Essential Google Ads Settings For 2025 : Optimize Performance

Boost Your Google Ads Success in 2025 With These 5 Essential Settings

As innovative as Google Ads can be, success hinges on getting the fundamentals right. In this guide, we will explore five critical campaign-level settings to optimize your Google Ads strategy in 2025. While account-level settings like conversion tracking won’t be covered, these campaign-specific adjustments will significantly enhance performance.

✅ Key Takeaways:

• Exclude Search Partners and Display Network from Search campaigns.
• Choose specific conversion goals to optimize for real business impact.
• Use tailored bidding strategies that match campaign objectives.
• Adjust location settings to prevent wasted ad spend.
• Leverage Brand Exclusions to refine search intent targeting.

1. Networks: Keep Campaigns Channel-Specific

Each campaign should be restricted to its designated network for better results. Google Ads often includes new Search campaigns in both the Search Partners Network and the Display Network by default. However, this can dilute traffic quality and efficiency.

• Search Network Campaigns should target only Google Search, excluding Search Partners and Display Network.
• Display Network Campaigns should remain solely on the Display Network.

Why?

Search campaigns focus on intent-driven searches, while display campaigns cast a wider net. Mixing these can lead to poor lead quality and budget inefficiency.

Include Google search partners and Include Google Display Network

2. Conversion Goals: Prioritize What Matters

Google defaults all campaigns to optimize for account-level conversions, meaning all conversion types are weighted equally. This can be problematic because not all conversions are of equal value.

For example:

• A purchase is more valuable than a newsletter signup.
• If Google optimizes for all conversions, it may prioritize the easiest-to-achieve actions, not the most profitable ones.

📌 Recommendation: Explicitly select which conversion goals to optimize for within each campaign.

3. Bidding: Align Strategy with Goals

Each campaign should have a tailored bidding strategy that aligns with its conversion objectives.

• Maximize Conversions: Best for campaigns focused on increasing volume.
• Target ROAS (tROAS): Ideal for return-on-investment-focused strategies.

Instead of applying a single bid strategy to all campaigns, advertisers can group campaigns with shared goals under portfolio bid strategies for better control.

📌 Example: If campaigns A, B, C, and D share a tROAS goal of 200%, using a portfolio bid strategy ensures better optimization.

4. Locations: Fine-Tune Your Geographic Targeting

Location settings are crucial for businesses targeting specific regions. Google’s default option is:

🔹 “Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your included location.”

However, this can result in wasted spend. For instance, an electrician servicing Manhattan may get clicks from people in Greenwich, Connecticut, simply because they searched for local electricians.

Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations

5. Brand Exclusions: Avoid Unwanted Brand Traffic

Google Ads introduced Brand Exclusions to prevent non-brand campaigns from appearing in brand-related searches. This is essential for businesses running separate brand and non-brand campaigns.

For example:

• Wayfair’s non-brand campaign for chairs may unintentionally appear for searches like “Wayfair chairs”.
• Adding “Wayfair” to the Brand Exclusions list prevents the non-brand campaign from competing with the company’s own brand ads.

📌 Recommendation: Use Brand Exclusions to refine campaign focus and funnel traffic appropriately.

Final Thoughts

By optimizing these five Google Ads settings, advertisers can achieve better traffic quality, improved conversions, and higher ROI in 2025. Fine-tuning campaign structures, bidding strategies, and targeting parameters will ensure a more effective and cost-efficient ad strategy.

By implementing these best practices, advertisers can maximize their success with Google Ads in 2025.