The settings I switch off in every new Google Ads account
When I take on a new Google Ads account for a small business, the first thing I do before I touch anything else is go through the settings.
Not because it's the most exciting part of the job. Because it's the most important. Google Ads accounts are set up with defaults designed to spend your budget as broadly and as quickly as possible. For a business with a large account and thousands of pounds to play with, some of those defaults might make sense. For a small business spending a few hundred pounds a month, they can quietly drain a budget before you've had a chance to see what's actually working.
Here are the four settings I switch off every single time, and what happens to your budget when they're left on.
The Display Network
When you run a search campaign, you'd be forgiven for assuming your ads appear when someone searches for what you offer. That's the idea. But Google defaults to also showing your search ads across its Display Network, which means your ad can appear as a banner on unrelated websites, apps, and pages across the internet.
The person reading a recipe blog or catching up on news isn't in the same mindset as someone who's just searched for your service. The intent is completely different. Display clicks tend to be cheaper than search clicks, which looks appealing in a report, but cheaper clicks from people who aren't looking for what you offer aren't a bargain. They're a drain.
Switching off the Display Network means your search budget stays in search, where it belongs.
Auto-applied recommendations
Google will regularly suggest changes to your account. New keywords to add, match types to broaden, bids to adjust. Most of the time these suggestions benefit Google more than they benefit you, because they tend to increase spend and reach, which is good for Google's revenue.
What a lot of business owners don't know is that there's a setting allowing Google to apply these recommendations automatically, without anyone reviewing or approving them. If it's switched on, your account can change in ways you didn't ask for and might not notice until you wonder why your spend has gone up or your results have dropped.
I switch it off in every account. Every change made to an account should be a deliberate decision, not something that happened in the background.
Show ads in all apps
This setting causes your ads to appear inside mobile apps. Someone playing a game or scrolling through an app isn't actively searching for anything. They might tap an ad by accident. They might tap it out of curiosity. They're very unlikely to be ready to make an enquiry.
App traffic tends to have high click rates and poor conversion rates, because the clicks aren't coming from people with buying intent. For a small budget, spending money on clicks that almost never convert is something to avoid, not enable.
Target CPA (smart bidding)
Target CPA is a bidding strategy where you tell Google what you want to pay for a conversion, and Google's algorithm adjusts your bids automatically to try to hit that target.
In theory, that sounds helpful. In practice, it requires a significant amount of conversion data to work properly. Google generally needs at least 30 to 50 conversions in a 30-day period before the algorithm has enough information to make good decisions. Most small businesses running modest budgets are nowhere near that volume.
When there isn't enough data, the algorithm guesses. And it guesses with your money. I've seen accounts where smart bidding has caused spend to spike, bids to go in strange directions, and results to drop, because the algorithm was working without enough information to do its job.
Until an account has the data to support it, I use manual bidding. It takes more active management, but it means the decisions are based on actual judgement rather than an algorithm filling in the gaps. You can find out more about how I manage Google Ads accounts here.
Why these settings exist
It's worth being clear: these aren't bugs or oversights. They're deliberate defaults.
Google's a business. Its revenue comes from ad spend. Settings designed to increase reach, automate decisions, and expand where your ads appear are good for Google's revenue. They're not always good for your budget.
None of this means Google Ads doesn't work. It means it works best when someone's paying attention to the details and making deliberate decisions rather than letting defaults run. That's the difference between a budget that works and a budget that disappears.
If you're not sure whether your account has these switched on, I offer a one-off Google Ads audit that covers exactly this kind of thing.
