Google Ads Display Campaign Sneaky Settings
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You can’t get your Google Display campaign to work and have no idea how to do it?
Do you have a Display Campaign and for some reason, it’s not working and you can’t figure out why?
Chances are, you might have fallen into Google’s sneaky default setting or what I like to call a ‘Google Gotchas’. What it does for your campaign is it goes beyond your selected targeting and it’s quite tricky to find and turn off.
So in this article, I’ll show you where to find this sneaky setting. I’m also going to show you how to identify if this is happening and how you can fix it.
This is our remarketing campaign and as you can see it has a decent amount of traffic, but it shouldn’t even be getting this a lot of impressions and clicks for a month’s period. If you see that your campaign suddenly having this high impressions, you should investigate what might be causing it.
What I did next is go to the campaign and into the ad group and then the audience section on the left side:
Once you’ve reached the Audience page, you’ll be able to see Audience segments, click show table:
If you scroll down, you should be able to see the total numbers of impressions, clicks, etc.
As you can see, besides the Total: Segments there’s a Total: Expansion and optimized targeting – this option is Google going beyond the targeting you’ve set for your retargeting campaign.
In reality, we didn’t give Google permission to do enable or do this targeting. You will notice the split in spend of the ‘Segments’ and ‘Expansion and optimized targeting’.
This means that Google is charging you extra for this expansion of targeting. So now the question is ‘how do I turn this off?’. On the left side of your Google Ads, go the ‘Settings’
Click Edit ad group targeting
You will get redirected to this page and then scroll down
In the Settings section click on the Optimized targeting.
Uncheck the setting and hit Save.
Take note that this setting is enabled by default. So always ensure that this is always off when you create a Display campaign.
If you want more guides about Google Gotchas, be sure to visit our guide about this by visiting Google Ads Gotcha Guide where you can learn more about the sneaky default settings in your Google Ads campaign.