Why it's a good idea to check in with your Google Ads campaign settings

When creating your ad campaign, the first thing Google takes you through is the settings.

However, once the campaign is live, the Google Ads campaign settings are often forgotten but can be a gold mine for increasing your ad's success.

It's a good idea to check in with your settings regularly to ensure:

• Google knows the goals you want to achieve with the campaign are still the same
• The marketing objective is still the same
• You are not restricting any potential additional traffic
• You are choosing the right networks
• Your locations are still relevant
• Your bid strategy selected is still the best option for you

In this article, I go through where your settings are located once your campaign has gone live. Which settings live in this part of the account, and some simple checks and optimisations you can do on your campaigns.   

Where are your Google Ads campaign settings located?

The campaign settings are located within the light grey sub-menu on the right-hand side of the Google Ads dashboard.

To ensure you have the correct campaign settings, you must have the campaign selected on the main dark grey menu on the right-hand side of the Google Ads dashboard.

Once you select it, you should have something that looks like this:

What's in the campaign settings?

Campaign name

This is where you want to name your campaign. Google would have asked you to give it a name when setting it up; however you want to ask yourself, is this the best description for the campaign or could you have a better naming convention?  

Goals

This is where you tell the platform what goals you want to help drive your campaign's performance.

Marketing objective

I must admit I feel a little like this is a duplication of the above as you already tell Google which goals are important to you, and those goals normally are categorised. But here, you select the single goal that would make this campaign successful for you.

Campaign status

This is where you can set the campaign status as:

• Active = serving ads
• Paused = stopped serving ads until re-activated
• Removed = stopped serving ads permanently

Networks

Within the search campaign settings, you can select several options around networks.

For example:

Search Network

Ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords.

Display Network

The Display Network lets you place your ads in front of people as they browse millions of websites, apps and Google-owned properties.

Google search partners

You can add Google search partners to your campaign. Google search partners are sites in the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads on their search results.

Locations

Locations help you target your ads to people in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in a geographic area.

To get the best from your Google ad spend, it's essential to look at where you're going to get the most success geographically.

Languages

Here you can select the languages your customers speak and have their browser language set too.

Budget

This is just one of the locations within the platform you can adjust your budget. But it's an excellent opportunity to consider if the budget you have set is appropriate for the results you want to achieve.

Bidding

Your bid strategy is how you optimise bids to meet your advertising goals.

Automated bid strategies set bids for you based on your business goals. Manual bidding requires you to set your own maximum cost-per-click bids for ad groups or keywords.

Start and end dates

You can set the start and end dates of a campaign here. For example, if you are running an ad campaign for a specific offer and want to select a date for it to finish instead of coming into the account and remembering to pause.

Additional settings

Several additional settings are available to you that might be worth considering.

Value rules

Value rules allow you to set specific requirements. This can include an audience or location to change conversion values based on your customers' attributes and relative value to your business.

Ad rotation

Currently, you get two options in ad rotation:

1. Optimise: Prefer best-performing ads
2. Do not optimise: Rotate ads indefinitely

I predict this option may be removed in the future because of the move over to RSA (responsive search ads).

Campaign URL options

This is an excellent option if you need to add extra information to the ad click. If you have Google Analytics, then it's automatically tagged. But if you are using another platform or a CRM, this is a great tool.

The tracking template is the URL you want the ad click to go to for tracking.

Dynamic Search Ads setting

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) target relevant searches automatically based on your website, then use headlines automatically customised to people's actual searches. This setting determines what domain, language and targeting source to use for your DSA.

IP exclusions

You can enter the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to exclude from seeing your ads. This could be handy if you have staff members Googling you and don't want them to cost you money by clicking on an ad.  

Simple checks and optimisations to improve your success

Here are a few tips I would like to share that I recommend you check and update to help improve your success.

1. Deselect the display network check box and create a separate display campaign

I see this quite often. To maximise success, it's vital to see the two types of campaigns (search and display) as different.

Although the rise of the Max Performance campaign contradicts this thought, it makes sense if you don't want to mix your data with two different approaches to advertising online.

• Set languages to "all languages."

If you just have English set, you could be missing out on people in your ad location who speak a different language as well as English.

For example, let's consider advertising in Devon UK, but perhaps Spanish browsers are their default. They may still be a great customer for you, but because your settings are just for English browsers, you won't show ads to them.

• Set your location options to Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations

As a default, Google will set this to Presence or interest: People in, regularly in or who've shown interest in your targeted locations.

Although they recommend this setting, it can sometimes waste your budget on irrelevant traffic that has shown an interest in your location but could be anywhere in the world.   

Final thoughts

There you have it. I have taken you through where your settings are located once your campaign has gone live. Which settings live in this part of the account, and some simple checks and optimisations you can do on your campaigns. There's also additional info available from Google that you can access here.

If you are strapped for time and want a Google Ads expert to look at this for you, please feel free to get in touch for a chat.