You set your monthly budget. You launched the campaign. Google started spending. And then, a few weeks in, you looked at the search terms report and found your ads showing up for things like "Google Ads tutorial," "marketing jobs," and a handful of searches in a city you've never worked in. Nobody flagged it. The campaign kept running. The budget kept draining.
This is not a corner case. Google Ads ships with default settings that consistently cost advertisers money, because those defaults are calibrated to maximize Google's revenue, not yours. They are opt-out, not opt-in, which means every new account that launches without changing them is paying for traffic it never wanted.
The five settings below are the ones we see left active most often in accounts that come to us after months of wasted spend. Each one is easy to find, easy to fix, and expensive to leave alone. If you're running Google Ads now, check these first.
When you create a Search campaign in Google Ads, the platform defaults to including the Display Network alongside it. This means the budget you set aside for search intent, people actively typing a query related to your service, can be distributed across banner placements on third-party websites, mobile apps, and YouTube. The two channels have fundamentally different intent profiles, and bundling them together dilutes both.
Search ads reach someone at the moment they're looking for what you offer. Display ads reach someone who may or may not be in market, based on Google's audience modeling. Combining them in one campaign means you have no way to control how much budget flows to each, no way to set separate bids, and no clear performance data by placement type. The budget goes where Google decides, and Google's decision tends to favor placements that generate impressions.
The fix is to uncheck "Display Network" when setting up a Search campaign, or to go into Settings and disable it in any campaign currently running. If you want Display placements, run a dedicated Display campaign with its own budget, its own creative, and its own conversion tracking. Keep Search and Display separate from day one.
Google now defaults new keyword additions to broad match. Broad match tells Google's algorithm to show your ads whenever it determines the search query is "related to" your keyword, a definition that has expanded considerably over the past few years. For a contractor running ads on "home renovation contractor," broad match will surface queries for renovation financing, home improvement store hours, how to renovate a bathroom yourself, and dozens of other searches with no hire intent at all.
According to Google's own match type documentation, broad match is designed to cast the widest net possible. That wide net may be appropriate for large brand awareness campaigns with significant budgets and robust negative keyword lists. For a contractor with a $3,000 monthly ad budget trying to book service calls, it is a reliable way to spend the first half of that budget before a qualified lead appears.
Start new campaigns with phrase match or exact match. Phrase match requires the search to contain your keyword phrase in order, allowing natural variations. Exact match locks the query tightly to what you've specified. Both produce higher cost-per-click than broad match and lower cost-per-qualified-lead. As campaigns accumulate conversion data, you can test selective broad match keywords with strong negative keyword coverage, but that comes after the account has data, not before.
The Search Partners network is a collection of sites that Google has partnered with to show search-style ads, including AOL, Ask.com, and various smaller search engines and directories. It's enabled by default on every new Search campaign. Your ads run on these properties using the same bids and the same budget as your primary Google Search placements.
The problem is asymmetric transparency. You cannot target or exclude individual Search Partner sites. You cannot view performance broken down by partner. You get aggregate data that mixes Google's core search results with partner placement results, which makes it difficult to know whether your cost-per-lead is being driven by high-quality Google searches or by low-quality partner traffic inflating your click volume.
In most contractor accounts, disabling Search Partners and running Search-only for the first 60 to 90 days produces cleaner data and better lead quality. You can re-enable and test it once you have a baseline, but starting with it active means your early performance data is contaminated before you know what clean looks like. Disable it in Campaign Settings under Networks.
Working with a specialist
These settings are the first thing we audit in any new account
If you'd rather have a team who reviews this before the first dollar is spent, we can walk through your account, identify what's leaking, and rebuild the campaign structure around leads you can actually close.
How The Diamond Group works with home service contractors →New campaigns often default to a Maximize Clicks bid strategy, which instructs Google to generate as many clicks as possible within your daily budget. The problem with this as a starting strategy for lead generation is that clicks and leads are not the same thing. Maximize Clicks optimizes for volume, not for intent quality or conversion probability. Google will find you clicks, efficiently and reliably, at whatever price fills the budget.
What this means in practice: your ads will show more frequently for lower-competition queries, which tend to carry lower intent. Budget gets distributed across a wider range of search positions and times of day, prioritizing click volume over the high-intent queries where a conversion is more likely. Early campaign data that comes out of a Maximize Clicks period is harder to use for optimization because it reflects what Google decided to buy, not what your best prospects were actually searching.
The right starting strategy for most contractor accounts is Maximize Conversions, with a specific conversion action defined before the campaign launches. This requires conversion tracking to be in place before you spend anything, which many accounts skip. Google's conversion tracking setup guide walks through the options. Set your primary conversion as a form submission or phone call, confirm it's firing correctly, and then let the bidding strategy optimize toward what you actually want.
When you have multiple ads in an ad group, Google defaults ad rotation to "Optimize," which means Google's algorithm decides which ad to show based on which it predicts will perform best in each auction. This sounds reasonable until you consider what "best" means to Google: typically the ad with the highest predicted click-through rate, not the highest predicted conversion rate or lead quality.
The result in contractor accounts is that one or two ads tend to dominate impression share quickly, while the others are rarely shown. If the ad that wins Google's preference test isn't the one that produces the most qualified leads or the best lead quality, you have no signal telling you that. You see that ad getting more impressions and clicks, which looks like success, but the underlying lead quality from that ad versus the suppressed ones is never measured.
The counter-practice is to rotate ads more evenly for a defined testing period, track conversion rate by ad variant, and make the optimization decision yourself based on conversion data rather than delegating it to click-through prediction. In Google Ads, this is found under Ad rotation in the campaign settings. Set it to "Do not optimize: rotate ads indefinitely" for at least 30 days when testing new creative, then make the call based on your own conversion data before setting it back to optimize.
This one is technically a default behavior rather than a toggleable setting, but it catches enough advertisers off guard to include here. When you set a geographic target in Google Ads, the default is to show ads to people "in, or regularly in, or who've shown interest in" your target location. That last clause, "shown interest in," means your ads can appear for someone searching from outside your service area if they include a location in their query. A homeowner in another state searching "roofing contractors Wilmington NC" can trigger your ad, click through, and consume your budget.
For most contractors with defined service areas, the correct setting is "Presence: people in or regularly in your targeted locations only." This restricts ad delivery to people who are physically in your area, eliminating the interest-based expansion. Google's location targeting documentation explains the distinction between presence and interest targeting. It takes thirty seconds to change and can meaningfully reduce out-of-area clicks in competitive or destination markets.
It's worth being direct about this: Google's recommended settings at account setup are not neutral. They are engineered to increase spend. Display Network inclusion, broad match defaults, Search Partners, Maximize Clicks, and optimized ad rotation all share a common effect, which is that they increase the number of auctions your budget participates in and the volume of clicks it produces. This is good for Google's revenue. It is not inherently good for your cost per booked job.
This doesn't mean Google Ads isn't an effective channel for contractors. The service companies we work with consistently use it to fill their pipelines when the campaign structure is right. Our Google Ads service for home service contractors covers the full architecture behind a campaign built around qualified leads, not click volume. But the platform only performs well when someone is actively overriding what Google wants to do by default.
Contractors who run their own accounts or work with agencies that don't audit these settings are often funding Google's default behavior for months before they realize the campaign was leaking the whole time. The most expensive version of Google Ads is one where the budget is high, the defaults are intact, and nobody is watching the Search Terms report. Fixing the defaults costs nothing. Catching them late costs months of misallocated spend that could have gone toward qualified consultations.
The settings above are not advanced optimizations. They are the floor. Getting them right doesn't guarantee a performing campaign, but running them wrong guarantees a leaky one. Confirming each one before the first dollar is spent is the baseline that separates accounts built for results from accounts built for activity.
Stop funding Google's defaults
Your budget should produce booked jobs, not impression volume.
The Diamond Group builds and manages Google Ads for home service contractors, starting with the structure that stops the bleeding. Campaign architecture, keyword strategy, conversion tracking, and weekly performance reviews, all focused on booked jobs and qualified service leads.
See how we work with home service contractors