Clicks and Clarity with Claire
If you’re spending real money on Google Ads and still asking, “Why isn’t this working?”—this podcast is for you.
I’m Claire Jarrett, Google Ads strategist and founder of Jarrett Digital. Each week, I break down what’s actually going on behind the numbers—so you can stop wasting ad spend, start attracting qualified leads, and scale with confidence.
No fluff. No jargon. Just clear advice, real audits, and proven strategies from accounts managing four to six figures in monthly ad spend.
Whether you're DIY-ing your ads or working with an agency, this is the clarity you've been missing.
Clicks and Clarity with Claire
Google Quietly Deleted the Keywords That Were Converting
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Google was removing keywords, editing bids, and changing targeting without the business owner knowing.
Claire audits a flight booking company where auto-applied recommendations turned off the small volume keywords that were converting cheaply and replaced them with broad match. 216 keywords crammed into 1 campaign meant poor ad strength and invisible ads.
She explains how to check what Google has changed in your account — and why the keywords Google removed might have been the ones that were actually working.
Welcome to Clicks and Clarity with Claire.
I opened a flight booking company's Google Ads account and the first thing I saw was auto-applied recommendations. All of them turned on.
Google had been removing keywords. Editing the bidding. Upgrading the tracking. Changing the targeting. All without the business owner understanding what was happening or giving permission.
And the worst part was what Google had removed.
The account had lots of keywords getting small amounts of traffic. Individually, none of them looked impressive. But they were converting at a very low cost per conversion. They were doing exactly what you want keywords to do. Bringing in leads cheaply and reliably.
Google turned them off. Every single one of those small volume keywords, gone. Google decided they were not worth keeping because the volume was too low. And then Google replaced them with broad match keywords and handed control to the AI.
The results dropped significantly.
This is what auto-applied recommendations actually do. Google presents them as helpful suggestions. The interface makes it look like Google is optimising your account for you. But Google is not optimising for your business results. Google is optimising for Google's objectives, which is getting you to spend more money across more of its network.
The only recommendation we ever leave on is use optimised ad rotation. Everything else gets turned off. Because we want to make the decisions about what happens in the account.
Now, beyond the auto-applied damage, the account had structural problems.
There were 216 keywords in a single campaign. We like to have 5 exact match and 5 phrase match of the same keyword per ad group. Maybe 10 or 20 at most. 216 is unmanageable.
And because there were so many keywords crammed together, the ad strength was poor. Which means the ads were not competing in every auction. The competitors with excellent ad strength were showing. This business was not. And the owner did not even know it was not showing.
That is one of the most dangerous things about poor ad strength. There is no alert. No notification. Google just quietly stops showing your ads in auctions where the competition has better ad copy. You keep paying for the clicks you do get, but you are invisible for many of the searches you should be appearing for.
The search terms told an interesting story. Cheap flights was clearly the winning keyword type. High conversion rate. Strong intent. But because there were no negatives forcing keywords into specific campaigns, Google was bidding on cheap flights across multiple campaigns at once. The same search term triggering ads from different campaigns, competing against itself.
You fix that with negative keywords. You add negatives to the other campaigns to force the search term to show only in the campaign you want it in. Otherwise Google just picks whichever it feels like, and you lose all control over which ad shows for which search.
The fix here was substantial. This account needed at minimum 50 ad groups per campaign. Each with tightly themed keywords. Each with matching ads that could reach excellent ad strength. Target CPA set per ad group based on what the business actually needs per conversion. And a daily negative keyword routine to keep the search terms clean.
That is a lot of work. But it is the difference between an account that reliably brings in leads at a predictable cost and an account where Google is making changes you did not ask for, removing keywords that were working, and replacing them with broad match terms that cost more and convert less.
If you have auto-applied recommendations turned on, go and check your change history right now. Look at what Google has been doing. You might find that the keywords Google removed were the ones that were actually working.
That is it for today.
If you want me to check what Google has been changing in your account without you knowing, book a free audit at clairejarrett.com.
So many thanks for listening.
Bye for now.