5 Google Ads Default Settings That Quietly Waste Your Budget

If you've just launched a Google Ads campaign and left everything on its default setting, you're almost certainly paying for clicks that were never going to turn into customers. Google ships new campaigns with several options switched on (or set a certain way) that suit Google's reach more than your return. The good news: most of them take seconds to change. Here are the five Google Ads default settings worth fixing first, why each one costs you, and the handful of cases where you'd actually leave it alone.

Key takeaways

• Four of these are quick toggles in your campaign settings, and one is a dropdown change. None of them risk breaking your account.
• Search Partners and Display Network expansion are both on by default in Search campaigns and usually convert far worse than plain Google search traffic.
• The location targeting default shows your ads to people merely "interested" in your area, not just people actually in it.
• "Observation" audiences don't restrict who sees your ads, they only measure. If you meant to target, you have to switch the mode.
• The default ad rotation picks "winners" too early on tiny samples, starving your better-performing ads.

Setting 1: Search Partners Network (turn it off)

Every new Search campaign has "Include Google search partners" enabled by default. That means your ads don't just appear on Google.com. They also show across hundreds of partner sites that use Google's search technology, places like Ask.com, AOL Search, YouTube search, Amazon in certain contexts, Walmart, and plenty of smaller sites you've never heard of.

The problem is intent. Someone searching on Ask.com is a different kind of visitor to someone searching on Google.com, and it shows in the numbers. Search Partner placements typically convert at 30 to 60% lower rates than Google.com searches. The clicks are cheaper, sure, but they tend to produce worse conversion rates with no offsetting benefit. For most commercial-intent campaigns, Search Partners produce 5 to 15% of impressions but only 2 to 5% of qualified conversions.

The fix: open Google Ads, go to your campaign, then Settings. Expand the "Networks" section, untick "Include Google search partners", and save.

When to keep it on: there are real exceptions. Very high-volume e-commerce accounts with broad consumer targeting, brand campaigns where any extra impression has value, and accounts deliberately testing partner traffic quality. For 90%+ of service businesses and B2B accounts, switch it off straight away.

Setting 2: Display Network expansion (turn it off)

This one catches people out. "Include Google Display Network" is enabled by default when you create a new Search campaign, even though the campaign is labelled Search. With it on, your text ads can show up as banner-style placements across millions of websites, apps and YouTube videos.

Search and Display are completely different beasts. Different user context, different conversion patterns, different creative needs. Cramming them into one campaign causes real problems:

• Bid strategy confusion. Smart Bidding can't optimise separately for Search and Display when they share a campaign.
• Reporting opacity. Your performance metrics blend two very different channels, so you can't see what's actually working.
• Display waste. Display impressions land on irrelevant placements that eat budget without bringing any real buying intent.
• Quality Score complications. Landing page experience differs for Search visitors versus Display visitors.

Display expansion inside a Search campaign typically eats 15 to 30% of campaign spend while producing only 5 to 12% of conversions, and at conversion rates well below your Search-only numbers.

The fix: Google Ads, your campaign, Settings. Expand "Networks", untick "Include Google Display Network", and save.

The right way to run Display: if you genuinely want Display advertising, build dedicated Display campaigns that sit apart from your Search campaigns. That lets you use Display-specific creative, bid strategies and audience targeting, with clean reporting you can actually read. Most service businesses should skip Display altogether. For those that benefit from it, dedicated campaigns produce 3 to 5x better ROI than mixed Search and Display campaigns.

Setting 3: Location target type (change it)

Location targeting decides who sees your ads geographically. Tucked away in the location settings is a dropdown labelled "Location options", and it defaults to "Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations."

That little word "interest" is the issue. The default shows your local ads to anyone Google thinks is interested in your area, including out-of-town visitors, former residents, and people who follow the area for reasons that have nothing to do with buying from you. Most of these people can never become customers, yet you're paying for them.

The fix: Google Ads, your campaign, Settings. Expand the "Locations" section, click "Location options", and change the "Target" dropdown from "Presence or interest" to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations". Save.

Typical impact: a 12 to 25% reduction in wasted spend, more or less immediately. This is the single biggest win for businesses serving local, commercial buyers. If most of your customers come from a defined area, this is the setting to fix today.

Setting 4: Audience targeting mode (change where it makes sense)

When you add an audience to a campaign, Google gives you two modes. "Targeting" restricts your ads so they only show to people in the audiences you've selected. "Observation" lets your ads keep showing to everyone but tracks how that audience performs. The default for new audiences is Observation.

Here's the catch. Observation mode gives you zero targeting benefit. It's purely a measurement tool and changes nothing about who sees your ads. Plenty of businesses add a Customer Match list, In-Market audiences or Similar Audiences expecting to tighten their targeting, but Observation leaves the targeting exactly as it was and just adds reporting columns. The audiences feel like they're doing something. They aren't restricting anything.

When to use Targeting: when you have high-confidence audience data (say, a Customer Match list of your best customers), when you genuinely want to narrow who sees your ads, or when you're running parallel campaigns with broad reach in one and tight targeting in another.

When to use Observation: when you're testing whether an audience actually performs differently, when you want to apply a bid adjustment without excluding everyone else, or when you're gathering data on audience patterns before you commit to a restriction.

The fix: go through each campaign's audience settings. Find the audiences you meant as targeting restrictions but left in Observation, and switch those to Targeting. For audiences you genuinely want as measurement only, leave them in Observation but apply a positive bid adjustment where the data backs it up (typically +15 to 50% for your strongest audiences).

Setting 5: Ad rotation (change it during testing)

Ad rotation controls how Google spreads impressions across the different ads in an ad group. The default is "Optimize: Prefer best performing ads."

It sounds like exactly what you'd want. In practice it creates two problems. First, premature optimisation: Google declares a "winner" on early signals, often after only 200 to 500 impressions, long before the result is statistically meaningful. Second, reduced learning: the "losing" ads stop getting shown, so you never find out whether they'd have done better at scale.

The result is ads pinned as winners based on small-sample noise rather than real performance differences. The wrong ad ends up with 95% of impressions while the genuinely better ad gets starved before its real strength can show.

The better setting: "Rotate indefinitely" spreads impressions evenly across your active ads so real performance data can build up. After roughly 1,000 to 5,000 impressions per ad (depending on your volume), the differences become statistically meaningful and you can pause the weaker ads yourself.

The fix: Google Ads, your campaign, Settings. Expand "Additional settings", click "Ad rotation", change it from "Optimize: Prefer best performing ads" to "Rotate indefinitely", and save.

When to use each: "Rotate indefinitely" is the right call during active testing, the first 3 to 6 months of any new campaign and after any significant ad copy refresh. "Optimize" can suit mature, stable campaigns where you trust Google's algorithm to manage ad selection on extensive history. Most accounts are better off treating "Rotate indefinitely" as the default and pruning weak performers by hand as the data comes in.

What changing these defaults actually does for you

None of these fixes is clever or risky. They're mostly toggles and one dropdown. But stacked together they change where your money goes: away from low-intent partner placements, irrelevant Display banners and out-of-area browsers, and towards the people who can actually buy from you. The location and network changes alone tend to cut a meaningful slice of wasted spend, and the ad rotation change protects you from backing the wrong ad on a coin-toss sample.

The wider point: defaults are set for the average advertiser and for Google's reach, not for your specific business. It's worth going through every new campaign's settings line by line before you spend a penny, and reviewing them again every few months as your account matures.

If you'd rather not pick through campaign settings yourself, our paid advertising and SEO-led growth team can audit your account, fix the defaults that are leaking budget, and set up your tracking properly. It pairs well with a tidy, fast website too, since a good landing page is half the battle. A solid website maintenance plan keeps the pages your ads point at quick, secure and converting.

Got a Google Ads account running on autopilot? Get in touch and we'll show you exactly where the budget's going and how to claw it back.