How Google got advertisers to trust all their default settings

Ad strength is good. Smart bidding is active. Broad match is finding reach you didn't know you had. The recommendations tab has been cleared. Everything is green.

And somehow the leads still cost twice what they should.

This is the most common thing we see when we audit a Google Ads account. Not chaos. Not obvious incompetence. A tidy, well-maintained account that's quietly haemorrhaging budget — because every default setting in it was chosen by a company whose revenue goes up every time someone clicks, regardless of whether that click was ever going to buy anything.

Google's pitch for broad match is simple: more reach. Your keyword triggers more searches, you appear in front of more people, you find demand you didn't know existed.

In practice, it finds searches you'd have negated on day one.

These aren't edge cases. Pull the search terms report on any broad match campaign and you'll find the same thing. The searches that triggered your ads, the ones you paid for, read like a list of people who were never going to call you.

Broad match isn't wrong for every account. With tight negative keyword lists, careful monitoring, and enough conversion data, it can work. But the default recommendation to use it — before any of that infrastructure exists — is a recommendation that primarily benefits Google.

Smart bidding is sold as Google's AI doing the heavy lifting. Feed it enough conversion data, the argument goes, and it'll find the right people at the right price better than any human bidding manually. That's true, eventually, for accounts with enough data. The problem is Google pushes it on accounts that don't have nearly enough — and then bids in ways that are difficult to defend.

Yorkshire resin installer — account average CPC: £2.85. Google was spending up to 27× that on searches the business would have excluded on day one.

If you pin your headlines — forcing Google to show a specific service in position 1, a CTA in position 2, a USP in position 3 — Google will flag your ad as having low or poor ad strength.

Ad strength measures one thing: how much freedom you've given Google to mix and match your headlines. A high score means Google can assemble your ad however it wants. A low score means you've taken control of what every prospect sees.

We have never audited an account where the pinned, "poor strength" ads didn't outperform the highly-rated ones on cost per conversion. Not once. The score is real. What it's measuring just isn't what they're implying it's measuring.

Performance Max is the logical endpoint of every default on this list. One campaign type. Google controls the bidding, the audience targeting, the placements, the creative combinations. You provide assets and a budget. Google does the rest.

It also, in almost every account we've analysed, looks better than it is. PMax consistently captures branded searches — people already looking for you by name — and terms your Search campaigns had already been converting. Strip those out, and the numbers fall apart. Click-through rates in PMax run roughly three times lower than equivalent Search campaigns.

The reason PMax reports look healthy is the same reason all of Google's defaults look healthy on the surface: the dashboard is built by the same company that benefits when the numbers look good. That's not a reason to dismiss the data. It's a reason to dig into it.

None of this means Google Ads doesn't work. It works extraordinarily well, for accounts that are set up to put conversion quality ahead of click volume.