In a new Google Ads campaign, a large share of the budget often goes to unnecessary clicks in the first few days. The reason: default settings are configured for Google’s convenience, not for the advertiser. If you change the following 5 settings before launching the campaign, most of that waste disappears.
These are not advanced optimizations — they are basic hygiene. But in most campaigns I have seen, at least 3 of these 5 are set incorrectly.
1. Turn off the Display Network
When you create a Search campaign, Google automatically checks two boxes: "Include Google Display Network" and "Include Google search partners".
The Display Network is a collection of banner placements across millions of third-party websites and apps. A click there is fundamentally different from a Search click: the person was not looking for you, they were reading something else and accidentally tapped the banner. Accidental taps in mobile games are especially common.
A Search campaign is for Search. If you need Display, create a separate campaign with a separate budget and separate tracking. When mixed together, the averages in your report become misleading: Display delivers cheap clicks, CPA looks "good," but there are no conversions.
What to do: In campaign settings, open the "Networks" section and uncheck both boxes.
2. Switch Geography to "Presence"
This is the setting that wastes the most money and gets the least attention.
In Location options, there are three choices, and the default is "Presence or interest" — meaning the ad is shown to people who are in your target location and people who are interested in that location. In practice, this means: you provide a service in Tashkent, but your ad is shown to someone in another country reading an article about Tashkent.
What to do: Settings → Locations → Location options → "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations".
Also check the locations you are excluding: add countries where you do not provide service at all to the "Exclude" list.
3. Prepare Your Negative Keywords List in Advance
Adding negative keywords after the ad is live does not recover money already spent. Build the list in advance.
Categories that almost every commercial campaign needs to block:
- Free intent: free, download, torrent
- Learning intent: what, how, why, do it yourself, textbook, course (if you do not sell courses)
- Job seeking: vacancy, job, resume, salary
- Competitor brands: list the brands in your industry
- Products you do not have: if you rent or sell, make the one you do not offer a negative keyword
Match type matters: if you set a negative keyword to phrase match ("bepul"), it blocks all queries containing that phrase.
After the campaign is live, open the Search terms report every 2–3 days (Insights and reports → Search terms) and review the actual queries. In the first week, you usually find 20–40 new negative keywords. This task later becomes a once-a-month habit.
4. Set Up Conversion Tracking Before the Ad
If conversions are not measured, Google’s automated strategies do not know what to optimize — they only increase the number of clicks. In that case, choosing "Maximize clicks" is the most reliable way to spend money quickly with no results.
The order should be like this:
- GA4 is installed and verified to work across the site
- The desired event is defined: form submission,
tel:click, add to cart, order completion - The event is marked as a "Key event" in GA4
- GA4 and Google Ads accounts are linked, and the conversion is imported
- You confirm that a real number appears in the "Conversions" column in Ads
Check: place a test order on your site yourself and wait for it to appear in the Ads report within 24 hours. If it does not appear — do not launch the ad.
For businesses that sell by phone, also record the phone number click as an event; otherwise, the campaign’s most valuable result will not be measured at all.
5. Starting Strategy: Do Not Switch to Automation Immediately
In a new account, choosing "Maximize conversions" or "Target CPA" seems logical, but these strategies rely on historical data. Without data, the algorithm spends your budget to learn.
A sequence that works in practice:
- At the start: "Manual CPC" or "Maximize clicks" with a
Maximum CPC bid limitset. The limit is mandatory — without it, a single click can consume the daily budget. - After conversions are collected: switch to "Maximize conversions".
- After a stable CPA is visible: set "Target CPA".
One note about daily budget: Google may spend up to 2 times the daily limit (while maintaining the monthly average). Therefore, set the daily budget as an average plan, not as the maximum you can afford.
Check the Landing Page Before the Ad
Even if these settings are correct, if traffic lands on a poor page, money will still be wasted. Minimum requirements: the page loads on mobile within 3 seconds, the promise in the ad is repeated on the first screen of the page, a contact method is visible, and the form has no more than 3-4 fields.
To review site speed and technical condition separately, items 6 and 7 in the SEO audit checklist (Core Web Vitals and mobile version) are directly relevant for ads as well — a slow page also increases click cost in Google Ads through Quality Score.
Conclusion
Before launching your first campaign: Display is off, geography is set to "Presence," the negative keywords list is ready, conversions are being measured, and the strategy is manual with a limit. All five take about one hour.
The next task is to read the Search terms report regularly. The habit that saves the most money in Google Ads is this: once a week, check what queries people entered to see your ad.