and just using that power to give me good feedback and make sure that the client's doing well.

Yeah. And I know that was for me, that was a big one, which I was really happy because I remember, you know, pre- all of these tools where it has similar client where, and they had to change their ad copy every single month. And back then I think it was about over 100 different ads they were running and we were doing it in Google Sheets with find and replace and those type of things, which is still, I always was always a little bit worried about it. And there were some times where their compliance team picked up some human errors. So I really like the fact of it's, it can quality control and remove the human errors. So just anyone wondering how we did that is essentially you just exported all the ad copy, ran it through Claude and had a prompt saying make sure that it doesn't say X, Y, and Z. Is that, is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, I did that and then reviewed it, and then even before we went live gave it another run through just to make sure that Claude was double-checking myself as well as Claude going through it. So yeah, big data sets.

Yeah, so big data sets is one thing. Uh, do you want to talk me through— so there's going to be, you know, a large percentage of people, or a good significant percentages of people watching this that are probably on smaller campaigns, smaller budgets, even potentially setting up their first campaign. Have you any recommendations for how you would use it or how you've added it in your process to speed up that process for getting a campaign live inside of Google Ads?

Absolutely. And if you're starting a new campaign, I'd definitely lean into it. That's how we, even with smaller accounts that we are also working on, we're running on Google Drive, Google Sheets, and we were going line item to line item building out ad copy like we were talking about earlier, where we can run a prompt and we can give Claude a prompt if we don't have a skill built in. So if we haven't built any skills into Claude, like we have at Define, what you could do is give it, this is who you are, Claude, act like an agency that's been in agency for 10+ years. I want you to build out ad copy for XYZ. Say you're a paving company in Tucson, Arizona. I want you to build out some ad copy headlines and descriptions around these services that you're doing. Allow it, go to work, pull back some data around what people, pain points, reviews, such like we were explaining earlier. And then that will give you an opportunity to have your ad copy ready. Run through it, make some adjustments, and then you can get that up into your ad account much smoother. If you're using a tool like Ads Editor, which can seem a little scary, and I was doing it very manually for uploading our campaigns, you can give Claude— and I often do— is I give Claude a prompt, build this, build our ad copy ready now into an upload-ready template for, for Ads Editor. But just kind of take a step back. You can, for an agency or for your solo business, and you've got only 2 hours to work on this every other week, you can really speed up your time instead of spending 15 hours looking through ad copy, looking through headlines. You can get a lot of that data, that research right in there. So I would use it as a good launch kick and we always do.

Yeah. And the things that I would say too is the big thing I would say is that I'm always, especially when you've got a live account running, is I tend, I would never recommend, and I don't ask people just to go ask general questions to Claude or to ChatGPT. Hey, what do you recommend for Google Ads? You want to also always be giving it the guidelines. And those guidelines are, if you've got actual data inside of your Google Ads account, like download that, export it, and put it into your discussion. The second thing I'd always also say there as well is to give it the extra context of how you like to operate. In terms of, say for example, us internally for DDA, when it comes to keyword structures, I don't like phrase match and I've been on the record for that. And I don't want this video to be sidetracked. I just don't think it's relevant right now. So like even you can start going into those things. We want to build our ad groups around this long tail broad match keywords, exact match keywords. Even going in there as well is that putting in the rule regulations that you've got around your headlines. You know, you may have some words that you can't say, words that you want to say, really build out what makes your product unique. And this is the big thing that I think is the big opportunity, especially for smaller businesses, is it becomes a creative writer for you to help really, especially some people who go, I'm not creative or I can't think about writing, is to basically say, you might see some other ads, even if they're completely in a completely different industry that you like and go, can you use the frameworks that you've used for these headlines, use them in my context. And this is, and then the other thing that I would say, especially for example, like, like, like a lead gen businesses or like a service businesses, I'd be feeding in the feedback that you get from your, your, your clients, you know, uh, you know, when you go into sales calls, this is what they say to me. This is how, how I attack the sales process. They're all the extra contexts that you can put inside of, um, of your, of your prompts. The other thing I'd say from there is as well is that any recommendation that Claude gives me, I don't take it as truth, and I don't take it as the answer. I take it as, let's— thank you for that information, let's now verify it, and let's now sit and think, see how that, how that works, and really go back from there.

And you always double-check, have, have double-checked the, the prompt that you're doing. Don't take this truth like you were saying. But it's something that you were, you were mentioning earlier that I thought would be really beneficial is What are you already doing with a client? Is your meeting with the client— use that transcription. You could use a prompt with Claude to say, give me some questions that I can ask my client that on this onboarding call that can really pull out what I would want to use for ad copy. Years experience. Yeah. Something unique about you. And then you can grab that transcript and then give that transcript to Claude in that creative writing process. So you're getting some qualitative data right from that client, right on the spot, as well as now I'm gonna look at some clients in a completely other city and another couple on the other side of the country, and I want to comb through their website, pull some data, maybe come through the reviews so I can get a larger set of information. So you can do those two things of like creative writing is help me do what I'm already doing with their client, um, it's just more efficient.

The other thing I'm doing too is especially this is for business, if we're doing audits or if we're doing, doing a longer-term review of an account, I'll even start exporting the change history, segmenting it down by weeks or months, depending on how far back I'm going. And then you're actually able to get a real summary on, you know, especially if you've got like 2 years' data, this is what's happened in the account. These are all the changes that have been happening. This worked well. This didn't work well. That's the type of data that you can get out and use. And especially if If you are a business and you've been running Google Ads now for, you know, maybe 2 years, one of the common things that we get from businesses is that, you know, this year with the changes to how Google Ads is doing its match types, they've seen some diminishing returns inside of Google Ads. So my message to them is a lot of it has probably got to do with you haven't changed your keywords and you haven't changed your negative keywords, but what's changed is the way that Google is matching those keywords. So one of the things you can do is grab 3 months where you're working really well last year and the last 3 months and run it through. Don't look at the keywords, look at the search terms, export the search terms out and then get Claude to go, can you tell me what is the difference in trends? Like where am I spending money more? And we looked at this, I looked at this for an account last week is that what happened was, is that essentially they were spending 30% of their budget in newer keyword themes that just weren't converting. So all we had to do to fix it was just to basically tighten up some of the guardrails and their negative keyword. Matching and their, their performance has returned.

Yeah. Something that saved a ton of time as well doing that similar approach is downloading your search term reports to pull negative keywords. That's starting to save quite a bit of time in creating negative keyword lists from the data. So if you're new in Google Ads or you've been doing it a few years, instead of going page by page, looking at 50 line items at a time, you can, you can extrapolate the entire thing in minutes and then review what Claude is deeming based on your account performance, your account history, and explaining where the account is in that time. What should your negative keywords be? Now, don't take it, don't copy that list and put it right into your negative keyword list. That's where you need that human touch and make sure that it's saying what it is, it's accurate.

The other thing I'd say too is that I know a lot of some people, I mean, there'd be a lot of people who listen to this where they're like way already way ahead in what they're doing in, in, in, uh, we really wanted this discussion to be sort of like the first step into this world. And the big thing I would say too is, so when I started going into this, uh, the best bit of advice that I got, and this was actually from, from, from Mike Rhodes, who's many, you know, is like a sort of a leading the path in this way, is actually ask the tool how you want me to present this data to you. And that's what I would kind of say. So now internally, what, like I've just built out in the last 24 hours, we've built out like a full sales lead flow dashboard, which, you know, we upload our leads and it sorts it out and writes emails and all of those things. And it just literally went through me going step by step. This is what I want to do. What information do I need to give you? And how can we write this in the right way? So the reason why I say that is I'd say for any, especially for business owners or agency staff who want to start going in this path, the great thing about looking at it in terms of your framework that you're not connecting Claude to your account is that you've got free passes at it because you're not going to be anything that Claude's telling you, it's not changing the account. So really just look at it as a, I guess, a co-working partner and a strategic partner that's giving you some extra data, giving you some extra advice so that you can then take that information and use it for your— and the biggest thing I'll just say as well is that see Claude more as your research partner, not your strategic— so you're the strategy, You're the strategic leader, they're your research partner.

Yeah. And something you said that it really stuck out to me is you don't need to learn how to prompt everything. It's nice to have a prompt folder and save it as your— in your Google Drive. But you could have two chats open. One of these themes that might be search terms or trying to get additional ad copy and you don't exactly know how to do that. Well, ask Claude, work through that on a conversation with Claude on build me up a prompt based on this and then take that prompt and then put it into a a new chat and see what it outputs rather than trying to create your own prompt. It's good at understanding what to do.

Yeah. And especially if you, even if you start talking to it, like, like actually, you know, rather than typing it in, actually dictating and talking to it, that's the biggest thing that I've found has helped as well. And even just also asking, like, if you need extra information, please let me know. That, that's, and I think I would say that's the one thing that I do think that Claude has over the other tools is it's slower. Lower in its output, but it's more like, you know, Gemini and especially ChatGPT, they're really, really quick, but they don't listen. Whereas with Claude, if you'll say like, you know, I'm going to give you a whole heap of information, don't start doing any work until you give you everything, it will do that. And yeah, so I think the main thing is, I guess the biggest thing I'd really encourage anyone, if you're wanting to start your journey with Claude or anything inside of Google Ads is go slow. The good thing is, is that you, nothing's changing live inside the account. You're just using it as a research partner. And if you ever get stuck, just say, how can I give you this information better so that you can do what I'm asking you to do?

Completely agree. Use it as a tool. And if I could add anything, like, you hear us talking a lot about Claude, and it's because from what I've seen in the past 3 to 6 months, there's a clear winner at this point in time where some of these these platforms, some of these large language models like ChatGPT, they perform really well in certain areas where we're really finding the reasoning in Claude is doing really well, where sometimes ChatGPT sometimes is, uh, um, it's looking to please and just answer any question with a yes, where Claude will give you some pushback.

But then, yeah, no, no, great. And especially for, um, in terms of Google Ads and the way that we're using it for like keyword reviews, copy reviews, right now, once again, May 2026 that we're recording this, it's Claude is the winner. But as I said, you can do it in the other tools. I just have personally found it still the, I guess, the winner at the moment, but we may look back 3 months from now and go, it's completely different. But the good thing about it is the principles of how you're using it is still the same. So you can just quickly change over to another platform pretty quickly anyway. Hey Daniel, mate, thank you so much for coming on and thanks for sharing your insights.

It's really a pleasure and honor. Thank you.