← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
10 Hidden Settings In Google Ads (Episode 508)
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. Today I'm talking about Google Ads specifically I'm going to give you 10 hidden settings in Google Ads that I, I think can be all the difference. If you don't know about these things, they can save you a lot of just quality of life management in Google Ads or maybe change the entire game for things that you didn't know you could do. So I'm going to go through them. I'm going to give my favorite five or actually I'm putting right at the top. So if you appreciate me not wasting your time and getting to, you know, my five favorites after the second ad read, you know, and actually doing it at the top, be sure and subscribe to the podcast here. And you know I'm on YouTube, you can subscribe here, I'm here every Monday or you can reach out to me for help and, and with your Google Ads account, Chris Schaefer.com because that is my normal day job that I do every day. I've been doing it for 23 years now. So without further ado, uh, let's jump in to 10 hidden settings in Google Ads. I'm going to give you the first one here. This one is something I do in every single one of my accounts. It is account level automated assets. So there is a setting in Google Ads by default that allows Google and particularly it's called AI Google Google AI or something like that is what it's labeled that can go in and add site links, call outs, images do a lot of things to your account without your permission or even showing up in your changes history. So it is completely invisible. You'll never know that it's being done unless you investigate and happen to see that there's new site links that you didn't write, new call outs that you didn't create, new images that are pulled in that you didn't add. Well if you don't want these things happening, there is a hidden setting in Google Ads to turn that automated asset off. So in order to get there you have to go to the assets view there. So you go to the assets screen and then in the far right Corner There are three dots. 1, 2, 3. Real small like a, like an ellipses turned on its head, right? So it's turned to the side. Click on that and go to the, it'll have a little drop down there that says account level automated assets. Take you to a screen. Now do the same thing again. Once you're on the account level automated asset screen, click it again. That same button over on the right hand side and you'll go to the settings and there you'll be presented with a screen you've probably never seen, probably never seen this setting before. It is hidden deep. It's probably one of the deepest settings in Google Ads that I've ever seen. It doesn't even have its own dedicated button. It's some kind of out there, no one notices it. Little button. And you can turn off this feature. So Google will stop making call outs and particularly site links is what bothers me the most. If they create a site link that points people to my About Us page. I don't like that. In fact, I really get upset whenever the AI will go in and create a site link to my client's pricing page and in the sitelink headline I'll say get pricing. No, I don't want them to get pricing. I want them to hear my clients pitch first, right? I don't want them to pay 2, 3, 10, $15 for a click for them to, for the, for the customer to just click on and see that my client's price is, you know, $10,000 for this product before they've had the pitch about why it's $10,000, right? I mean that's ridiculous. That's not a good marketing pitch and I don't want that Google AI. So stop it. So you turn off that account level automated asset and it's done. It won't happen again. So stay tuned. I've got more, I've got nine more I'm going to share and they're all my favorite. They're actually hidden settings like this. I'm not making this up. Before I continue, I want to tell you about my sponsor, Optio. So Optio is formally a great software that did one thing, it gave you recommendations and it was a wonderful tool. And, and now it's leveled up, right? Gamers out there, you know what I'm talking about, it's leveled up. It's brought itself to a whole new level to do more than you've ever thought possible. It's brought in AI integration so that it's now become a power tool for multiple networks. LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and of course Google Ads. And you can take this tool and interact with your data, you can chat with your data, you can get account checks and ad copy and generate ads from certain pages and do a keyword finder tool and all kinds of stuff. You can analyze your data right there on screen with this wonderful tool you can do so much and this is a special offer they're offering just to listeners to get in on this new leveled up Optio for free. You can try it for free. An amazing offer. You can go to optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of this new amazing software. You're gonna wanna try it. It's something that I highly encourage. I think it helps a lot of people debug and demystify Google Ads. It's a great tool. Optio.com PSP all right, let's continue on with number two. So my number two hidden setting in Google Ads are location groups. Now this one may not apply to all of you, but for the ones that it does apply to, I think this is really important because I think the best way to explain it is to talk about a client. I usually, I recently used this setting for. So this client has multiple facilities in in the same general area, right? So in the same metro area there are multiple facilities and they all are on different areas of this metro area. So whenever someone's searching on their Google Ads, it's important that the people in this area see the ad that's relevant to their location and and then the people on the other side of town see the ad that's relevant to their location. The problem is Google was taking the location asset, which is the Google My business, the Google places listing that they had for each location and showing sometimes the other location for the wrong side of town. So people on the east side were seeing the location for the west side and sometimes the people on the west side weren't seeing anything or maybe maybe seeing the opposite side. Sometimes it was right, sometimes it wasn't. But after further investigating this was becoming a problem. So this can be fixed by there's a little setting in your assets section. So we're back to the assets again. You have the asset section and whenever you are on the location asset, there is a way to create a location group. So what you can do is you can make sure that your Google business location, your Google my business location is associated with this campaign and this other business location is associated with another campaign. So that people don't see one if they're in one area and don't see the other when they're in a different area. So it's going to be able to show the right location to the right people rather than dynamically just deciding which one to show. Which sometimes can be a big problem. Which it was for this client. They were noticing a drop off on one location. And once I investigated, I Found out. Oh, that's the location that Google's prioritizing for some reason. So it was fixed by location groups. So if you haven't try location groups and you do have multiple locations in your Google my business business profile and you're running different campaigns or possibly even different ad groups, I'm not sure it'll work for ad group level, but that could be a great solution for you. So again, a very minor hidden little detail setting in there, but it could make a massive difference. Okay, the next one is something I personally do every Friday. So this particular thing is something I do every single Friday. And I recommend for those of you that are in the business of PPC that manage Google Ads accounts like I do and you have your own Google Ads accounts that you're managing for your clients, I recommend that you do this every Friday too, or once a week you go in and improve your client's optimization score. And why am I even concerned about it? Well, if you don't know as a Google partner, which I am, you can, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see I have my Google partner premier status behind me, which was a hard fought status that I was proud of. And you have to have a certain optimization score in all of your accounts that are in your mcc. So for those of you that don't understand a word I said, basically there's a thing called optimization score. Optimization score is Google's scoring of your Google Ads setup. And there is only one thing that's true about this optimization score. It will always go down. It never goes up. Always. It goes down. Does that mean that your performance is decreasing? No, it does not. It does not mean that your account's slowly getting worse over time. It just means that there's more things that Google wants you to add and do more budget that you should spend more keywords, that you should add, more automated features you should turn on. So what I'm saying here is that Google's understanding of how good your account is doing is based on how much you're following their recommendations and that is represented by their optimization score. So if you're not following their recommendations and not adding broad match keywords, not adding maximized conversions or certain bidding strategies that they think is better, or increasing your budget to something they think is more appropriate for you, they're going to decrease your optimization score. But guess what? Every Friday I go in and I dismiss my clients. Right? Recommendations. You can go in and tell it dismiss recommendations and your optimization score goes up. Dismissing recommendations has the same effect as applying a recommendation at least to the to the optimization score. So if I have a 50% recomm optimization score and I dismiss all of of my recommendations, I now have a hundred percent recommendations optimization score because I dismissed the recommendations. This is not really important. If you're managing your own account, it doesn't really matter. But for managers out there, for other people that are Google partners, you have to maintain your optimization score and sometimes you don't want to apply those crappy recommendations so you're forced to dismiss them. So that is a hidden setting. It's again those three vertical buttons. It seems like a lot of these things that I'm going to mention are those three little vertical buttons. There is a dismiss on those recommendations where you can improve your optimization score without actually doing it. So that's, that's number three. All right, let's continue on this next one I think is crazy important. I catch this all the time whenever I do coaching with people and stuff like that. Which by the way I do offer. If you haven't, you can book a time with me and I can help you level up your Google Ads. I promise I will share something that you've never seen, never thought of. I've done this for 23 years and I have done hundreds if not reaching into the thousand mark of these coaching sessions online. So you can find it Chris Schaefer.com all right, so this one is there is a call asset ad schedule. So let's say you have a phone number showing on your ads through the call asset and your ads are running from 5am to 11pm do you know that your phone number is showing along with the ads potentially from 5am to 11pm now that may not be a problem if you have an answering service, but that may not really be something you want if some is someone's having to answer that phone. You know an individual or you know just an office person who's only going to be in the office from 9 to 5. So there is a call asset ad schedule and you can turn off your call asset during non answerable times. So if someone is not going to answer the phone at 4am make sure you don't show your call asset during that time so that someone can click on your phone number and you pay money and they don't get an answered phone. Right? Nobody picks up their phone call and you've paid money and you lost opportunity there. You'd at least want them to go to your website, right? You'd rather have someone at 4am Go to your website and fill out a form or something like that, not call your phone number. But this does happen and you can stop it from happening with that call asset ad schedule. Whenever you're editing the call asset, there's an advanced section at the bottom of the call asset edit screen for you to set a time schedule for your call asset. So be sure and do that if you haven't done it. I find that to be something that was neglected a lot. And you know, I wonder, I often wonder how many times are people calling and the phone not answered because it's set at a, you know, at 9 o' clock on a Sunday night. That's not, it's probably not a time when someone's going to answer the phone. Right. Okay, so we are just about halfway through. We're now moving to number five. Number five is an old school hidden setting that I don't know that all of you will use, but it's there and if you know about it, that's a. It could be something you could try. Targeted audiences. So audiences in Google Ads is something we've had for a very long time. It is just people that are interested in X, they're interested in something or they have a history of an interest in this, or they're actively shopping for X. Okay, so if you are selling a certain widget that's in the electronics category, you might want to target people who are interested in tech and electronics. Now when you do this in a Google Ads search campaign, by default it's set to observation, which means that it just gives you data about people that were interested in and clicked on your ad. But if you change your audience to targeted audience, it is now going to only show to people that searched your keyword and were also within that targeted audience of people interested in electronics. So this is something you could really play with. There's a lot because this is an entirely new grouping and scope narrowing of where you could show your ads. You could loosen up your ad copy and say, hey, I'm interested in showing ads to people who are actively shopping for new SUVs. And I'm not really wanting to spend a whole lot on that. I want a small budget. So what you could do is you could have some maybe broad match keywords, you know, buy new SUV near me maybe. And you also, in addition to creating those keywords, have a targeted audience for people that are in market for a new SUV or new vehicle. Now it's not going to show to general audience people. It's not going to show to just Anyone, they have to have an in market status. According to Google Signals. It's going to, Google's going to determine that this person's probably interested in this based on their search history. So you can show ads about, you know, your SUVs that you're selling at your facility to people that are, you know, have been for the past couple days, past week, past couple weeks have been searching around and searching around SUVs. So really cool feature that. I mean I could talk a lot about different ways to apply this. There's a lot you can do with this, but it is specifically a targeted audience. So that's the hidden feature there, hidden setting that you can try in your search campaigns. All right, so we're halfway through now. We're going to get a little faster. I'm going to speed up a little bit because the rest are not quite as deep. But number six is a DSA ad group. So dynamic search ad. DSA is a type of ad group that is different from the standard ad groups. So you know, ad group, an ad group is what our ad inside of campaigns. You can have one campaign and then five ad groups or one ad group or 10 ad groups. Those are all standard where they, you, you, you add keywords, you create ad copy in a standard ad group. Now in a DSA ad group that is a dynamic insertion. Excuse me, A, a dynamic, dynamic search ad in a DSA ad group, Google is going to create the keywords for you. In fact there aren't even keywords. You just give Google a website, you copy and paste one of your service pages, you copy and paste your website into this DSA ad group and Google automatically just finds you relevant traffic according to the content on that web page. So there is no ad copy that you write, there are no keywords that you write. And a lot of people don't even know this is, this exists because it's been around for a couple 15 years or something like that. It's been around for a very long time. So it's not new. It's not, you know, something particularly creative is as far as AI, there's no AI involved. It's just the system reads your page, whatever page you put in there and says I'm going to find you traffic that looks like that page, people that are searching for things like that page. So I have to pause here because please don't abuse this. This is a addition to your actual Google Ads search campaigns. This is not in replacement of do not use this DSA setting thinking that it's going to be a shortcut. I'm, I'm not a shortcut guy. Don't listen to this podcast thinking you're going to find shortcuts. I very much believe in the long haul of optimization and, you know, very precise decisions and strategy and stuff like that. So DSA is merely a tool in your tool belt. It is not your entire strategy. So please don't do it that way. But it's a great, it's a great little thing that you could kind of play with and sometimes it gets some different results than maybe a broad match ad group would do. So play around with that, and that is number six. So moving on, number seven, this one's pretty simple, but sometimes it can be incredibly useful. In your Google Ads campaign, there is a location setting. There's an advanced location setting. So in the settings of your campaign, there's a location setting that decides where people have to be in order for them to be eligible to see your ad. There are two settings. There are location based on the presence of the person within your targeted area, and then there's a presence and interest targeting. So that's the setting that I want to talk about as this number seven hidden setting. And I think the best way to explain it is to give you illustration. In Florida, there are a lot of retired peoples and they might have sons and daughters that live outside of Florida. So those sons and daughters might need to have some type of medical person help out their parent. So from Utah, from, you know, anywhere in the United States, from, from, from California, they might be searching about something in Boca Raton. Boca Raton. What was the Miami. Let's just go Miami. All right, so a person in California is searching and saying wheelchair repair in Miami. They're not in Miami, they're in California. But typically the ad would not show in that instance. But because. And if you change your campaign to presence and interest, that person has said that they're interested in Miami, they're interested in the location of Miami even though they're not there. So they would be able to see your Miami ad saying, we fix wheelchairs in Miami and they're in California. So this is a setting that I don't use very often, but when it's a appropriate, sometimes it can be really useful to be able to turn that on. Because now I recommend starting with it off and then turning it on to see what kind of difference it makes to the volume. But this could be really interesting if you are not aware. This is sometimes a lot better than having, you know, a national campaign that's targeting Miami. Sometimes that can be quite frustrating. You can't, you know, you're getting stuff that isn't necessarily Miami in their searches and all of that. So consider that that's number seven. And now I have three more. And before I tell you, remind you about my sponsor optio.com PSP to try their free upgraded tool, the new power tool for Google Ads management multi channel. Try it on multiple channels for your marketing and you can now chat with your data. Try it out for free optio.com PSP all right, 8, 9 and 10. Here we go. Number 8. And I just have to say this because I still get people saying, chris, manual bidding isn't around anymore. And that's why this is number eight. Manual bidding is around. It is a hidden setting. You have to go to your campaign settings, change your, your, your bidding strategy and then go to the not recommended section. Keep, keep expanding there. There's some options to expand your bidding options and you have to go to a not recommended. It's actually, it's actually in parentheses, not recommended. Don't click here. Then you'll actually see manual bidding as an option. So manual bidding is still there, it is still active, it is very much alive and it is a hidden setting at this point, but it won't be going anywhere. It may be hidden, but it is still very relevant. I don't need to harp on that very much because manual bidding is my favorite number one bidding strategy. I hundred percent use manual bidding on every single campaign that I start. It may not always stay in manual bidding, but by far most of my campaigns are manual bid campaigns. Still to this day, 2026. All right, number nine, shared bid strategies. Now that may not be a surprise to you, but I want to point out one specific setting within the shared bid strategies that you might be interested in. So shared bid strategies can be bid strategies that are shared across multiple campaigns within one account. Now typically I'm not a big fan of Target CPA just, just to use it simply because sometimes I like a little more finite control of the bids. But with a shared bid strategy, particularly a Target CPA shared bid strategy, there is a feature in that specific bid strategy that allows you to cap your bids to actually say, okay, I'm going to let Google run a target CPA, but do not spend more than $50 a click, right? Maybe something really high. Don't spend more than this much per click. You can actually set a maximum bid limit and that is not available anywhere else. If you set up a normal Target CPA bid strategy, non shared target CPA bid strategy. That setting is not there. So for that reason, that makes that number nine because it is hidden. It is not. You wouldn't even know that it's even an option because it's totally hidden. All right, so rounding up now number 10 is this. It's conversions. And you think what? That's not hidden? Okay, let me explain something about conversions. When you have a conversion, there are two levers that you may not know about that are incredibly important in your conversion tracking. First is the lever to turn on and off convert specific conversions in your account. So you can have a conversion for phone calls, web forms, you know, all these different things, chat and all these ways that people contact you. There is a lever to change one conversion from primary to secondary. You say, chris, why would you do that? What's the point of that? Well, the reason you would do primary to secondary is because when you change it to secondary, it doesn't delete it. It just makes it inactive for account optimization. Essentially, it's no longer to. It's no longer going to show as a conversion for any campaign that it's added to. So a secondary conversion, maybe. Maybe the phone calls that you get are always junk. Maybe anyone who calls is never a good lead for you. It's never qualified. So you could still track it, but just change it to secondary. And now when you get 15 conversions, those will be 15 conversions that are not phone calls. So really important setting. If you have some reason to make a decision to say, okay, I don't want to delete it, but for now this is not important, let's not track, track it. And then one extra little hidden thing about conversions is there is account goals and campaign goals. So let's say you have a campaign set up for, let's say, elderly care, right? Someone's going to be taking, you know, you do elder care, you do in home care for elders and seniors and things like that. Okay? And your conversion for that is a web form and, you know, maybe a booking or a phone call. All right, so those are the three conversions that you have for your lead generation for in home senior care services. Now you have another campaign that specifically is looking to hire aides for that campaign or for your company, right? So you're, you're trying to hire aides who can come in and help you. And you know, so this is a hiring focused now you don't want to, maybe you don't want to track phone calls because you don't take phone calls from people who want to be hired, they have to fill out a resume form or something like that. You know, they fill out a form on your page. So that is where you would use a campaign goal. The campaign goal would be different than the account goals. It would only be a contact form that's filled out for, you know, someone who wants to be hired. Hello. You know, you have to put their name in. They have to put their, you know, upload their resume and all that stuff. That would be a conversion tracking system. That would be separate than everything else. So if, if you have different priorities for different campaigns, you need to have a different campaign goal for this and a different campaign goal for that. This is a hitting hidden settings that I find a lot of people don't use and aren't aware of. So that's it. So that is number 10, 10 hidden settings in Google Ads that hopefully is going to make a difference for you and bring about some creative things. Thinking on how to get more out of Google Ads. If you'd like further help with your Google Ads. My name is Chris Schaefer and that's who I'm. That's what I'm here for. I'm here for you. This podcast is 100 free. I put it out there for everyone to listen to and learn. I hope to grow the Google Ads community and improve the community, make it a little less shady and crappy. And if you agree and you like to work with someone that thinks and acts like that, reach out to me. Chrishaeffer.com is my website. Otherwise, I'll see you guys here next week.