The sneaky settings hiding in your Google Ads account

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Every so often, Google changes their ads UI and quietly introduces new settings. If you haven’t been deeply hands on with your search ads over the past few years, you may not be familiar with all of the settings that could be hiding in your account, wasting budget, and hindering scale. Google does a pretty good job of burying these, so here are some things you should look for, and where to find them, as of the current iteration of the ads UI in April 2025.

Auto-apply recommendations

You may notice when you log into your ads account that Google has “recommendations” for your campaigns. More often than not, these recommendations are designed to get you to spend more money, and aren’t going to help you achieve efficient performance. Google might be auto-adding new keywords, auto-duplicating exact match terms to broad match, or creating and launching ads for you if you haven’t checked on this setting in a while.

To review and adjust these settings:

➡️ Select “Recommendations” from the left hand menu

➡️ Select the “Auto-Apply” button on the top right, above your “optimization score”

➡️ Review all the options that are checked off, and un-check any that give Google too much control over your campaigns. Typically, the only options I like to keep checked are “Use optimized ad rotation” and whatever bidding settings are relevant.

Bidding for new customers

Google gives you the option to optimize bidding for new customers, which sounds great if your goals are focused on customer acquisition. The problem is that Google still isn’t great at definitively identifying which impressions come from new customers, despite all their data from Gmail and Chrome browsers. This means the vast majority of traffic is not able to be definitively identified as “new”, and so is not bid on by default. Campaigns with this setting may seriously struggle to scale.

To review and adjust this setting:

➡️ From the campaigns view, go into each campaign’s settings by hovering over the campaign name and clicking the gear button

➡️ Under the “Customer Acquisition” setting, check whether you’re bidding equally for new and existing customers, or optimizing for new customers only

Automatically created assets

Google gives you the option to allow it to create ads for you based on your landing page, your domain, and your existing ads. There are few instances I can think of where it makes sense to allow Google to write ad copy for you, especially because copy can be created based on anything that exists on your domain. Most campaigns are organized to advertise specific products or services, and giving Google free rein of all the copy on your site to create ads could be an organizational, messaging, and performance disaster.

To review and adjust this setting:

➡️ From the campaigns view, go into each campaign’s settings by hovering over the campaign name and clicking the gear button

➡️ Under the “Automatically created assets” setting, check whether you’ve toggled this on or off

Broad match expansion

The broad match expansion setting allows Google to bid on broad match versions of all the keywords in your campaign, even if you’ve set them up as exact or phrase match. This is a surefire way to show up for irrelevant searches and waste a whole bunch of money, especially if you don’t have an incredibly buttoned-up negative keyword list.

To review and adjust this setting:

➡️ From the campaigns view, go into each campaign’s settings by hovering over the campaign name and clicking the gear button

➡️ Under the “Broad match keywords” setting, check whether you’ve toggled this on or off

Networks

You might assume your Google ads will only show when someone searches on Google, but that’s only true if you’ve specified this in your networks settings. Aside from the Google SERP, ads may show up on sites within Google’s Search Partner Network or Display Network, without much visibility into performance specifics beyond these broad buckets. My typical recommendation to avoid low quality traffic is to start by including the partner network, but not the display network, and keep an eye on your performance breakdown.

To review and adjust this setting:

➡️ From the campaigns view, go into each campaign’s settings by hovering over the campaign name and clicking the gear button

➡️ Under the “Networks” setting, check whether you’re including Search Partners and / or the Display Network

Negative keywords

Robust negative keyword lists are critical to a scaled-but-efficient search strategy — I wouldn’t use broad match keywords without them. This tells Google which search terms NOT to surface your ads for; “free” is a basic example if you’re selling a product or service. Google has buried this setting with its most recent iteration of the ads UI, but here’s how to find it.

To review and adjust this setting:

➡️ Hit “Tools” in the far left menu

➡️ Open the “Shared Library” drop down

➡️ Click “Exclusion lists”

➡️ Hit the plus sign to create a new negative keywords lists, or click into existing lists to add keywords and ensure lists are applied to all relevant campaigns

Conversion columns

You should have conversions as a column in your campaigns, ad sets, ads, and keywords views. But depending on the conversion actions you have set up at the account level, you might want to double-check the specific columns you’re using. If you have non-KPI events set up as conversions and are using the “all conversions” column, you’re going to be over-counting the number of “true” KPI events.

To review and adjust these settings:

➡️ Click on “Columns” and “Modify columns” from your campaign (or ad set, ad, or keyword) view

➡️ Expand the “All columns” dropdown

➡️ Within the “All columns” dropdown, expand the “Conversions” dropdown, and review which metrics are checked off. “All conversions” is likely going to count every instance of events you have set up as a “conversion”, whereas “Conversions” will count those set as primary actions only.

Now what?

Reviewed all these settings and still not happy with performance? Just reply to this email and we can schedule a deep dive.

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