Your Google Ads optimisation score is an estimate of how your account or campaigns are set to perform. It’s a range between 0-100%. It’s calculated in real time based on several factors including statistics, settings and estimated impact of recommendations. The recommendations suggested will help improve your optimisation score. Each recommendation listed shows how much your optimisation score will improve by.

Applying the recommendations might not always be the right move

It’s important to know that just because it’s recommended, it doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for your account. Google doesn’t consider your prior knowledge and campaign research, it doesn’t consider your personal objectives. It can only look at campaign settings, real time auction insights and estimated impact of changes to settings. Some recommendations may be useful, but not always. Let’s explain with a real world example.

See the two recommendations in this image:

Change keywords to broad match

The first recommendation is to change the account’s phrase and exact match keywords to broad match keywords to get more conversions. For this particular ad account, we are working with a limited budget and obtaining regular conversions with the exact and phrase match keywords. By switching to broad match, we will appear for a lot more search queries which may or may not be relevant to this account. Further, this is an established account with prior use of broad match keywords, so we know what the search terms the ads will appear for when using broad match. This would be helpful if we had extra budget and had excellent impression share scores and needed to expand our reach. 

Use optimised targeting

The second recommendation is to use optimised targeting for a Display remarketing campaign. By implementing this recommendation, the campaign would shift from targeting people who have visited the website, to people who Google thinks might be relevant. This recommendation may be useful for a standard display campaign, however in this instance this display campaign’s objective is to target previous web visitors. If this recommendation was implemented we would see a surge in impressions and clicks, however the impact of these results is to be determined. In our experience, it’s not beneficial for most of our clients.

As you can see, both these recommendations are not helpful or relevant to this ad account, and by dismissing these, we’ve boosted the optimisation score as if we had applied these recommendations anyway. Don’t just do what Google recommends.

Think critically about it and if you don’t understand, get a professional to help. If you’re struggling to make sense of your optimisation score or your account recommendations, send us an enquiry over here, and one of our directors will be in touch to organise a call.