15 Cursor Skills for Google Ads — SKILL.md Files That Work

What are Cursor skills for Google Ads?

Cursor Agent Skills are reusable instruction sets that teach the Agent a specific workflow — Cursor's own examples are deploying to staging and running a security audit; ours are running a Google Ads account. A skill is a folder containing a SKILL.md file: YAML frontmatter with a name, a description (the Agent uses it to decide when the skill applies) and optional paths globs, then Markdown instructions. Skills are discovered on startup and invoked with /skill-name in chat or attached with @.

That structure is the whole point for Google Ads work. A loose “analyze my account” prompt produces a different answer every run. A skill produces the same table, the same severity ratings and the same import-ready output whether you run it today or a teammate runs /wasted-spend-audit in three months — and because it runs in an editor, the output is a file in the repo, not a chat message that scrolls away. The 15 skills below are the ones we run on accounts spending $25K–$200K a month; they are the same operating loop as our Claude skills for Google Ads, and Cursor reads those files directly.

Skills vs rules vs MCP: which one do you need?

The working setup for most accounts is one rule plus 15 skills plus a connector: the rule says never mutate without approval and always write outputs to reports/, the skills define each analysis, and the connection keeps the data fresh so you never export another CSV. If you take one thing from this section: do not judge Cursor on one-off prompts. The gap between a vague prompt and a structured skill is bigger than the gap between any two AI models.

How to install a Google Ads skill in Cursor

Three ways in, from fastest to most portable. All three end with the same skill available as a slash command in every Agent chat.

Diagnostic skills: find what's broken

Diagnostic skills answer one question: what is going wrong in my account? Run these first. The average Google Ads account has three to five diagnosable issues at any time, and most go unnoticed for weeks. Run all five once when you adopt this system, then put the Wasted Spend Audit and the Impression Share Gap Finder on a recurring cadence.

01 · Wasted Spend Audit

Scans your search terms report and flags every term that spent money without converting, then outputs a prioritized negative keyword list with estimated monthly savings. To run it: in Google Ads, go to Insights and reports → Search terms, set the range to the last 30 days, enable all columns, download the CSV, attach it and say “use the Wasted Spend Audit skill”. Good output is a table sorted by spend with a specific reason next to every flagged term; if the reasons feel generic, the export is missing columns. Sanity-check the top ten rows by spend before importing — a term with no conversions in 30 days may still assist on long sales cycles. Cadence: weekly.

02 · CPA Spike Diagnosis

Identifies the root cause when cost per acquisition jumps. CPA spikes have six common causes — audience saturation, bid strategy changes, competitor entry, landing page issues, seasonal shifts and Quality Score drops — and the skill checks all six in one pass so the evidence sits side by side. Read the output bottom-up: the ranked diagnosis is the headline, but the evidence lines tell you whether the Agent is reasoning from your numbers. Include both the spike period and a baseline period. Cadence: on demand, the day CPA moves.

03 · Quality Score Analysis

Breaks Quality Score into its components — expected CTR, ad relevance, landing page experience — across all keywords and weights every low-QS keyword by monthly spend, so the top of the list is where a fix changes your bill. Match the fix to the failing component: expected CTR means the ad promise is weak, ad relevance usually means the ad group is too broad, landing page experience sends you to skill 10. Export keywords with the QS columns enabled. Cadence: monthly.

04 · Search Term Leakage Scan

Goes deeper than the Wasted Spend Audit by finding patterns — systematic gaps in your negative lists that let irrelevant traffic through repeatedly. Skill 01 blocks individual terms that already cost money; this one blocks the theme so the next hundred variants never match. Pay attention to the brand-contamination check: branded searches leaking into non-brand campaigns inflate their reported performance and mislead every budget decision built on top. Attach both the search terms report and your existing negative lists. Cadence: bi-weekly.

05 · Impression Share Gap Finder

The growth-side diagnostic: the other four find waste, this one finds volume you are not buying. The budget-vs-rank split is the decision that matters — IS lost to budget is fixed with money (skill 08 tells you where to take it from), IS lost to rank is fixed with Quality Score and bids, and no budget increase helps. Take the deprioritize bucket seriously: a campaign with a weak conversion rate and 40% lost IS is a hole, not an opportunity. Include the impression share columns, which are hidden by default. Cadence: monthly.

Optimization skills: fix what's broken

Optimization skills take what the diagnostics found and turn it into a change you can apply — a negative list in Editor format, a bid strategy with a transition plan, a budget model with three scenarios. Every one of these assumes you know which problem you are fixing and roughly what it costs per month.

06 · Negative Keyword Mining

Builds a comprehensive negative list from five sources — actual search terms, industry non-buyer terms, semantic near-misses, competitor brands and out-of-area geography — and formats it for Google Ads Editor. Run it on every new campaign before launch, then bi-weekly. Cadence: per new campaign, then bi-weekly.

07 · Bid Strategy Selector

Recommends the right bid strategy per campaign from conversion volume, value variance, budget headroom and auction insights — and insists on a two-week transition rather than a cold switch, which is where most bid-strategy changes go wrong. Cadence: quarterly.

08 · Budget Reallocation Model

Ranks campaigns by efficiency, names donors and recipients, and models conservative, moderate and aggressive shifts with projected conversions, blended CPA and ROAS for each. Pair with skill 05 so the recipients are campaigns actually losing impression share to budget. Cadence: monthly.

09 · Ad Copy A/B Generator

Writes two complete responsive search ads — 15 headlines and 4 descriptions each, with character limits enforced — one rational, one aspirational, plus pinning recommendations and a hypothesis for why one should win. Feed it your current best headlines so it iterates rather than starting from zero. Cadence: per ad-group refresh.

10 · Landing Page Match Scorer

Scores the alignment between keyword, ad and landing page on seven criteria, with message match and intent double-weighted, and returns specific rewrites for any page under 7. The Agent can fetch the page itself if you give it the URL. Cadence: per landing page, quarterly sweep.

Reporting skills: communicate results

Reporting skills turn raw Google Ads data into narratives stakeholders can read without follow-up questions. The weekly digest alone saves most teams two to three hours per account per week, and it is the skill that makes the other fourteen visible.

11 · Weekly Performance Digest

Five fixed sections — executive summary, metrics table with week-over-week and month-over-month columns, top and bottom campaigns with data-backed reasons, anomalies, next-week actions — in plain language with real numbers. Attach this week, last week and the same week last month. Cadence: weekly, Monday morning.

12 · Anomaly Detection Alert

A statistical pass over 60 days of daily metrics: rolling mean, standard deviation, anything in the last seven days more than two deviations out, plus slow drifts over 30 days. Runs daily when an MCP server supplies the data, weekly from exports. Cadence: weekly, daily with MCP.

13 · Executive Summary Generator

One page for leadership: a headline stat, four metrics with trend arrows, what worked and what needs attention in business language, and next month's plan. Under 400 words, no jargon. Cadence: monthly.

14 · Competitor Benchmark Report

The skill that gains most from running in an editor with web search. It reads your auction insights for overlap, position-above and impression share, then uses the Agent's web search to pull what each competitor is saying and what customers are saying back — messaging you cannot see in Google Ads. Cadence: monthly.

15 · ROAS Forecasting Model

From 60–90 days of daily data: seasonality, the ROAS decay curve as spend rises, a baseline forecast with confidence bands, and three spend scenarios with the diminishing-returns threshold. Give it planned changes so the forecast accounts for them. Cadence: monthly.