We just finished auditing a client’s Google Ads account. What we found made us cringe — not because they did anything wrong, but because Google did.

Five settings. All turned on by default. All quietly draining money from their budget every single day. And the worst part? These aren’t buried in some obscure menu. They’re right there in the campaign settings — Google just really, really hopes you don’t change them.

Here’s the thing: Google is a publicly traded company. Their ad platform is designed to maximize Google’s revenue — not yours. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just business. And these five default settings are proof.

We’re going to walk you through each one, show you why it’s costing you money, and tell you exactly how to fix it. If even one of these is turned on in your account right now, you’re overpaying.

Let’s get into it.

1. “Presence or Interest” Is Selected for Location Targeting

This is the one that makes us angry on behalf of every local business running Google Ads.

When you set up a campaign and choose your target location — say, Gainesville, FL — you’d assume Google shows your ads to people in Gainesville. That’s the whole point, right?

Wrong.

Google defaults your location targeting to “Presence or interest” — which means your ads also show to people anywhere in the world who have “shown interest” in your target area. Someone in California who googled “Gainesville restaurants” last week? They might see your ad for roof repair. Someone in another country researching Florida colleges? They could see your ad for local plumbing services.

For a local service business, this is pure waste. You’re paying for clicks from people who will never walk through your door, never call you, never become a customer.

The fix takes 10 seconds:

Go to Campaign Settings > Locations > Location Options and change it from “Presence or interest” to “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.”

Do this on every single campaign. There is almost no scenario where a local service business benefits from “Presence or interest.”

2. Search Partners Is Turned On

You built a Google Search campaign because you want to show up when people search on Google. Makes sense. But Google has other plans for your budget.

By default, your Search campaign also runs on something called the Google Search Partners network — a collection of third-party websites like Ask.com, random directories, and other sites most people have never heard of.

The traffic quality from Search Partners is almost always terrible. High click volume. Near-zero conversions. And here’s the kicker: you can’t even see which partner sites your ads are running on. You’re paying for clicks from mystery websites with zero transparency.

We pulled the Search Partners data from our client’s account. The numbers were brutal: Search Partners was eating 18% of the monthly budget and producing exactly zero conversions. Not low conversions. Zero.

The fix:

Go to Campaign Settings > Networks and uncheck “Include Google search partners.”

If you want to give it a fair shot, run it for 30 days and compare conversion rates between Google Search and Search Partners. The data will make the case for you — it almost always does.

3. Broad Match Keywords Are Turned On

Google has been pushing broad match keywords harder than ever. Their pitch sounds reasonable: “Let our AI find conversions you’d miss with tighter match types.” The reality is… different.

Broad match means Google can show your ad for any search that it considers loosely related to your keyword. A broad match keyword like “roof repair” will trigger your ad for searches like:

• “DIY roof repair tutorial”
• “roof repair jobs near me”
• “roof repair tools for sale”
• “how much does a roofer make”

None of those people want to hire a roofer. But every one of those clicks costs you money.

The “cheap clicks” argument doesn’t hold up either. Yes, broad match sometimes delivers clicks at a lower cost-per-click. But CPC is not what matters — cost per conversion is what matters. Cheap clicks from irrelevant searches are not cheap leads. They’re expensive zeros.

And it creates a never-ending treadmill: you spend your time mining search term reports and adding negative keywords, constantly trying to plug leaks in a dam that shouldn’t have holes in the first place.

The fix:

Use exact match as your foundation. Add phrase match for terms where slight variations are valuable. Only use broad match in very rare, well-monitored experiments with strict daily budget caps and aggressive negative keyword lists already in place.

Go through your current keywords. If you see broad match terms eating budget with low conversion rates, pause them or switch to exact/phrase match. Your cost per lead will likely drop within the first week.

4. Automatically Created Assets Are Turned On

This one is sneaky. Google introduced a feature called “Automatically created assets” that lets Google write additional headlines and descriptions for your ads — without your approval.

Google pulls text from your website, your landing pages, even your other ads, and creates new ad copy variations on its own. Sometimes these auto-generated headlines are decent. Often, they’re generic, off-brand, or just plain wrong.

We’ve seen auto-generated headlines that pulled irrelevant text from a client’s footer. We’ve seen descriptions that didn’t match the service being advertised. And the whole time, these Frankenstein ads were running alongside the carefully crafted ad copy the client paid an agency to write.

The worst part? Most people don’t even know this is happening in their account.

The fix:

Go to Campaign Settings > Automatically created assets and turn them OFF for both headlines and descriptions.

Your ad copy should be intentional. Every headline, every description should be written with purpose — matching the keyword, speaking to the searcher’s intent, and pre-qualifying the click. Letting Google auto-generate this is like letting a stranger rewrite your sales pitch.

5. Dynamic Search Ads Are Enabled

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) sound helpful: Google crawls your website and automatically creates ads based on your site content. No keywords needed — Google figures out what to show and when.

Here’s the problem: Google’s idea of what’s relevant on your site might be very different from what you want to advertise.

DSAs will create ads for your About page, your blog posts, your Terms of Service, your careers page — anything Google’s crawler finds. People end up clicking on ads for pages that have nothing to do with your core services. You’re paying for traffic to pages that were never designed to convert.

We’ve seen DSA campaigns where 40% of the clicks went to blog posts and informational pages instead of service pages. Those clicks cost the same as a click to a high-converting landing page — but they convert at a fraction of the rate.

The fix:

If you have DSAs running, check the Dynamic Ad Targets report to see which pages Google is creating ads for. If they’re pointing to anything other than your core service/product pages, either add page exclusions or pause the DSA campaign entirely.

For most local service businesses, you’re better off with well-structured Search campaigns where you control every keyword, every ad, and every landing page. DSAs are a shortcut — and in Google Ads, shortcuts usually cost you.

Add These Up and the Numbers Get Scary

Each of these settings might seem minor on its own. But stack all five together — which is exactly what we found in our client’s account — and the waste adds up fast.

Out-of-area clicks from bad location targeting. Junk traffic from Search Partners. Irrelevant searches from broad match. Off-brand ad copy from auto-created assets. Wasted clicks from Dynamic Search Ads pointing to the wrong pages.

In the account we audited, these five issues combined were responsible for an estimated 30-40% of the entire monthly ad spend going to clicks that had virtually zero chance of becoming a customer.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s real money — every single month.

Want Us to Check Your Account? It’s Free.

Here’s the thing — we find these exact issues in almost every Google Ads account we look at. It’s not because business owners are doing something wrong. It’s because Google’s defaults are designed to benefit Google, and most people don’t know to change them.

Imperium Marketing Solutions offers a completely free, no-obligation Google Ads audit. We’ll log into your account, check every one of these settings (and about 20 more), and show you exactly where your money is going — and where it’s being wasted.

No sales pitch. No pressure. Just a clear, honest look at what’s happening inside your account. If everything looks great, we’ll tell you. If there are problems, we’ll show you exactly what they are and how to fix them.

We’re a Gainesville-based marketing agency, and we’ve built our reputation on being straight with people about their ad spend. If you’re running Google Ads and you’re not sure whether your budget is being spent wisely, let’s find out together.

Ready for your free audit? Contact us here or call us directly. It takes about 30 minutes and could save you thousands.

— The Imperium Marketing Solutions Team