Google is Stealing Your Budget... Change these 6 Hidden Settings

In this video, I want to take you through the six hidden settings that could be absolutely burning your Google Ads budget without you even knowing it. Now, when it comes to Google Ads, I do need to let you know that it does operate a lot like a casino. And what I mean by that is that it sets the rules in a way that Google will always win. So as a business owner, you've got to be really, really careful. Now, you've got to balance this out because Google is a powerful tool that you can use to grow your business. But there is some warnings because as I said, it does operate a little bit like a Las Vegas casino. And, and if you don't have your settings set correctly, you can be burning money faster than you're actually spending it. Another way of thinking this is that this could be a little bit of a laziness tax, that if you just let Google do what it wants to do, you're going to be paying extra because you just haven't paid attention to these settings, which could greatly increase the efficiency of your account spending. So in this video, I'm going to take you through what these six settings are so that your business can be more profitable with your Google Ads account spending. And the first one is your automatically applied recommendations, or what you would call your aar. By default, Google will tell. And what that means is that if you don't turn these off, Google can automatically change some really, really important things in your account, like what keywords you're targeting. It can also automatically make you spend money on the display network, which if not done correctly can be some really, really poor quality traffic. And it can also automatically switch to smart bidding, so maximize conversions or maximize conversion value and even automatically change your target. So some really, really important things that you don't want Google just blindly changing by itself. So to check this, where you need to go, you want to go into the Recommendations tab. And from the Recommendations tab you'll see what's called an Auto Apply settings. If you don't see that, one thing you do need to make sure is that you're looking at all campaigns because if you've got an individual campaign selected, you won't see this Auto Apply setting. So once you're in Auto Apply settings, what you need to do is you just need to go through and then just make sure that all of these little check boxes that you can see through here, make sure that these are all turned off. They're not turned off. Google can go through and make those changes. As they're saying you actually need to opt out out of it. It's not an opt in. Google automatically put you into these settings, so make sure you've opted out. Now, we're going to stay here in the iPad so I can show you a couple of extra things. But one thing I do want to point out is that some people do say if I do turn off these automated recommendations, I'm just new to Google, I don't know what optimizations to do. Don't worry, because we're here to help you at the fine digital academy. Because if you follow that link in the description below, you can get access to a free product which is called Start and Scale. This gives you access to not only my Google Ads optimization checklist, but it also gives you access to over 30 different optim videos where step by step walk you through how to optimize your account. I also show you how to set up all of the different types of campaigns that you need when to use those campaigns. And you also get access to Google Ads in 2026, masterclass, all that amazing free stuff. Just follow that link in the description below because let's now go to the setting which can cost you money number two. And this is all got to do with your location targeting. What you're seeing. A common theme here is that with location targeting in Google, if you target say for example a city like New York, you would instantly think that hey, my ads are only going to show in New York. But obviously with goog, sometimes it's not as simple like as that. So what you need to do is that when you're in the campaigns, I want you to go and choose an individual campaign, then go into your settings. And when you're in the settings, you want to scroll down to your location targeting settings and then you want to go to your location options. And you'll see here that there's actually two ways that you can target. You've got the presence option and you've also got presence and interest. What the difference between these two options are is that the presence option targets the people who live in the location you're targeting or who are regularly in that location. Whereas presence and interest also takes into people who are showing an interest in that area. Some people go and argue that especially if you're in niche like tourism or real estate or moving or something in that area where people could be using the example of New York again outside of New York, but wanting to search for a service inside of New York, people go, well, that's why you need that presence and interest turned on however, we've seen far better results by having that set out into two separate campaigns. So you would have a campaign for New York only that is specifically targeted to people who are currently in New York. And then you've got another campaign which is targeting, you know, everyone else in the US or even other countries who are looking for your service inside of New York. Now, the benefit of that, especially if you want to run any local discounts or any messaging, which is more important for locals versus for tourists coming in, that's a really, really good extra strategy you can use. But the main thing I want to communicate. So remember, it's not just about targeting your location. Make sure you set that location targeting in most cases to presence only and not presence and interest. All right, now I'm going to take you to another one. And because we're here, what I do want to show you is I want to show you about AI Max inside of a search campaign. You'll see that there's just a little toggle button right here. It's really, really easy. I don't like the word toggle, but that's how Google rolled it out, that you just turn on this toggle button. What this does by switching that on, that turns on AI Max inside of that search campaign. Now, let's talk about why I have an issue with AI Max just being turned on inside of a current search campaign. If you're unfamiliar with AI Max. AI Max launched at Google Marketing Live last year and it was really sold as keywordless targeting, which is nothing new inside of Google Ads. But the big promise of AI Max is that it would find incremental growth. So people who are searching for your products or services who would not normally do that previously. As of the time of this recording in February 2026, the internal testing that we've done has shown that AI Max has not shown any real benefits in the incremental growth. That's not to say that over the next six to 12 months that AIO Max won't become more powerful, but in current format, we're still not 100% sold or not even close to 100% sold on the effectiveness of AI Max. That's not saying that you shouldn't use AI Max, but I'll just say be very, very careful. And what we would recommend that if you are going to use AI Max, you want to put it into a separate campaign. You may ask, why would we say that? And the reason comes back to what AI Max is designed to do. It's designed to find new Incremental traffic. So essentially people who are searching turns which are not currently converting inside of your account. So that's why we put it into a separate campaign. And the way that we build that inside of that new campaign which has IOMAX turned on, we would add in any current high converting keywords as negative keywords in that new campaign, which has AOMAX functionality and would also take out brand spend. Because the big thing that we found is that aomax just went under single word brand keywords. That's why I would say at the moment we still see greater results with dynamic search ads. I do think that will change throughout 2026, but for sure, definitely move AI Max into a separate campaign rather than just using it inside of your current search campaign. All right, so let's now go to setting number four that could be wasting your money. And this one is especially for any conversion actions which are not e commerce based. So I'm talking about form fills, quote fills, phone calls. When you're inside of your conversion setup, you want to make sure that you have set that conversion tracking to one and not every. Now what's the difference between this? If you've got a conversion goal, let's just say for example, a form fill even you set it to every in the conversion settings. What that means is that every time that form is filled out, it's going to count as separate conversion. What the risk is here is that if you do have any spam or body activity on your site and that form gets filled out multiple times, they would all be counted as individual conversions. So it can very, very quickly sway your data. So what you want to make sure is you've set it to one. So it's only one form fill that is classed as a conversion action. And that brings us to the last two settings, which is number five and number six. And number five is that you don't have brand exclusions added into your Performance Max campaign. Now, the reason for why we want to exclude brand on a Performance Max campaign is because I love Performance Max as a campaign type, but I'm really, really acutely aware of what was created to do. Performance Max looks to see what is converting currently inside of your Google Ads account and then it just looks to find as many new conversions as it can get based off that data. The problem being is that if you don't block out your Branded spend, Performance Max will move very, very quickly to Branded spend because that's where it's able to get the easiest conversions. What you want to do with Performance Max is You want to make sure in the settings and this is something that we go through in that start and scale program. If you're unsure of what I'm talking about here is you want to make sure that inside of your performance max campaign that you've excluded brand by adding in a brand list which includes your own brand. Another option that you can do for a performance max campaign is you can create a competitive brand list so you can actually block your competitor terms from operating inside of your performance max campaign. So that's another option that you can use. And now we come to the sixth and final setting that you need to get right inside of your Google Ads campaigns so that you're not wasting money inside of Google Ads. And this has got to do with a term that Google calls optimized targeting. This is specific to demand gen, your display and also your video campaigns. By default, optimized targeting is used inside of a performance max campaign. But for demand gen and video and display, you can use what's called optimized targeting. When it comes to optimized targeting. So let's just say you have set up a demand gen campaign because you want to target cart abandoners or you want to target website visitors and you've got some really, really specific messaging for them. Maybe a special offer or a cart abandoning offer. And if you've gone through and built out that audience list and then you select optimized targeting, what that actually does is that it turns that targeting into a signal, which means that it can target any audience that it seems fit. So I don't want to give the message that optimized targeting should never be used because there are some really good cases where it can be used. Especially if you're just wanting a broad reach campaign. You're wanting in as many people as possible to see your ads, that's a great fit for it. But if you are using some really, really specific audience targeting around website visitors, cart abandoned or anything like that, optimized targeting is something that you definitely want to have turned off. Thank you for joining me. And even if you've got some campaigns which you've been running for a long time, it does make sen just to go through and make sure you do have all of those settings set correctly. And if you would like to learn more about iimax, make sure you go through and watch this video right here. And remember, if you need access to start and scale, just follow that link in description below. I look forward to seeing you in our next video. See ya.