There's a hidden setting when configuring geo on campaigns.
By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".
This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.
A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.
While we're at it...
1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)
2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.
By default it's set to "People -interested- in your target location" . You need to change it to "People who are -in- your target location".
This setting is hidden under a toggle, so it's very easy to miss. Definitely a dark pattern and results in a lot of garbage clicks if you overlook that setting.
This is just one of many dark patterns which makes Google Ads effective only for people willing to spend the time tuning and tweaking every single setting.
A big part of the problem is Google themselves - they say always use "broad" keyword matches (and of course it's the default). Broad matches are really not good for most campaigns unless you have an extremely large budget, yet if you read their documentation they heavily encourage it.
While we're at it...
1) Never enable the "auto apply recommendations" setting. If you do, it gives Google free reign to modify your campaigns (this has always resulted in worse performance and more spend in my experience)
2) Never listen to a google ads rep if they call. Once you're spending enough, they'll call you every week trying to convince you to change various settings. 95% of the time their advice is just plain bad. The quality of the advice does increase once you're spending enough and get assigned more senior reps. But even the senior reps are there to get you to spend more money, their job is not to make your campaigns more effective, "ad specialists" are simply sales people in disguise.