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
Every Google Recommendation Was On — And Every One Was Wrong
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Every Google recommendation was turned on. Every campaign was the wrong type. And the results were getting worse.
Claire audits an orthodontist's Google Ads account where auto-applied recommendations had converted every campaign to display network, added 739 broad match keywords, and launched YouTube and Performance Max campaigns — none of which were appropriate for an orthodontist.
She explains why the optimisation score measures compliance with Google, not performance for your business. And why the only recommendation worth keeping is optimised ad rotation — everything else should be turned off.
Welcome to Clicks and Clarity with Claire.
I opened an orthodontist's Google Ads account recently and the first thing I noticed was the icons.
Every single campaign had the wrong icon.
If you spend enough time inside Google Ads, you learn to spot it instantly. The icon tells you what type of campaign it is. And every campaign in this account was a display network campaign. Not a single one was a pure search campaign.
That means the ads were not just showing when someone searched for an orthodontist. They were appearing on random websites, in mobile apps, on YouTube, across Google's entire display inventory.
And the reason was Google's auto-applied recommendations.
Tons of them. I could tell straight away from the notification bar. Google had been making changes to this account on an ongoing basis. Adding keywords. Changing match types. Editing the bidding strategy. Adjusting the targeting. All without the business owner understanding what was happening.
There were 739 keywords in the account. All broad match. A complete mess.
This is what happens when you let Google manage your account through its recommendations. Google's sales reps, and I call them sales reps because that is what they are, will tell you they are there to help you set up the account. But they are incentivised to get your spend up as high as possible. And they are often very junior staff who believe in the capabilities of the AI to do far more than it actually can.
The AI takes all of the decisions. The campaigns are set up incorrectly. And things get worse and worse over time.
Performance Max was running. Which for an orthodontist is not ideal. Performance Max tends to bring in brand conversions. Someone who already knows the practice searches for it by name, Performance Max claims the credit, and it looks like the campaign is working. But those people were coming anyway.
YouTube ads were running. Video campaigns for an orthodontist. Nobody is watching a YouTube video and deciding on the spot that they need braces.
The only thing this account actually needed was a search campaign. Orthodontist near me. Best orthodontist near me. Children's orthodontist near me. Invisalign plus the city name. Braces plus the city name. Specific buying keywords from people who are actively looking for treatment right now.
That is all.
Not 739 broad match keywords spread across display, YouTube, Performance Max, and search. Just tightly themed search campaigns with matching ads.
The business was only getting 2 leads a day. For the amount being spent, it should have been getting substantially more.
And the conversion tracking was questionable. Some conversions were coming from Google Analytics where a value had been assigned, probably by the Google team. Some looked like they might be page views being counted as conversions rather than actual enquiries.
Bear in mind, this is a business that trusted Google to manage the account properly. They followed the recommendations. They let the AI make changes. They did what they were told.
And the result was an account where every campaign was the wrong type, every keyword was broad match, and the budget was being spread across networks that will never generate orthodontic patients.
If you have a Google rep helping you manage your account, go into recommendations, then auto-apply, and check what is turned on. If Google is automatically editing your ads, changing your keywords, adjusting your bidding, and modifying your targeting, turn all of it off.
The only recommendation we ever leave on is use optimised ad rotation. Everything else, we turn off. Because we want to make the decisions about what happens in the account, not Google's algorithm.
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.