When setting up campaigns in Google Ads, you’ll often come across a plethora of ads settings which can seem daunting as well as confusing. And that’s how it is meant to be! Google provides you with a bulk load of settings so that you mess up and spend more, earning Google it’s fair share of revenue.

Implement these settings to stop Google from wasting your marketing budget!

In this article, we are going to learn how to run frugal search campaigns by choosing the precise settings in Google Ads and setting up your campaigns for success. These settings are the base of your campaign, messaging, keyword targeting, location and audience targeting as well as placements and bidding.

Google Ads Settings for Account and Campaign Set up

Google Ads Settings in your ads account are at two levels

1. Account
2. Campaign

Account level Settings in Google Ads

Let’s take a quick look at the account level settings before diving into the details of campaign level settings. The important and advanced settings for you Google Ads Account are:

1. Tracking Template: you can configure a dynamic tracking template by using multiple parameters as variables. These will reduce your effort to set up UTMs at campaign, ad group or ad level.
2. Auto Tagging: This ads click ID (GCLID) to your parameter so that every click can be tracked with a unique ID across the whole funnel. This is also used by Google in its attribution models and automated optimization of the campaigns.
3. Call Reporting: There are three further settings available for the following purposes:
   1. Get detailed info
   2. Save call recordings
   3. Share data with 3rd party call analytics provider
4. Account level negative keywords: You can add up to 1000 keywords at account level. These will reduce your effort while setting up campaigns.
5. IP Exclusion: You can exclude the IPs for your office locations so that your employees who regularly search for brand name don’t see the ads. You should also work with your IT team to exclude any IP’s sending spam traffic.
6. Customer Match for Smart Bidding & Optimized Targeting: This further has two settings to choose from as a checkbox to switch on or off:
   1. Use all customer match lists in Smart Bidding and Optimized Targeting
   2. Conversion Tags: Turn on conversion based customer lists

Campaign Settings in Google Ads

For Google Search Ads, we have more than a dozen settings that need to be precise to maximize the campaign performance. Some of these settings are conveniently (for Google) hidden in drop down menus or are pre chosen for you stating ease of use and better performance but in reality with the intent that you spend more with lesser control to optimize performance. Now let’s list down these settings and my best suggestions on how to use them

1. Conversion Goal
   1. Account default
   2. Campaign Specific

Account default goals make it easier for you to manage multiple campaigns and provide enough data for optimization across the account. Thus, I suggest using account specific goals. Multiple goals can be selected as account specific. This is helpful specially in B2B to optimize some campaigns for upmarket. On the other hand, for B2C businesses, campaign specific goals can be useful during seasonal campaigns with engagement related goals.

2. Customer Acquisition
   1. For new customers only
   2. For existing and new customers

As discussed in my previous blog on Bid Strategies and Optimization, This is an extremely useless setting meant for you to choose an extremely high target CPA and spend more. Google is hardly able to distinguish between new and existing customers based on either cookies or email IDs. Thus, I suggest not to use this setting and keep it at default for both new and existing customers.

3. Marketing Objective: These can be Sales, Leads, Traffic or No Goal guidance. Choosing this will not have any impact on your campaign performance. But I suggest choosing the right one to help google learn about your business objectives.

4. Networks
   1. Search Partners
   2. Display (Search on Display)

My experience with both of these has been dismal. However, for some industries Search Partners may provide a low CPA but will also have a low volume which is fine. Analyze Search Partners data regularly to find out if this setting should be unchecked for any campaigns. I use it mainly for brand and competitor campaigns and not for generic campaigns.

For Search on Display, using this setting will help you get conversions and leads at a very low CPA. However, for B2B the quality of leads will not be at par so you may end up with high cost per deal. For B2C, I would again suggest analyzing this at campaign level and accordingly switch on or off this setting. I have seen good results from this campaign in hotel industry.

5. Location
   1. Location Inclusion and Exclusion by Country, State, City, Region or Radius

Then there is a hidden option in drop down which is extremely important to reduce wastage of your marketing budget. This hidden drop down will expand into two options to choose from:

1. Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted location
2. Presence or Interest: People in or interested in your targeted location

I strongly suggest you choose the first option of Presence only as this will help you save a lot of wasted budget. Do not waste your money by choosing the second option because Google will start showing your ads across the globe where you won’t even be selling your products or services.

6. Languages: Choose the language of your ad messaging as well as targeted audience. This will help Google in targeting the right audience and share the ads in their native languages.
7. Budget
   1. Campaign budget
   2. Shared budget

Now again, this is one of those settings that you need to be extremely careful about. If you are a B2C business that is able to track RoAS end to end on Google Ads itself (not considering returns and other losses/expenses here), then using shared budget for your Generic KW campaigns can make life extremely easy for you. You can read more about budgeting strategy here.

On the other hand, for B2B businesses, where end to end tracking is not possible due to limited conversion volume or long sales cycles, I highly suggest using campaign level budgets as it will help you segment budgets on the basis of device type and keyword priority.

8. Bidding: There are multiple bidding strategies available in Google Ads. I have discussed this topic in detail in my previous blog which I highly recommend you to read in order to improve campaign performance.

9. Automatically Created Assets: The options here are On or Off.

Choosing this is highly dependent on the type of business, brand strategy and campaign. For most part you can use automatically created assets. But for any business with specific terms and conditions, offers or disclaimers, keep this option switched off.

10. Start and End Dates

Many of your campaigns will be evergreen campaigns without any end dates. But, seasonal or promotional campaigns need to have proper start and end dates as per your marketing calendar.

11. Broad Match Keywords: Again the options here are On or Off

I strongly recommend keeping this setting off so that Google does not waste your budget in haywire targeting. For businesses with monthly budget of $1M or more, keep this option On for only Broad Match campaigns. You can read my blog on Keyword Optimization to know more about this.

12. Dynamic Search Ads: Again there are only two options here On (based on domain or subdomain) and Off. Along with this there is an option to choose the language. My suggestion here is to keep this off and instead use a DSA ad group to monitor the performance and compare it to your other ads.

13. Value Rules for Conversion Goals based on Primary and Secondary Dimensions: This is useful mainly for B2C for engagement related metrics. In B2B, you should set up these values in Goals itself or use offline conversions import to use dynamic values.

14. Ad Rotation: This provides you to optimize ad performance by choosing one of the following options:
    1. Optimize
    2. Do not optimize
    3. Optimize for Conversions
    4. Rotate evenly

Go for the easiest option in this case and let Google optimize ad rotation on its own. However, in the first 2 weeks, keep an eye if the impressions are skewing highly towards just one of the ads, in which case you should rotate them evenly to get a better comparison.

15. Lead Form Settings: You can choose to show a lead form whenever someone interacts with your ads. For better brand recognition and getting more traffic to your website for retargeting, I would suggest to keep this off. However, if you wish to enable this option, you’ll need to use APIs to sync lead form to your CRM.

16. Campaign URL options and Custom Parameters: You can use custom tracking parameters to send data to your CRM and analytics software. This option helps you to build custom parameters as well as set up dynamic UTMs. If you have set this up at account as well as campaign level, then campaign level url tracking will be given precedence.

17. IP Exclusion: You can provide a list of IPs to be excluded from your ad impressions. This is especially useful to exclude traffic coming from searches originating from your own offices and to exclude any IP’s which are sending spam clicks or traffic to your ads. Mostly, larger enterprises who do not provide work from home option will find a use for this feature.

18. Brand: Here you have two further settings available.
    1. Inclusion Lists: If you use this setting, broad match will automatically be switched on. Use this cautiously and regularly check search term report to exclude irrelevant search queries. You can use this to target products and services from a specific brand. This works like a competitor campaign which has its keyword targeting divided into two parts – competitor brand names list is provided in this setting while the generic keywords related to products and services as added into your regular keyword space.
    2. Brand Exclusion: You can use this to avoid showing ads on searches by brands that you consider are not in the same segment such as yours. This comes in handy to maintain brand image. An example here would be that Apple includes Redmi, POCO and Vivo in this list. This would enable them to avoid ads whenever a user is searching for phones from these brands and using search queries such as buy POCO smart phone, buy Vivo camera phone. Google is getting better at showing ads specific to the brands being searched.

This concludes our comprehensive list of all the settings available in Google Ads at account and campaign level. It is important for any marketer to implement these precisely in order to achieve optimal performance from Google Ads campaigns.

For most small businesses going into such details for each campaign can be an uphill task and therefore, you may need to hire professionals or an agency to manage your Google Ads account and help you improve your marketing performance.

Mindless helps businesses get the best performance out of their Google Ads account. We have helped our B2C clients achieve 20x return on ad spend and B2B clients lower CPL by 20% while improving lead quality and funnel conversion rates. We have managed over USD 60M in ad spend across Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads and other digital marketing campaigns. If your business is facing a challenge in optimizing Google Ads or other paid media channels, then book a free consulting session with our experts and find out how we can help your business achieve new heights.

You can also mail us on sales@mindless.digital for any queries.

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About the author:

Pragun Jain is a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with over 500+ businesses ranging from billion dollar SAAS enterprises to 5-star hotel chains, restaurants and retail stores. He has managed over USD 75M in paid media spend across Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads and other digital marketing channels.

You can visit his LinkedIn profile here.

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