AI ads infrastructure
Find Wasted Ad Spend With Claude (Step-by-Step)
Use Claude to find every wasted dollar in your Google Ads account in 5 minutes. Exact prompt, tools called, sample output, and what to do with the findings.
Wasted ad spend is the highest-leverage opportunity in most Google Ads accounts. Claude — connected to your account through an MCP server — can surface it in about 60 seconds. This page shows the exact prompt, the tools Claude calls under the hood, what the output looks like, and how to act on it.
The prompt that works
You: "Find every dollar of waste in this account from the last 30 days. I want to see: keywords spending with zero conversions, search terms triggering on irrelevant queries, campaigns with no negative keyword list, and any device or daypart where CPA is 2x the account average."
The specificity matters. "Find waste" alone leaves too much interpretation room. The four-bucket prompt above maps cleanly to Google Ads API queries and produces a structured answer Claude can return in one pass.
What Claude does under the hood
Claude calls the runScript tool, which executes a sandboxed JavaScript that fans out parallel GAQL queries against the four waste surfaces in your prompt:
- Keywords with spend > 0 and conversions = 0 in the last 30 days, ordered by cost descending.
- Search terms with the same filter, joined to their parent campaign and ad group.
- Campaigns where negative_keywords_list_count = 0.
- Device and ad-schedule performance segments where CPA exceeds 2x the campaign average.
Parallel execution matters here. Sequential queries would burn token budget and time. NotFair's runScript can fire 20 GAQL queries in one call and correlate the results in-script.
What the output looks like
Claude: "Last 30 days: $1,847 in zero-conversion keyword spend, concentrated in 7 keywords. Top: 'small dog daycare near me' ($412 spend, 0 conversions, 89 clicks). Search terms: 73 of 214 unique queries on your broad-match 'pet boarding' keyword are irrelevant ('pet sitting jobs', 'free pet adoption', etc.) — $623 wasted there. 3 campaigns have no negative keyword list at all. Mobile CPA is 2.3x desktop in your search campaign while bids are equal. Total recoverable: ~$3,100/month at current rates."
What to do with the findings
- Pause the zero-conversion keywords with sustained spend — "pause keywords with $100+ spend and 0 conversions in 30 days" → Claude runs bulkPauseKeywords with the filter.
- Add the irrelevant search terms as negatives — group by theme first ("jobs", "free", "adoption"), then add as phrase-match negatives at the campaign or shared list level.
- Apply a starter negative keyword list to the bare campaigns — Claude can generate a list from the search terms history and apply it in one call.
- Adjust device bid modifiers — drop mobile -50% on the search campaign and watch CPA over the next week.
Approval gate every write. Claude proposes; you confirm. The whole loop — diagnose, propose, approve, execute — typically takes 10 minutes. Compare to the 2–4 hours a manual audit takes on the same account.
How often should you run this?
Weekly is the sweet spot. Daily is overkill for most accounts (waste accumulates slower than that). Monthly misses recoverable spend that compounds — finding $1,800 waste 30 days later means you already lost $1,200 of it. We've found that a 5-minute weekly waste check on a $20K/month account recovers more spend than most paid optimization tools surface in a quarter.
FAQ
Try MCP with Google Ads
Connect your Google Ads account to NotFair in 30 seconds and start querying campaigns from Claude.