A new Google Ads campaign ships with settings already chosen for you, and several of them widen where your money can go. Ranked by how much of the budget each one can quietly redirect, the order is not the one most checklists give: the network settings outrank the match type everyone argues about, because network spend is hardest to see in the reporting.
Every default in this list is documented, changeable in under a minute, and defensible as a choice for somebody. The question is not whether Google is hiding anything. It is that the defaults are set for the median advertiser across millions of accounts, and the further you are from that median, the more they cost you.
Which Google Ads default settings cost you the most?
The ones that widen where your budget can go without telling you, because spend leaves quietly and the reporting does not separate it out.
Ranked by
How much of the budget the setting can redirect before anybody notices. Weighted toward the settings whose spend is hardest to see in standard reporting, because an expensive setting you can see gets fixed.
Search partners, included by default
First because it is on by default on every new Search campaign, it can send your budget to hundreds of sites that are not Google, and the placement detail available to you is far thinner than for anything else you buy.
Search partners is not automatically bad, and for some accounts it genuinely adds cheap volume. The problem is the asymmetry: it is enabled without you choosing it, and evaluating whether it is working for you is harder than evaluating any other part of the account.
The right move is not to reflexively turn it off. It is to segment the reporting by network, look at what search partner traffic actually did, and then decide with a number in front of you. Most accounts that do this for the first time are surprised in one direction or the other.
“When you create a campaign for the Search Network, search partners are included by default. You can opt out of these networks at any time through your campaign settings.” Google Ads Help, About the Google Search Network, checked 29 July 2026.
Location targeting set to presence or interest
Second because it silently widens your audience to people who are not where you serve, and because the resulting waste is invisible in every report that does not break out location.
The distinction is between people in the location you target and people merely showing interest in it. For a business that serves a city, the second group includes anybody anywhere in the world reading about that city, and for a plumber or a dentist that traffic converts at approximately zero.
It ranks below search partners only because the fix is more obviously correct: almost every local service business wants presence, and almost nobody has consciously chosen otherwise.
Broad match with no negative keyword list
Third. It moves a lot of budget, but it moves it visibly. The search terms report shows exactly what you paid for, so this is the expensive default that is easiest to audit.
Broad match is the setting everybody argues about, and it is genuinely the most contested item here. With good conversion data and a maintained negative list it can outperform tighter match types. With neither, it is a way of discovering how many unrelated searches exist in your category.
It sits third rather than first precisely because the evidence is right there. Anyone can open the search terms report and see the waste in ten minutes, which is not true of the two settings above it.
Automatically created assets and ad suggestions applied by default
Fourth because it changes what your ads say rather than where your budget goes. The financial exposure is indirect, but it is the only default on this list that can create a claim you did not write.
Auto-applied recommendations and automatically created assets can pull copy from your landing pages and generate headlines from it. For most advertisers this is harmless and occasionally helpful. For anyone in a regulated category, or anyone whose claims have been through legal review, it is a compliance exposure rather than a performance one.
The check is quick: look at what is switched on under recommendations, and if you operate anywhere near finance, health or legal, switch the automatic ones off and review suggestions manually.
The default conversion action the campaign optimises toward
Last on budget exposure and first on consequence. It moves no money by itself, which is why it is ranked here, but it decides what every other setting is trying to achieve.
A campaign optimising toward the wrong conversion action will spend its budget efficiently in the wrong direction, and no amount of tightening the settings above fixes that. It is included at the bottom of a list about budget exposure as a deliberate contrast: the setting with the least direct spend attached is the one worth checking first.
Are these defaults a trick?
No, and framing it that way misleads. They are defaults chosen to suit the median advertiser, and the median advertiser is not you.
It is easy to write that Google engineers the defaults to extract spend, and that framing gets clicks. It is also lazy, and it leads people to reflexively disable things that would have worked for them. A default that broadens reach is the right call for an advertiser with no data and no negative list, which describes a very large share of accounts on the platform.
The useful framing is that a default is an assumption about you, made before anyone knew anything about you. The value in reviewing them is not catching Google out. It is that you now know things about your business that the default could not.
What should you check on a new campaign before it spends?
Networks, location targeting mode, match types and the conversion action it optimises toward. Four checks, five minutes, and they prevent most first-month waste.
- Networks: decide search partners and display deliberately rather than accepting them, and segment by network in reporting from day one so the decision can be revisited with evidence.
- Location: set presence rather than presence or interest unless you have a specific reason, and check the target is the area you actually serve rather than the country it sits in.
- Match types and negatives: whatever match type you choose, start with a negative list. Broad match without one is not a strategy, it is an experiment somebody else is running with your budget.
- Conversion action: confirm the campaign is optimising toward the action you would actually pay for, not toward whichever one was created first.
The fourth of those is the one worth the most attention and gets the least, which is why it has its own ranking in conversion actions ranked by how well they predict revenue. If you would rather have somebody go through an existing account rather than a new campaign, the order we work in is set out in how to audit a Google Ads account.
Google Ads management
Google Ads management means owning the whole loop: what the account is allowed to bid on, what counts as a conversion, and what the numbers mean once they arrive. We do all three. Most underperforming accounts we see are not badly optimised, they are badly measured, and no amount of bid tuning fixes a conversion action that fires on a thank-you page reload.
Read about Google Ads management