Paid Search Sandbox
GlowRoute's Google Ads account, with every keyword, bid and auction behind it. The same business as the Web Analytics Sandbox, seen from the platform that spends the money rather than the one that counts the visits — and the two do not quite agree.
Your brief $42,000 a month goes through this account and it returns $1.14 for every dollar. You have next month's budget to re-plan. Open the brief
You are GlowRoute's first analyst, three weeks in. GlowRoute is a direct-to-consumer skincare brand selling serums, moisturizers and SPF bundles through its own site and nowhere else. Google Ads is the largest single line in the marketing budget, and nobody has opened it properly since the agency that built the site set it up.
Hold four questions while you work: Which campaign would you cut, and what would the money you saved actually buy? Which keywords look like failures and are simply too new to judge? Why does a click on GlowRoute's own name cost more than the account average? And if you turned the brand campaign off tomorrow, how much of that revenue would you genuinely lose?
Overview
Trend
Build your own table
Choose what to break the account down by, then choose the columns. Anything you build here is counted from the same auctions as every other report.
What this keyword is doing in the auction
Pick a keyword and move the two controls. Everything underneath is computed by the same auction that produced every other number in this tool, so this is not a demonstration of the mechanism. It is the mechanism.
Who else is in this auction
What people actually typed
A keyword is what you bid on. A search term is what somebody searched for. On exact match those are the same thing. On broad match they are not, and the gap between them is where the money goes.
Try a negative keyword
A negative blocks every query containing that phrase, which is blunter than it sounds. The readout below shows what it saves and what it kills.
Next month’s plan
Jess has to defend this account in the quarterly review. Commit to an action on each keyword below, the queries you would block, where the money moves, and the one change you would make to how the account is built. Then find out what the records actually supported.
1. What happens to each of these keywords
Every row shows what it cost, what it returned, and the rate it would have to hit to pay for itself. Some of these have not run long enough to have told you anything yet.
2. Queries you would block
The most expensive queries the account bought without meaning to. Each one you block also blocks anything else containing that phrase.
3. Where the money moves
4. One change to how the account is built
Keyword edits treat the account one line at a time. Pick the single change that would do the most.