Every account we audit has a handful of settings nobody chose.
They were not decisions. They were what the campaign came with, and nobody has opened that screen since. Individually each one looks minor enough to skip past. Together they are usually the cheapest money you will ever get back, because fixing them takes minutes and costs nothing.
Here are the four we find most often, and the one piece of standard advice that turns out to be wrong more often than people admit.
"Presence or Interest" Is Broader Than It Sounds
Open a campaign, go to Settings, then Locations, then Location options. There are two choices, and the default is the wide one.
Presence or interest shows your ads to people in your targeted locations, people regularly in them, and people anywhere in the world who have shown interest in them.
That last clause is the one that costs money. Someone in another country researching your city can trigger your ad. For a local service business this is straightforwardly wasteful: a plumber in Phoenix does not want clicks from someone abroad reading about Phoenix.
Presence restricts delivery to people actually in or regularly in the area.
We found this on a steel building manufacturer's account, set to the default nobody had touched. For most local and regional businesses, presence is the correct setting and the default is not.
There is a real exception. If you sell to people planning to travel or relocate to your area, interest targeting is doing exactly what you want. A hotel, a relocation service, a destination clinic all have genuine reasons to reach someone who is not there yet. Everyone else should switch it.
While you are on that screen, two things are worth a look. Excluded locations are separate from targeted ones, and a business that does not serve a neighboring county should say so explicitly rather than hoping the radius handles it. And how you defined the area matters: a radius around your address is not the same as targeting a city, and neither is the same as targeting a metro. A 25-mile radius drawn around a suburban address routinely covers places nobody would drive from.
Search Partners: Check Before You Switch It Off
The standard advice is to turn search partners off. Search partners are sites outside Google that show Google search results, and the usual objection is that you have no visibility into where your ads run and the traffic is diluted.
We generally launch with it off for that reason. But the honest version is more interesting.
On a therapist's account we audited, 18 conversions came in over 30 days. Fourteen of them came from search partners. Turning it off on principle would have removed most of that account's results.
So the rule is not "off." The rule is look before you decide.
Segment your campaign by network. Google Ads reports search partners separately from Google search, so you can see exactly what each is producing. If partners are delivering conversions at an acceptable cost, leave them on. If they are consuming budget and returning nothing, switch them off and move that budget to search.
The reason we default to off on a new build is different from the reason people usually give: early on you want the cleanest possible signal to learn from, and mixing two networks makes attribution murkier at exactly the moment you can least afford it. Once the account has data, revisit it with numbers.
Display Riding Along Inside Your Search Campaign
This one is a straightforward defect and it is common in accounts built through Google's guided setup.
When you create a search campaign, there is an option to also include the Display Network. It is easy to leave checked, and what happens next is predictable. Display inventory is effectively unlimited and the clicks are far cheaper, so the campaign spends most of its budget there while the search ads you actually wanted get a fraction of it.
You end up with a campaign reporting plenty of clicks at a flattering cost per click, and almost no results, because the two networks got mixed into one number.
Keep them separate. If you want display, run a display campaign with its own budget, its own targeting and its own reporting. If you want search, run search. A campaign that does both is really a display campaign wearing a search campaign's name.
We audited an antiques dealer whose single campaign had display attached and search partners on, in a market where the search terms themselves were expensive. There was no way to tell what was working, because everything was averaged together.
There is a milder version of the same problem worth knowing about. Even with display switched off, a search campaign can still show ads on Google's own surfaces beyond the results page. That is usually fine and not worth fighting. The one to catch is the checkbox that pulls in the whole Display Network, because that is the one that changes where the majority of the budget goes.
The Placements You Are Paying For and Cannot See
If you are running display or Performance Max, your ads are appearing somewhere specific, and by default that includes places you would never choose.
Mobile games. Parked domains. Kids' YouTube channels. The Display Network reaches an enormous share of the internet, and without exclusions your budget flows to whatever is cheapest, which is rarely whatever is best.
The failure mode here is specific. Nobody sets out to advertise a B2B service inside a children's game. What happens is that display inventory is priced by supply and demand like anything else, the least desirable inventory is the cheapest, and an algorithm asked to buy clicks efficiently will find it. You are not being cheated. You asked for cheap clicks and got them.
On one healthcare account we found display campaigns running for years with no placement exclusions at all.
Two things to know. First, you can see where your ads ran: the placements report tells you, and it is usually a sobering read. Second, and this is the part that keeps people from fixing it, some exclusion controls are buried deeply enough that the practical route is Google Ads Editor rather than the web interface. It is not that Google forbids it. It is that the path is obscure enough that most advertisers never find it, and the default is inclusion.
At minimum, exclude mobile apps and app categories unless you have a specific reason to be in them. Then read the placements report monthly and exclude what is obviously wrong.
The Defaults That Are Actually Fine
It is worth saying plainly that most settings should be left alone, because the opposite error is real. An account where somebody has been in every screen adjusting everything is usually in worse shape than one nobody touched.
Device bid adjustments. Unless you have volume that clears a real confidence threshold, leave them at zero. Adjusting device bids off a handful of clicks is guessing with extra steps.
Ad rotation. The default lets Google optimize which ad shows. That is the right call in almost every account, and "rotate indefinitely" is for a specific testing situation most advertisers are not in.
The recommendations tab. It is a source of ideas, not a to-do list, and the optimization score attached to it is not a performance metric.
The four settings above are different because each one silently widens where your money goes. That is the test worth applying: does this default spend money somewhere I did not choose? If yes, narrow it. If not, leave it.
Why They Ship This Way
None of this is a conspiracy, and it helps to be clear-eyed about it.
Google's defaults are set for the average of millions of accounts, and they lean toward reach. Wider targeting, more networks, more placements. That produces more impressions and more clicks, which is a reasonable default for an advertiser who has not thought about it, and a good outcome for Google either way.
Your account is not the average of millions of accounts. The defaults are a starting point, and the entire job of the settings screen is to narrow them to your actual business.
That is also why these findings cluster. An account where nobody changed the geo setting is usually an account where nobody looked at networks or placements either, because the same person clicked through the same guided setup on the same afternoon.
The Twenty Minute Version
Open one campaign and work down Settings.
- Networks. Is Display checked inside a search campaign? Uncheck it. Are search partners on? Do not switch them off on principle, segment by network and read the numbers first.
- Locations, then Location options. Presence or interest is the default. Unless you sell to people planning to travel to you, switch to Presence.
- Placements (display and PMax only). Read the placements report. Exclude mobile apps and app categories, then exclude the obviously irrelevant. Expect to need Google Ads Editor for some of it.
- Then repeat for every campaign. These settings are per campaign, not per account, so a campaign built later by someone else can carry different defaults entirely.
None of this changes your keywords, your ads or your bids. It changes where your existing budget goes, which is why it is usually the fastest improvement available in a neglected Google Ads account.
It also pairs with structure. Tight ad groups control what you buy; these settings control where you buy it, and both have to be right before bidding can do anything useful. Structure is chapter five.
We check every one of these before we look at a single bid. If you would rather not spend an afternoon in settings screens, we can do it. If you would rather do it yourself, start with location options. It takes about ninety seconds and it is wrong in most of the accounts we see.
