Google Ads for Pakistani e-commerce: the 5 settings I change on every new account

When I open a new Google Ads account for an online store, I don't start with keywords. I start with settings. Google's defaults are built to find more places to spend your budget. That's not the same as helping you sell.

Most of these settings take a few minutes to change. Left alone, they waste money every single day. Here are the five I change on every new account, and why they matter even more for stores selling in Pakistan.

1. Location targeting: presence, not interest

In campaign settings, under Locations, there's a part most people never open: Location options. The default is "Presence or interest". That means people in your locations, people who are regularly there, and people who've shown interest in them.

That last part is the problem. If you target Pakistan, Google can also show your ads to someone in Dubai or Toronto who searched for something related to Pakistan. For a store that only delivers inside Pakistan and takes cash on delivery, that click is wasted. They can't order from you.

Switch it to Presence. If you only deliver to certain cities, target those cities instead of the whole country, and check the locations report after a week to see where the clicks really came from.

There's one exception. If you sell to overseas Pakistanis sending gifts home, interest targeting can make sense. Put that in a separate campaign with its own budget, so you can see what it really brings in.

2. Search partners and Display: off

When you create a Search campaign, two boxes are ticked by default: Google search partners and the Google Display Network. I untick both.

Search partners are other sites that show Google search ads. Sometimes they work, but you can't see much about where your ads appear, and the quality varies a lot. The Display box is worse inside a Search campaign. It takes part of your search budget and spends it on banner placements across websites and apps. A lot of that inventory is mobile apps and games, where accidental clicks are common.

Start with pure Search. Once a campaign is profitable, you can test search partners in a copy of it and compare. If you want Display or YouTube, build them as their own campaigns with their own goals.

3. Auto-applied recommendations: off

Google Ads has a Recommendations page, and inside it there's an Auto-apply section. Recommendations you tick there get applied to your account automatically, without you approving each change. Depending on what's switched on, auto-apply can:

• Add new keywords you never reviewed.
• Switch your keywords to broad match.
• Remove keywords it decides are redundant.
• Change your bidding strategy.

I turn off almost all of it. Some of the suggestions are good. I still want to read them first. Check the Recommendations page once a week, apply what makes sense and dismiss the rest.

Optimization score measures how many of Google's suggestions you accepted. It doesn't measure how much profit you made.

Your optimization score will drop when you dismiss things. That's fine. Nobody pays their suppliers with an optimization score.

4. Conversion tracking you can trust

Smart bidding is only as good as the conversions you feed it. If tracking is wrong, Google optimizes for the wrong thing, and it does that very efficiently. Here's how I set it up:

• Use the Google Ads conversion tag for purchases. Install it through Google Tag Manager or, on Shopify, the Google and YouTube app. Make sure it fires once per order, sends the order value in PKR and includes the order ID.
• Turn on enhanced conversions. This sends a hashed version of the customer's email and phone number with the conversion, so Google can match more sales to ad clicks when cookies are blocked. It's worth doing on every store.
• Decide what GA4 is for. You can import GA4 conversions into Google Ads, but don't count the same purchase twice. I keep the Google Ads tag as the primary purchase action used for bidding, and set imported GA4 purchases as secondary, so they show in reports without changing bids.
• Keep small actions secondary. Add to cart, page views and WhatsApp clicks are useful to watch. If they're set as primary, Google will happily chase the cheapest of them.

5. Bidding and Performance Max guardrails

On a brand new account, I don't start with Target ROAS. Google needs conversion history before a target means anything. I usually start with Maximize conversions on a sensible budget, and only add a ROAS target once the campaign has a steady flow of conversions to learn from.

Performance Max needs the most guardrails, because one campaign runs across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps. Three settings I always check:

• Brand exclusions. Without them, PMax will happily show ads to people searching for your own store name. They were going to find you anyway, and it makes PMax look better than it is. Exclude your brand and run a small separate Search campaign for brand terms.
• Asset groups by product type. Don't put the whole catalogue in one asset group. Split by category or by margin, with images, headlines and videos made for each. A lawn suit and a men's watch shouldn't share the same ads.
• Final URL expansion. When it's on, Google can send traffic to any page on your site, including blog posts and policy pages. For most stores I turn it off, or exclude the pages that can't sell.

Then read the Insights and search terms reports inside PMax every week. They don't show everything, but they show enough to catch obvious waste.

One more: negative keywords on day one

This one isn't a setting, but I do it before launch too. Every new account gets a shared negative keyword list applied to its Search and Shopping campaigns. For Pakistani stores, my starting list usually covers:

• Free, jobs, salary, course and training, unless you sell courses.
• OLX, used, second hand and repair, unless you sell those.
• Wholesale, if you only sell retail.
• How to, kaise and DIY searches from people looking for information, not a product.

Then check the search terms report every few days in the first month. It shows exactly what people typed before they clicked, and it's the fastest way to stop paying for searches that were never going to buy.

Before you launch

None of this is advanced. It's the boring part most people skip, and it's usually where the money leaks first.

If you want to learn the whole setup, the course covers it step by step. If you'd rather I check your account with you, book a strategy call.