Are You Controlling Google Ads — or Is It Controlling You? What Google Changes Without Telling You

Google Ads account settings. I bet you almost never visited this tab in your Google Ads account, but I will share with you today 3 most important settings in this menu. Also, at the end of this video, I will give you one tip, one life hack that I've never heard in the internet, on YouTube videos, never. It's really hidden gem for you, how to increase effectiveness of your ads. So looking forward to share it with you. Let's start.

Igor Levitsky, Dr. Eds, PhD, the Young Scientist of the Year in Ukraine. Since 2006, he has been applying mathematics to optimize Google Ads. Named Europe's best PPC speaker by Ads World Experience. One of the leading Google Ads experts in the world. A professional educator. Over 4,000 entrepreneurs have increased their sales after taking his courses. A practicing expert, Igor's clients generate $50 million in profit from Google Ads each month.

You can find general account settings in the menu Admin, Accounts Settings. There are a lot of videos on YouTube with the strategies, with the campaign settings, and so on and so on and so on. But almost no videos about the most important part of Google Ads, the account settings that affect all your campaigns, all your ads, all all your budgets, all your money. In this menu, Google collected all data about your account. But let's discuss first 3, the most important. First one is account-level negative keywords. It works extremely good for Search Ads, for Shopping Ads, but the problem is with Performance Max ads. In Performance Max, you cannot exclude the search terms, you can't add negative keywords. But Performance Max can still serve your clients in the Google search. So even if you excluded negative keywords "free" and so on from search campaign, from shopping campaign, Performance Max will still show your ads to somebody who are looking for the free cleaning. How completely exclude and completely block some negative keywords for any campaign in your account? You can follow to admin account settings, find negative keywords, and press this plus. In this field, you can add line by line your negative keywords. For example, free, video, how-to, and so on, and press save. After this, these negative keywords will apply to every single campaign in your Google Ads. My recommendation, never use at the account level negative keywords that are not completely wrong to your business. If you have some negative keywords, let's say, now you serve just New York, but in the future, nobody knows. But now you want to exclude any other states, any other cities from your ads. So somebody who are looking for, let's say, New Jersey cleaning service will not see your ads. You can add New Jersey at account level. But if in the future you will decide to serve New Jersey as well, I bet you will forgot to delete this negative keyword from this list. So use the account-level negative keywords only for general keywords that are not applicable to your business at all. Never put here the names of the cities, of the states, or services that you are not serving now but can in the future. If you are now selling only phones but not laptops, you can add the negative keyword laptop at the campaign level. And when you will create new campaign, for example, when you will start to sell laptops, you will not include these negative keywords. But I bet if you put the laptop negative keywords at the account level, you will forget to exclude this word after you will launch campaign for laptop selling. So you can use negative keywords at the account level, at the campaign level, at the ad group level. Always use this level smart to avoid situation when you will block your actual users from seeing your ads. Next quite important option is IP exclusions. First answer, there are some lazy employees for whom the easiest way to find some product or service in their own company is to Google it. When they just need to find some page on their website, they just usually put the search term in Google Ads and click on the first link. And very often the first link is your search ad from your brand or DCA campaign. In some cases, there are more clicks from the employees, from the team, from the branches than from actual users. And of course, you don't want to waste your advertising budget on your team because they already aware about services that you serve. So how to exclude your employees, your team, your branches, your home from Google Ads? The easiest step is to go to whatismyip.com website and this website just shows your actual IP, my public IPv4. Just copy this IP and paste it in IP exclusions and press save. That's it. Next, send this link via Messenger, WhatsApp, or whatever to your employees, to your branches, to your partners, and ask them to share with you their IP addresses. Put all of these IP addresses into IP exclusions panel and press save. After this, you will never waste your advertising budget on your employees or your partners. Next question is more complicated. What if somebody wants to click fraud me? What if my competitor just click on my ads from different devices, from different laptops, from different users and waste my budget on these clicks. I will show you how to determine exact IP addresses. So this is admin panel of my hosting provider. I'm sure you have another hosting provider, but try to find in the dashboard IP statistics link or something like this. Ask technical support if you need. Where can I find the statistics about IPs? For example, this is my statistics. And I can see that some IP address did almost 1,000 requests to my website. First of all, I can learn about what is this IP. Okay, some general information. In my case, I also can look at the log file and try to find what exactly this user with this IP address did on my website. And in my case, this user visited admin panel. So I'm sure that this is my technical guy, my technical expert who just set up my website for new landing page. So in my case, of course, I will exclude him because I don't want to show— to spend my money to show my ads to the guy who is actually my employee. In your case, if you will find in this statistic some IP addresses that visit your website a lot of times or from unexpected countries, unexpected locations, just feel free to exclude them and eliminate the click fraud from your website. But with this technique, you can exclude only amateur-level click fraud. If somebody will decide to click fraud you professionally, Professionally, it will go via a thousand of virtual machines or virtual IP addresses, and you cannot exclude in this way the professional attack. I'm taking 32 seconds to share something important with you so you can stop wasting your ad budget. I've managed over $700 million in Google Ads, so all my insights are tested and proven. I regularly talk to senior leaders at Google, and I'm an official Google partner. My students, entrepreneurs all over the world, have already optimized their ad campaigns, cut costs, and boosted sales using my methods. These strategies work for any budget, whether it's $500 or $5 million. I invite you to use these proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. Next, quite important option is Auto-Apply of recommendation. You can go to Admin, Account Settings, Auto-Apply, and press to go to Auto-Apply settings. Or you can go to Campaigns, Recommendations, and choose Auto-Apply. If you will open these two tabs, maintain your ads and grow your business, you will find a lot of interesting things inside this. By default, all of these checkboxes are turned on. And Google can change your targeting, change your rotation, change your ads. Just imagine that you serve VIP clients. For example, you sell some incredible expensive things. And in your ads, you intentionally mention that it's only for VIP, it's high price offer, and so on. But Google will decide that your ads will have higher CTR If Google will change your search ad with tags like "cheap thing," "cheap products," "big sales," and so on, and a lot of users who are looking for something cheap will go to your website and will ask questions why it is so expensive. But your actual targeting audience will just ignore your ads because they are not interested in something cheap. So I'm sure you don't want to give Google ability to change your ads. So turn it off, all of these settings, all of these checkboxes. As you can see, Google can turn on optimized targeting. Google can add new keywords. Let's say you waste not enough money on Google Ads and Google can add new keywords and help you to waste more without, of course, any value for you. Just add new keywords that Google can show your ads and charge you more. By default, Google can add broad match keywords, use display expansion, even change your bids. For example, change your target CPA. Google will decide that you spend not so many as Google wish for Google Ads and will just increase your target CPA. To avoid all of this situation, to avoid wasting of your money, just go to this setting, Auto-Apply, and turn all of them off. After this, you can be sure that only you manage your Google Ads settings. And the last secret option that I want to share with you. In the option Customer Match, you can turn on Conversion-based Customer List. What is this? I'm sure you know about Customer List Audiences inside Google Ads. You can add emails or other personal data of your customers, and Google will create audience based on this data. But Google can create this type of audience customer list based on conversions on your website. What's the point? You will ask. I can create just standard audience of, uh, users who interacted with some page or tag. And the point is, when you create Standard Audience, in this audience you add only separate devices of users. But in Customer List, Google adds a users as a whole with the different devices that each particular user can use. So for example, if you have 1,000 users in Standard Audience, It means that you have 1,000 devices or browser fingerprints or cookies in this audience. So 1,000 unique devices. But with customer list, 1,000 users in this customer list means that you have 1,000 unique users. Each of them can have several devices, laptop, desktop, TV, mobile phone, and so on. So the value of customer list is much more higher than the value from standard audience. Just turn this option on and you will see in your Audience Manager new audience, new customer list based on conversion data. Call Reporting and its hidden threat. Just imagine the situation. You are using the call asset in your Google Ads or you are using call-only ads. So user can just click on your ads or on asset on your ads and call you. You launched your Google Ads. It works quite good. Users call you, ask questions, pay you money in the end. But if user will save this number and try to call you again, let's say in a month, he will call to absolutely other business. Why? Because if Call Reporting is turned on, on your account, Google instead of your numbers substitutes into the ads Google's own redirected numbers. And when somebody calls to this number, Google redirects it to you or to another advertiser in the future. So let's see where you can change or choose the option for you. In the Admin Account Settings menu. You can find Call Reporting. If you will read the Google Ads Help, you can see that Call Reporting which runs on Google forwarding numbers. And you can also see nice explanation how this forwarding works. Customers get routed through a Google forwarding number which allows you to gather this data about the call. So it works like a free call tracking. But in case of another call tracking tools, you can buy separate pool of phone numbers and work only with these 4 numbers. So in case if user will decide to call you again in a month with a separate call tracking tool, this user will still call to you. But in case of Google forwarding numbers, nobody knows who will answer the call. If you want to turn off this feature, if you want to your users call directly to you without any substitutes, without any forwarding numbers, just turn on this option and press save. In case if you will decide to enrich your data with the information about call duration, about number of calls, and so on, you can turn on this option and even choose to save calls for 30 days. And if you have third-party provider for call analytics, you can send this data to the third-party provider. But in this case, you should be aware if user will save this number and will try to call you even tomorrow. It's high probability that the user will call to absolutely another business. Notifications in the Google Ads— how to turn them off or how to receive push notifications on your phone? In this video, I will tell you all about Google Ads notifications. If you're tired from a lot of emails from Google Ads, if they bombard you with some newsletters, feedback opportunities, actions, alerts and so on, but you don't want to unsubscribe from Google Ads emails because you understand they, they actually can send you something quite important. What is the best way to reduce the number of emails that you receive from Google Ads? You can go to Admin Notification in your Google Ads account and turn off all notification topics. Regarding actually important emails like billing alerts, if you have some problem with your billing, you will still receive. You will still receive account security issues and new users who added to your account, but you can opt out from emails that actually have only marketing purpose from Google Ads. And you will save a lot of time for you to filter these emails by your hands. I highly recommend to turn all of them off because actually important and it's billing, reports, advertising verification, and account security. All other type of emails is just wasting of your time. And some advertisers would like to receive notifications on their phone, especially critical notifications about balance on their account, about issues with their ads. If you want to receive push notifications on your phone, you need to download Google Ads application for your mobile. Then go to the settings and press turn on on notification options. After this, you can choose which notifications you want to receive in push messages on your phone and you will receive information like budget going low or you have some disapproved ads or you have some problems with billing or you can have identity verification process final, finalized, or something else. So to summarize this video, if you want to receive less emails from Google Ads, just turn all of them off in your web interface of Google Ads. If you want to receive critical notifications on your phone, just opt in for them via Google Ads application for your phone. See you in the next videos.