Six Google Ads Settings That Quietly Waste Your Money

Every setting below is enabled by default, and every one expands where your money goes. That's not a conspiracy — Google's defaults are built for advertisers who want reach, and a local service business wants the opposite. Nobody turns them off because nobody looks.

Twenty minutes in your account. Do it with a coffee.

1. Search Partners and Display expansion

Where your ads show beyond Google search. Search Partners puts you on other sites' search results. "Display expansion" on a search campaign lets it spill into banner placements entirely.

The problem: you built a search campaign because you wanted people actively searching for a plumber. Display placements are people reading something else. The click quality is not comparable, and it's blended into your reporting as if it were.

Do: segment by network in your reports before deciding. If partner and display traffic converts at a meaningfully worse rate — which is typical for local service accounts — turn them off and put the budget back into search.

2. Location targeting set to "presence or interest"

The default includes people who are merely interested in your area, not physically in it.

For a national ecommerce business, reasonable. For a plumber in Nashville, it means paying for clicks from someone in Ohio researching Tennessee.

Do: change to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations." It's buried in location options and it's one of the highest-return single changes in most local accounts.

3. Broad match without tight negatives

Broad match has genuinely improved, and it can work well — with two conditions most accounts don't meet: good conversion data feeding it, and a real negative keyword list.

Without both, broad match on "water heater repair" will find you searches about water heater parts, DIY instructions, warranty questions, and jobs at water heater companies.

Do: pull the search terms report for the last 90 days. Read it — actually read it. You'll find categories of waste you can negate in bulk: job, career, salary, DIY, how to, free, parts, manual, and competitor names you don't want. Then keep doing it monthly, because it never stops generating new ones.

4. Conversions counting things that aren't leads

This is the expensive one, because it corrupts the bidding rather than just the reporting.

Automated bidding optimises toward whatever you told it a conversion is. If page views, clicks to a PDF, or 15-second calls are counted as conversions, the system learns to buy more of those — efficiently and relentlessly.

Do: open your conversion actions and check what's marked primary. Only real leads should be. Set a call duration threshold (60 seconds is a reasonable starting point) so misdials don't count, and make sure call conversions are actually being sent back — many service accounts are bidding on form fills while most of their real leads arrive by phone.

5. Ad schedule running when nobody answers

If your office closes at 5pm and calls after that reach voicemail, you're buying clicks that convert into nothing after 5pm.

Two valid answers, and the second is better:

Restrict the schedule to hours you can answer, or bid down outside them
Or cover the hours properly — an answering service or missed-call text-back — and keep running

For emergency trades the second is almost always right, because after-hours calls are the highest-intent and highest-ticket ones you get. For a 9–5 business, restricting is fine.

6. Auto-applied recommendations

Google can apply its own changes to your account automatically, and this is on by default in many accounts.

Some are harmless. Others add broad match keywords, expand targeting, or raise budgets — changes that increase spend and that you didn't make.

Do: turn auto-apply off, and review recommendations manually. The optimisation score is a suggestion, not a grade. An account at 100% is an account that took every recommendation, which is not the same as a well-managed one.

While you're in there

Check who has access. Old agencies, former employees, a contractor from four years ago. Remove anyone who shouldn't be there — and confirm you own the account rather than an agency owning it on your behalf. That question matters more than people realise.

Check the geographic report. Not just where you targeted — where clicks actually came from. It's frequently a surprise.

The honest caveat

Google changes defaults, names and menu locations regularly. Some of the above will be in a different place by the time you read it, and new defaults will have appeared that aren't on this list.

The durable principle: defaults expand reach, and expanded reach is Google's interest more than yours. When you find a setting you don't recognise, the question is "does this make my targeting broader," and if the answer is yes, it deserves scrutiny before it stays on.

More in the Google Ads guide and on measurement.

Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published September 8, 2026. Google's settings move — this post is reviewed quarterly.