Paid Search Sandbox
GlowRoute's Google Ads account, with every keyword, bid and auction behind it. Find out where the money goes before you decide where it goes next.
Your brief $42,000 a month goes through GlowRoute's Google Ads account. The agency says it is working. Jess has to sign next month's budget on Monday. Open the brief
You joined GlowRoute three weeks ago as its first analyst. It is a direct-to-consumer skincare brand in Los Angeles: a vitamin C serum that carries the brand, a barrier repair cream, an SPF 30 daily, and bundles of the three, sold through its own site and nowhere else. Google Ads is the largest single line in the marketing budget.
Ravelston Digital, the agency that built the current site, set the account up and still runs it. Once a month it sends a PDF. Nobody at GlowRoute has ever logged in to check it. You have the login now.
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?
Where this sits. This is the same business as the Web Analytics Sandbox, seen from the platform that spends the money. Google counts clicks here; the site counts sessions there, and the two do not quite agree. The Advertising report in the Web Analytics Sandbox puts them side by side.
Field notes Ten findings are waiting in this account. 0 of 10 logged Open your notes
Jess needs findings, not screenshots. There are at least ten in this account worth a line in her budget memo, and they come in three kinds. Log each one as you find it: what you saw, where (report, breakdown, date range) and the number that gives it away. Notes stay in this browser and are never sent anywhere.
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.