In this tutorial Igor Ivitskiy walks advertisers through a series of hidden Google Ads settings that can silently waste budget or damage campaign performance. He first shows where to locate the Auto‑Apply recommendations toggle and explains why turning every option off prevents Google from automatically changing targeting, bids, keywords, or ad copy—especially important for high‑value or niche offers. He then debunks the popular advice to enable parallel tracking, clarifying that it is already the default for Search, Shopping, Display, and Video campaigns and only needs manual activation for hotel campaigns. Next, he warns about the hidden threat of Google Call Reporting: when enabled, Google replaces the advertiser’s phone number with a forwarding number, causing repeat callers to be routed to other businesses. He demonstrates how to disable forwarding while optionally keeping call‑duration data. The video also covers the “email address isn’t in an allowed domain” error that appears when sharing account access, showing how to add the required domain in the security settings. Finally, Igor details the entire billing workflow—choosing billing country and currency, matching the payment‑profile name to the cardholder name, selecting automatic versus manual payments, and the limited ways to edit a payment profile (mostly via Google support). Throughout, he emphasizes practical steps, real‑world examples, and the financial impact of each setting, aiming to help advertisers protect their spend and improve ROI.
How to manage auto-apply recommendations and why it's necessary to turn them off.
Igor Levitsky, Dr. Edds, 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.
So first of all, let's find where you can set up the 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. Things, and in your ads you intentionally mention that it's only for VIPs, 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 a 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 is this, 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. Myth about parallel tracking. You can find a lot of videos and articles in the internet when authors advise you to turn on parallel tracking. They say that you have to enable parallel tracking in order to increase the speed of loading of your landing page, in order to increase the overall efficiency of your ads. So what is parallel tracking? Without this option, Google Ads, when user clicks on your ads, will send the click first to special tracking URL where Google collects data about this user. And only after this, Google will redirect this user to your website. Yes, it's very fast, it's faster than 1 second, but still it's some type of delay. With parallel tracking, Google sends user immediately on your landing page and track all the details about this user on the backend. In this case, immediately after click, user lands to your website without any delays, without any lags. So in general, sounds very good. And you can find a lot of videos on YouTube or articles where they advise you to turn on the parallel tracking manually in the settings of your account. But let's look to this setting together. You can find it in Admin Account Settings. Here is the Tracking tab and Parallel Tracking option. You can turn on or turn off this option. And the first question that I can ask: it's only for hotel campaigns, isn't it? Yes, exactly. If you will press on this question mark and learn more, you will find that parallel tracking is default option for Search, Shopping, Display, and Video campaigns. For all of these types of campaigns, parallel tracking works by default without any interaction from your side. You don't need to enable this option if you, like 99% of marketers, use only Search, Shopping Display, and Video campaigns. Only if you are using Hotel campaigns, specific Hotel campaigns that allow users to book the hotel immediately from the search results page, in this case, you can turn it on. As you can see, this option is applicable only for Hotel campaigns. For all different types of campaigns, it's the default option. You need to much nothing. So if you will see in the future advices about enabling of parallel tracking, just be aware that these advices are outdated at least for 6 years. 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, Google 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 phone 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. 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. 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. This email address isn't in an allowed domain. What does it mean and why you have this error inside your Google Ads? So I suppose you tried to share access to your Google Ads with somebody else. And when you inserted the email of this person, Google Ads showed you an error: "This email address isn't in an allowed domain." How can you resolve this issue? Very easy and very fast. The first of all, this layer of security that Google Ads added to their system allows you add the email addresses only from particular domains. When we say about domain, we mean the part after the symbol. So in my case, just for example, it's random domain, igor.com. So to be able to add this email, I need to first copy the domain that was allocated to this email. And go to the Security tab, open Allowed Domains, and add another domain that I need to add. In my case, igor.com, and press Save. After this, I can return to my Access and Security, Users menu, insert my igor@igor.com email, and press Send Invitation. After this, invitation was successfully sent and the user can receive access to my account. How to set up billing in Google Ads. How to set up payment profile, how to add, change, delete it, whatever you will need to do with your payment method. So if you're just creating new account Google Ads or you're creating new payment profile, you will need to know how to properly fill all the necessary details. When you first set up account, Google Ads always asks you about your country and about currency in which you prefer to pay for your ads. The main idea is that the billing country and country where you plan to advertise can be absolutely different. So you can set up account, let's say, for Indonesia, but advertise from this account all over the world or only United States. Or you can set up account with billing address in United States and advertise to, let's say, Australia. It doesn't matter. Google asks at this stage only about country where your bank account and where your organization are based. So in our case, let's set up with United States. And Google always asks about currency in which you prefer to pay. If you want to avoid unnecessary exchange rates, always choose the currency that align with currency of your bank account. If your bank account in United States dollars, so choose United States dollars in the Google Ads. Only one small nuance. If we speak about Google Auction, you always pay per every single click the amount of money that more than your competitor by the one cent. And if we pay in United States dollars. So in this case, we will— let's say our competitor pays per click $3. We will pay $3.01. Now I ignore the quality score and another parameters that can affect. It's only for simplicity. So you will pay $3.01. But if you, let's say, set up account from country where exchange rate to dollar like hundreds times different, you can save some amount of money by choosing your local currency. Because in this case, let's say your local currency exchange rate to dollar, 100 your dollars to 1 United States dollar. In this case, you will pay per every single click the amount of money that 1 your local currency cent bigger than your previous competitor. In this case, you will save some money per every single click, but it's not a drastic saving, but it's some saving. So let's set up United States, United States dollar. Then Google always asks, do you organization or individual? In this case, I'm choose individual. My legal name and my zip code. Create. Then Google Ads asks, how will I pay for my ads? For the majority of us, it's easier to pay from credit or debit card. In this case, you will need the card number, like the usual details. Very important thing, your cardholder name has to be absolutely letter by letter the same as your payment profile name. In case if you will have different card payment profile, profile names, Google will just ban your account. So very carefully check whether the name and surname that you put inside payment profile align with the name and surname inside the details of your card. After this, Google will ask, do you prefer to pay upfront or do you prefer automatical chargings? Google prefers automatical chargings when you link your card and Google just charge your card when you spend some amount of money, some threshold of money that Google automatically set up. Next question: what if I need add another payment profile, change my, or delete mine? So there is setting in the menu, Billing Transfers, but you can change nothing inside this menu, inside this profile. So in order to change any details in your payment profile or completely change the profile, you need to write a message to the Google support team. They will ask you the same questions: what's the country, what's the currency, what's the name, what's the type of the business that you want to change. And only they able to change information inside your payment profile. Only one thing that you can change manually in the account settings. If you will go to Billing, Settings, How you pay, you will find that you can change automatic payments to manual payments. Just press this link and it gives you information that if you change, you need to put your money inside Google Ads upfront. And Google will stop your advertising when this money is not enough to cover your spending. Anytime you can return to automatic payments. Like a small advice, usually for the experienced advertisers who know how to control their budgets very precisely, I always choose automatic payments. For the new advertisers who are worried about the overspending on their cards whatsoever, I recommend to choose manual payments and put some money on Google Ads account upfront and just, uh, you will be absolutely sure that Google will advertise your business, your website only on this money and will never charge you automatically more than you decided previously. I wish you great results, a higher ROI. See you in the next videos.
