Back in 2019, I wrote about Google’s recommendations and optimisation score and since then there have been some updates to the feature.
The “optimisation score is an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform” as described by Google.
And as I said, in my post back in 2019:
“The score is a percentage, 0% being total rubbish, and 100% being perfect”
“In order to improve your optimisation score, Google provides ‘recommendations’, hence the name of the feature, to increase your score. These recommendations include bid and budget changes, keyword and targeting alterations, and ad and extension amendments. Each idea includes details of the increase you could see in your score if you were to implement the suggestion(s) – this indicates how important these changes are deemed by Google.”
Now, for as long as I can remember, nearly every chat I’ve had with a Google representative ends up talking about the more recently added, auto-apply recommendations option. This is the option to simply click a button to allow Google to automatically apply its recommendations. This means you would be giving Google permission to make edits to your campaigns, such as adding new keywords or creating dynamic search ads – something we would never recommend using.
However, probably due to low uptake on the catch-all auto-apply option and hopefully due to a lot of users giving their honest opinions of its suggestions (ie. “I don’t think this will improve my performance”), Google has released some new options.
Choose which recommendations are auto-applied
Google has introduced the ‘Manage’ tab, within the auto-apply section, giving users the option to choose (and more often than not, not choose) which recommendations are allowed to be automatically applied:
These options are split into ‘Maintain your ads’ and include things like:
- Use optimised ad rotation
- Remove redundant keywords
- Upgrade your conversion tracking
And ‘Grow your business’ which includes things like:
- Add new keywords
- Create Dynamic Search Ads
- Upgrade your existing keywords to broad match
- Use Display Expansion
Please, please don’t ever select these!
There are a few options in here that you can consider opting in to, for example:
- Use optimised ad rotation
- Remove redundant keywords
- Remove non-serving keywords
- Remove conflicting negative keywords
- Remove redundant keywords
- Upgrade your conversion tracking
However, there is nothing better than human input when it comes to optimising your campaigns and it only takes a few seconds, every 1-2 weeks, to check the recommendations and apply these types of suggestions, so you can double check you are happy with them.
Test Google’s recommendations with experiments
Another new feature that has been added, is the ability to test the suggestions with easy experiment set up.
“Currently, this functionality is available for broad match and target return on advertising spend recommendations. We’ll continue to roll out support for more recommendation types on the Experiments page in the coming months.”
So if Google is suggesting switching all your keywords to broad match, in just a couple of clicks you can create an experiment to test the theory. This means you can create a campaign containing the broad match terms and split the budget and traffic 50/50 between the two campaigns to see which performs better.
If you do choose to try an experiment like this for non-brand terms, I would recommend having brand terms as negatives on both campaigns to ensure they do not sway conversion data.
If you don’t have the time or confidence to manage your Google Ads account, please don’t opt to auto-apply its recommendations. Get in touch with us and we can help.