Open a brand-new Google Ads campaign and Google has already made a dozen decisions for you. None of them are hidden, exactly. They're just sitting a click or two below the fields everyone fills in, and most firms launch without opening them.
For an accounting firm, a few of those defaults quietly change who sees the ads. One shows them to people who are merely interested in your city. Another sends them to websites that aren't Google. A third lets Google write headlines you've never read. None of that shows up as an error. It shows up months later as a cost per client nobody can explain.
This chapter is the ten minutes of settings that belong before the first dollar goes out.
Google's Default Location Setting Pays for People Who Only Read About Your City
Pick a city as your target and, out of the box, Google counts two kinds of people as "in" it: the ones physically there, and the ones who've merely shown an interest in the place. That second crowd can be sitting anywhere on the planet.
The alternative is called Presence. Google describes it as showing your ads to people "likely to be located, or regularly located" in the places you target. That covers the people who live there and the people who commute in to work every day. It leaves out the rest.
For a tax practice, the rest is a long list. When we searched "cpa boston" for this guide, one of the questions Google suggested underneath was the average salary for a CPA in that city. Job seekers sizing up a move search your city's name next to your profession all year. So do accounting students comparing firms, retirees two states away reading up on the rules for the place they used to live, and people researching a business they might open someday. Plenty of them will read an accountant's ad. Very few will sign an engagement letter with a firm they can't easily visit.
The fix takes one click. In the campaign's location settings, open the location options and choose Presence. Do it before launch, because every click before that is a click the firm paid for on behalf of someone else's curiosity.
Then check that it worked. Three or four weeks in, pull up the locations report and look at where the clicking actually happened. For a local practice on Presence, nearly every click should come from inside the service area. A noticeable share from other states usually means the setting didn't stick, or that a second campaign was built without it.
A Virtual CPA Firm Can Serve Six States. Presence Keeps Its Ads Off the Other Forty-Four.
Not every accounting practice lives inside one metro area. One firm in our sample describes itself as a nationwide virtual CPA firm, and a fractional CFO group says it works across all 50 states. Plenty of small practices file returns for clients who've never been to the office.
The answer for them is a bigger map, not a looser setting. Target the states the firm actually serves, and keep Presence on. A remote practice licensed to serve clients in six states wants people in those six states, not anyone on earth who once looked up a city inside them.
Before adding a new state, check the licensing side. This is our reading of the model rules, not legal advice: individual CPAs can generally serve clients across state lines under what the profession calls mobility, but a firm's own permit can come into play depending on the work and on how the firm uses "CPA" in its name. NASBA's CPAmobility.org lays it out state by state. Ten minutes there is cheaper than an ad campaign in a state where the firm needs paperwork first.
Existing clients are a different story. As Chapter 3 found in the reviews, clients who move across the country often keep their accountant anyway. That loyalty is earned in the relationship, not in the location setting. The ads are for finding the next client, and the next client is almost always somewhere the firm already serves.
A Financial Planning Page Can't Be Targeted by ZIP Code
Here's a setting most firms don't know exists until an ad gets limited.
Google places some financial services in a category it calls Consumer finance, which it groups with housing and employment as areas where ad targeting is restricted to protect access to opportunities. The category covers credit, banking and "certain financial planning and management services." In the US, ads in that category can't be targeted by ZIP code, and they can't use age, gender, parental status or marital status either. A radius around the office and whole cities are still allowed.
Tax preparation and bookkeeping aren't named in that category. Financial planning is, loosely: Google doesn't define which planning services count. Our reading is that a firm selling wealth management, retirement planning or cash-flow management alongside its tax work should expect those ads to land in Consumer finance, and plan for it.
The practical move is structural. Give planning services their own campaign, targeted by radius or city from day one. Tax prep and bookkeeping can keep whatever targeting the firm prefers. Location targeting is set for a whole campaign, so the split is what lets the tax campaign keep its ZIP list while planning runs on a radius.
Google Dropped the Search Language Setting. Spanish and Haitian Creole Ads Now Win on Their Own Words.
For years, Search campaigns had a language setting: you picked English, Spanish or both, and Google matched ads to people whose settings fit. Starting in September 2026, Google is removing that campaign-level setting for Search. Ads now match based on the language they're written in.
That's a real change for firms that serve clients in more than one language, and accounting has plenty of them. In our example market, one Google review praised an office for serving "all Haitians and Spanish immigrants." A chain office page in the same city lists itself as "Spanish Speaking." Immigration, ITIN and international returns came up in 31 of the 622 reviews we read.
The searches are real, and some of them don't look like a textbook would predict. Across the US, "taxes cerca de mi" (taxes near me), a search that's half English and half Spanish, runs 8,100 times a month, and Keyword Planner prices its top spot between $2.29 and $14.10. "contador cerca de mi" (accountant near me) draws 1,300. Compare that range with the $4.11 to $22.53 Chapter 7 showed for "cpa near me." In our example market these Spanish searches are small, 70 a month for "taxes cerca de mi," but a small, cheap, underserved search is exactly what a new account can afford to win.
Under the new rules, a Spanish-speaking client is reached by a Spanish ad. So the structure follows the language: a separate ad group with Spanish keywords, Spanish headlines and a Spanish landing page, and the same again for Haitian Creole or Portuguese if the firm serves those clients. Have the ads written by someone who speaks the language, ideally someone in the office who'll be answering those calls. A machine-translated ad pointing to an English-only front desk is a promise the phone can't keep, and Chapter 8 already covered what clients say about that.
Search Partners, Display and AI Max Spend the First Dollar Where Nobody Searched for a CPA
The rest of the defaults fit on one sheet. Go through them the way a firm goes through adjusting entries before closing the books: each one has a starting balance Google chose, and a launch balance you choose.
- Search partners: off. Google includes partner sites in every new Search campaign by default. Partners are outside websites that borrow Google's ads for their own search boxes, and nobody at your firm gets to pick which ones. Leave them out until the account has a few months of clean results on Google itself to compare against. Then test them on purpose.
- Display Network: off. A Search campaign that also buys banner placements on websites is two campaigns wearing one name. Chapter 2 explained why a new firm starts with people who are already searching.
- AI Max: off. New Search campaigns come with AI Max switched on. Once on, it hunts for searches your keyword list never mentioned and drafts ad text by reading your site. There's a newer wrinkle: the feature once called automatically created assets is now "text customization," and Google is folding campaigns that use it into AI Max. One switch turns off both. AI Max has a place later, and Chapter 13 covers when.
- No broad match and no dynamic search ads in Isolation. Isolation, our exact-match campaign, stays exact.
- Auto-tagging: on. It's what connects a click to what happened after it.
- Call reporting: on. Most accounting clients call. Chapter 1 set up the tracking; this switch lets Google report the calls that come from ads.
- The firm's name: in its own brand campaign. Chapter 2 set that up. Keep it separate from the campaigns chasing strangers, so brand searches don't flatter their numbers.
- The first budget: small enough to read. Launch low enough that a week of results is something the partners can actually look at and understand, then raise it as the numbers earn it. Chapter 3 worked out what a client goal costs per month; the launch week doesn't have to spend at that pace. Its job is to confirm the tracking fires, the calls ring and the search terms look like people hiring an accountant, before the full budget arrives.
One setting to ignore: the marketing objective Google asks about when you create a campaign. It shapes the menus you see during setup and has no effect on the auction.
None of these settings is dramatic on its own. Together they decide whether the first month's data describes the firm's real market or a blend of the real market, a few partner sites, some banner clicks and several states' worth of the merely curious. Month-one decisions are only as good as month-one data.
Next: Performance Max Without the Client List
Chapter 10 moves past Search to Performance Max: why an accounting firm can't simply hand Google its client list, and how to build Performance Max's audience signals from competitor websites instead.
Earlier chapters: Chapter 8 on ad copy, and Chapter 2 on starting with hiring searches. The accounting guide's home page lists every chapter.
Checking every default before an accounting firm's first ad runs is part of how we handle Google Ads management.
