Most people open a new Search campaign, keep clicking Next, and let Google pick the settings. That is the expensive mistake. Google’s defaults are not built to protect your budget. They are built to spend it. A few of them quietly push your money onto the wrong network, in front of the wrong people, and in some cases straight to a competitor clicking your ad on purpose.
Before you spend a single rupee, there are four campaign settings to fix. They sit one level up from your ads, in a panel most beginners never open. Fix these and your budget starts landing on people who can actually buy.
Watch the full walkthrough above (Urdu). English summary below.
The settings that run your ads live one level up
Your ads sit inside ad groups. But the settings that decide who sees them, where they show, and what you pay all sit at the campaign level, not the ad level. That trips people up. They spend all their time polishing the ad and never touch the controls that actually spend the money.
Click into your campaign, hover to the left menu, and open Settings. That one screen is the control panel for everything below it. If you are still fuzzy on how the pieces stack, the ad group sits between the campaign and the ad, and the four fixes below all live at the top, on the campaign.
Turn the Display Network off (and leave Search Partners alone at first)
When you build a Search campaign, Google offers to also run it on two extra places: the Display Network and Search Partners. Both are ticked by default. The Display Network is the one to switch off straight away.
Display is banners and image slots on other websites. You are writing a text ad. So to fill an image space, Google will generate something on its own and show it around, and you pay for clicks from people who were never searching for you in the first place. That is budget gone with nothing to show. Turn Display off on any Search campaign.
Search Partners is different. Those are other search sites that use Google’s results. The traffic there has improved over the years, but it is not where you start. Add it later, only once your own Google search is already profitable and bringing steady sales or leads. On a new account, or one that is not profitable yet, leave it off. Google’s own search network is more than enough to fill your budget.
Presence or interest: the setting that spends outside your market
Location targeting looks like the easy part. Pick your country, or pick a few main cities if your budget is tight or your data points there. Simple. But underneath it there is a quiet default that most people never read.
You get two choices. “Presence or interest” means people who are in your location OR people merely interested in it. That is the default. “Presence” means only people actually in your location. Here is why it matters: say your market is Pakistan. Someone sitting in India who searches for something Pakistan-related counts as interested, so under the default your ad can show to them, and you can pay for that click. It will never become a local customer. Switch this to Presence so you only pay for people who are really in your market.
Two more moves in the same panel. You can exclude a location your data says never converts, so you stop feeding it. And for a local business, use radius targeting: a beauty parlour should target a set number of miles around its area, not the whole city. If your budget is small, tightening location is one of the fastest ways to make it stretch, right alongside setting a sensible max CPC ceiling.
Two exclusions that stop wasted and wrong clicks
The last two settings are exclusions, and they solve two very different leaks.
IP exclusions. On expensive campaigns, think legal work, or web development in the US where a single click can cost a lot, competitors sometimes click your ads on purpose just to drain your budget. You can find the repeat offender IP addresses and block them here. It is a fiddly fix, because a home router resets and the address changes, so do not lean on it too hard. The good news: Google now detects invalid and repeated clicks and refunds them to you automatically, and you can flag suspicious activity for it to review. That safety net did not exist a few years ago.
Brand exclusions. This one keeps your own brand name out of a generic campaign. Say you sell lawn suits under a brand name, and you are running a broad campaign on the term “lawn suits” to reach new buyers. You do not want that same campaign also catching people who type your brand. Run your brand in its own separate campaign, and exclude the brand name here, so the two never overlap and never fight each other for the same click.
The bottom line
Google’s defaults are built to spend, not to protect. Before you launch a Search campaign, do four things at the campaign level: turn Display off, leave Search Partners until you are profitable, switch location to Presence, and set your exclusions. That is the difference between a budget that reaches buyers and one that quietly leaks all day.
Watch the full walkthrough above to see exactly where each setting lives in the account.
Want to go deeper? The full Google Ads Mastery course covers this and 50+ hours of real account walkthroughs, from campaign setup to bidding to conversion tracking. See the course here.