The Costly Things Never Appear in a Change Log

A change history tells you what somebody altered. It’s the fastest way to establish whether anyone is actually working on your account, and I’d start there.

But it has a blind spot, and the blind spot is where the money goes.

A log records changes. It cannot record a setting that was never changed. So the defaults chosen on the day your campaigns were built sit there quietly, doing whatever they do, and no amount of scrolling through edit history will surface them.

Some of those defaults suit Google more than they suit you. That isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a company configuring its own product sensibly for the average advertiser. You are not the average advertiser.

Four settings, then. All visible with view-only access, none requiring you to understand bidding, and each capable of quietly spending a meaningful share of your budget for years.

---

1. Where Your Ads Are Actually Showing

Open any campaign, then Settings, then Locations, then expand Location options.

You’ll see two choices. Presence or interest means people in your area, and also people anywhere who have shown an interest in it. Presence means people who are actually there.

The first is Google’s recommended setting, so it’s what most accounts run on.

For a plumber in Leeds, that’s the difference between advertising to people in Leeds and advertising to anyone, anywhere, who searched something about Leeds last week. For a business selling nationally it hardly matters. For a local trade it can be most of the difference between a sensible cost per enquiry and a baffling one.

You can check the effect rather than argue about the theory. Reports, then Locations, then look at where clicks actually came from. If a good share arrived from places you don’t serve, you’ve found something.

---

2. Which Networks You’re Paying For

Same screen, under Networks.

A Search campaign can be set to run on Google search, on search partner sites, and on the Display Network as well. The last one is the one to look at, because Display is a different proposition entirely: banner space across millions of websites and apps, shown to people who weren’t searching for anything.

Display advertising has legitimate uses. Running it inside a Search campaign, blended into the same budget and reported as one number, is not one of them, because the two behave nothing alike and averaging them hides both.

Segment by network in the campaign view and compare cost per conversion across them. If Display is consuming a third of a search budget at several times the cost, that’s not a strategy anyone chose. It’s a tick box nobody unticked.

---

3. What Counts as a Conversion

This is the important one, and if you check nothing else, check this.

Go to Tools, then Conversions. You’ll get a list of every action the account treats as a result, and a column showing which ones are counted in the headline conversions figure.

Read that list slowly. I have opened accounts where the counted actions included visits to the contact page, clicks on a telephone link, and time spent on site. None of those is a customer. Two of them can be done by the same person in the same minute.

When soft actions are counted, every downstream number becomes decorative. Cost per conversion falls. Conversion rate climbs. The report improves month after month while the phone stays quiet, and nobody has lied to you at any point.

Two things to check while you’re there. Whether anything is counted more than once per click, which inflates volume on a single enquiry. And when each action was created, because a conversion action added last quarter can make a year-on-year comparison look like progress.

Then do the comparison that settles it. Take last month’s reported conversions and set them beside the enquiries that actually reached your inbox or your CRM. If the platform says ninety and your sales team saw twelve, you now know precisely what the reporting is worth.

---

4. The Optimisation Score Trap

Google shows a percentage at the top of the account called an optimisation score, and agencies quote it in reports because it looks like a grade.

It isn’t one. The score measures how many of Google’s own recommendations the account has adopted. Accept them and it rises. Dismiss them and it falls.

Worth pausing on who is making the recommendations. Google sells the advertising. Its suggestions frequently involve raising budgets, widening keyword matching and switching on automation. Some are genuinely good advice. All of them are advice from the seller.

You would not let a supplier grade your relationship with them. That’s the whole business I’m in.

So a score in the nineties tells you the account is compliant, not that it’s well run. An expert who has deliberately declined broader matching because it wastes your money will show a lower score and better results. If your agency leads with the number, ask which recommendations they’ve refused and why. A good answer exists. Not having one is the finding.

While you’re in Recommendations, look for auto-apply. If it’s switched on, Google is making changes to your account on its own initiative, and those edits will appear in the change history looking like somebody’s work.

---

How to Raise It Without a Row

None of these findings prove bad faith, and going in hot will cost you the answer you came for.

Defaults survive for ordinary reasons. Somebody built the campaign quickly in month one, the account passed to a colleague in month four, and nobody has opened the settings tab since. That’s a capacity problem, and capacity problems get fixed when someone points at them.

Ask three questions, in this order:

• “Are we on presence or presence-and-interest, and which would you recommend for us?” The second half of the question gives them room to think rather than defend.
• “Which of our conversion actions are counted in the headline figure?” Purely factual. The answer is on a screen.
• “Which Google recommendations have we declined this year?” The best question on the page, because a competent manager has a ready list and a passive one has never declined anything.

What comes back matters more than what you found. A manager who explains a deliberate choice you disagree with is doing the job. One who didn’t know the setting existed is stretched. One who tells you it’s too technical to discuss has answered a question you didn’t ask.

If the conversation goes nowhere, the wider pattern is usually visible elsewhere by then, and it’s worth checking what your real cost per customer looks like once the soft conversions come out of the numerator.

---

Or Send Me View-Only Access

Free, written, and yours to keep either way. Read-only is enough, and I change nothing.

What you receive:

• Every campaign’s location, network and bidding settings, with the ones costing you money named
• Your conversion actions, sorted into real enquiries and everything else
• Reported conversions reconciled against what reached your inbox
• A written specification your agency can work to, with the settings stated explicitly

Some accounts come back clean, correctly configured, nothing to report. When that happens I’ll say so, and you’ll have stopped wondering for the price of an email.

Request Your Free Assessment →