The idea of recommendations in Google Ads is great: even if you don’t know your way around, you have an automated assistant at your side who helps you with specific tips to optimize your own account and increase your success.

Sounds too good to be true? Yes, that’s why IT IS!

Because if you’re not careful, Google Ads recommendations can have the exact opposite effect. They can make your campaigns more inefficient and end up costing you a lot of money.

Unfortunately, smaller companies that don’t have much experience with Google Ads suffer the most.

I’ve written this post to make sure you’re not one of them. Here you will find everything you need to know – including specific tips on how to deal with the individual recommendations. Let’s go

What are Google Ads recommendations?

Google Ads recommendations are automated suggestions from Google to help you optimize your advertising campaigns. You can find them in the Recommendations Tab of your Google Ads account.

Each recommendation is displayed as a card and you have the option of taking a closer look at the details or applying them directly.

Typical recommendations include suggestions for expanding your keyword list, adjusting bids and budgets, activating new ad formats and many more.

Why are recommendations often viewed critically?

Google Ads recommendations are often controversial because they are not always in your best interest. Many of these suggestions aim to increase your ad spend without actually improving your campaigns.

For example, Google often recommends increasing your budget or using broad match keywords. While these measures can generate more traffic, in many cases they do not lead to more success or profitability.

Another problem is that these recommendations are based on general best practices and are usually not tailored to the specific goals of your campaigns – even if Google itself says so. And many of the best practices promoted by Google can also be viewed critically.

Cui bono? – Who benefits?

Google naturally wants you to spend more on the advertising platform. Because of this commercial interest, many people question Google’s recommendations.

Recommendations and the optimization score

You have probably already seen the optimization score in the Recommendations Tab in your Google Ads account. This is closely linked to recommendations.

What is the optimization score?

The optimization score in Google Ads indicates how well your campaign is optimizedd according to Google’s best practices. The score ranges from 0% to 100%, with a higher score indicating that your campaign is closer to its “full potential” – at least by Google’s standards.

Here is Google’s definition:

It’s important to understand that this score doesn’t directly measure the success of your campaign in terms of conversions or ROI. Rather, it shows how well your campaign aligns with Google’s recommended practices.

How easy it is to achieve a score of 100%

You can easily increase your optimization factor:

Because the optimization factor increases every time you accept OR reject a recommendation.

Google itself says that the optimization score reflects the performance of your campaigns. Honestly, this is simply not the case.

This means that even if you dismiss all recommendations from Google, you still have an optimization score of 100% – but with a small catch:

If you decline recommendations, the optimization score bar fills up with a gray bar instead of a blue one. This is another way in which Google makes a distinction. According to a Google Rep I spoke to recently, only the blue bar is relevant. In the example in the following image, this would mean that my campaign is only 53% optimized – Google recommends a score of 90%.

But honestly, I have never experienced it affecting anything.

Not a real “optimization score”

The optimization score does not really deserve this name for the reasons mentioned. It should therefore not play a major role in your decisions.

You should mainly focus on achieving your hard goals like sales numbers.

Despite all the criticism, the optimization score can still be helpful. Because if it is low, it means that Google has found many optimization opportunities. In this case, it’s worth taking a look at the recommendations. There are some very helpful tips here.

So let’s get to that now. Which recommendations are useful and which are not?

Recommendations and how you should deal with them

Google Ads offers numerous recommendations for optimizing your campaigns. These recommendations can be grouped into different categories depending on how useful they are in practice.

I divide the recommendations into these categories here:

• Rarely useful:
  You can usually reject these recommendations outright, as in most cases they are only there to increase your budget or reach – without benefiting you.
  

• Often useful:
  It’s worth looking at all the recommendations in this category. There may be helpful tips here, or aspects that you may have overlooked.
  

• Always useful:
  Here you will find recommendations such as errors or conflicts in your account. You should always follow these.

As there are many possible recommendations and I don’t want to overwhelm you, let’s focus on the most common ones.

Google Ads recommendations in detail

Rarely useful

• Adjust or increase budgets: It is often recommended to increase the budget. In the vast majority of cases, however, you don’t simply have more money at your disposal. With Google’s motivation in mind, the recommendation rarely helps you.
  
  Only increase your budget if you are achieving satisfactory results. And it’s also best not to listen to Google’s figures. They often recommend a much too large budget jump.
  
  
• Add broad match keywords: Unless you have deliberately chosen a strategy with broad match keywords yourself, I would advise against it.
  
  In the vast majority of cases, this only leads to you increasing your reach because you are bidding on a large number of irrelevant search terms. This often leads to more costs – without corresponding results.
  
  
• Use display network expansion: Adding the display network means that your search campaigns can also be placed on the display network. This may give you more reach – but it will dilute your results.
  
  My recommendation is to keep search and display campaigns strictly separate, as they fulfill different functions in your marketing mix.
  
  
• Recommendations to increase reach: Recommendations such as “Increase reach with Google video partners”, “Increase reach with Google search network partners” or “Use optimized targeting” will increase the reach of your campaigns.
  
  Especially if you are not yet satisfied with the performance of your campaign, these recommendations often only lead to more costs. If you are already achieving good results, it can be interesting testing those options. But in 99% of the time they don’t yield good results.

Often useful

• Add new keywords and remove redundant keywords: The recommendations can be helpful. However, usually, only a few (or none) of the keywords that Google mentions in the recommendation are suitable. You should take a closer look at the keywords and not just follow the recommendation.
  
  Read more about removing redundant keywords here.
  
  
• Optimize ads and assets: If you see recommendations such as “Improve your responsive search ads”, “Add sitelinks” and “Add assets to responsive search ads”, this may be an indication that you can improve your performance with better ad copy or more ad assets (formerly extensions), such as sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets or price assets.
  
  
• Optimize and adapt bidding strategies: Recommendations such as “Bid more efficiently with ‘maximize conversions’”, “Optimize bids with ‘target CPA’”, “Set target ROAS” and “Adjust ROAS targets” can be a useful tip. Especially if you collect enough conversion data with a campaign (at least 30 per month), you can test switching to an automated bidding strategy.
  
  
• Optimize product data in the Merchant Center: Recommendations such as “add GTINs to products”, “add age range to products”, “add color to your products”, “add gender to your products”, “add sizing to your products” and “add product labels” are an indication that you should optimize your product feed.
  
  The more and detailed the data, the better.

Always useful

• Keyword and ad maintenance: Recommendations such as “Remove non-serving keywords” and “Remove conflicting negative keywords” keep your account clean and efficient.
  
  
• Fix ad errors: Recommendations like “Add ads to each ad group” and “Fix ad targeting errors” will show you issues with your ads that you should fix.
  
  
• Set up conversion tracking and tagging: Recommendations like “Set up conversion tracking” and “Set up general website tag” indicate that your account isn’t set up properly yet. You should change this.

Applying Google Ads recommendations automatically – yes or no?

In Google Ads there is the option to apply the recommendations automatically. This means that they are applied as soon as the Google algorithm makes a recommendation for your account or your campaigns.

If you have ever noticed that, for example, new keywords have been added to your account or the bidding strategy of campaigns has changed on its own, this could be the reason.

This is because if auto-apply is activated for certain recommendations, you are giving Google permission to make major changes.

It’s best to check the corresponding settings in your account right away:

How to edit the settings:

• Go to your Google Ads account and navigate to the “Recommendations” tab.
• Click on “Auto-apply”.
• Select the recommendations you want to apply automatically.
• Save them.
  

Which recommendations can you apply automatically?

In my opinion, caution is advised with the vast majority of recommendations. However, there are a few that you can apply automatically without any problems.

Recommendations that make sense to apply automatically

1. Use optimized ad rotation
   • Explanation: Google ensures that the best ads are automatically displayed for each auction. This can improve the overall performance of your campaigns.
     
2. Remove non-serving keywords
   • Explanation: Keywords that do not deliver ads should be removed to manage the account more efficiently.
     
3. Remove conflicting negative keywords
   
   • Explanation: These keywords prevent your ads from being displayed. By removing them, more ads will be displayed.

Recommendations where you need to be careful

In my opinion, these are all the others. This is because these are recommendations that can be useful – but not in every case.

That’s why you have to check them yourself and make sure that the recommendation fits your current strategy.

Conclusion: The most important points when dealing with Google Ads recommendations

Google Ads recommendations are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can help you to discover optimization potential and errors. On the other hand, however, they can also make your performance worse – especially if you implement all recommendations.

Therefore: Take a close look at every recommendation before you adopt it. Always ask yourself whether it really suits your goals.

Here are some important points to bear in mind:

1. Check the recommendations thoroughly: not every recommendation is tailored to your specific needs. Google often aims to increase your spend, not necessarily your success.
   
   
2. Choose keywords wisely: Be especially careful with broad match keyword recommendations. These can lead to you paying for many irrelevant search queries, driving up your costs without delivering the desired benefit.
   
   
3. Keep specific objectives in mind: Recommendations are often based on general best practices rather than your individual campaign objectives. Make sure that every change you make serves your specific goals.
   
   
4. Automatic application of recommendations: Be careful about auto-applying recommendations. While there are some that can be useful, many can mess up your campaigns and cause unwanted changes.
   

Stay critical – you’ll be more successful in the long run.

Thanks for reading this far! I hope I was able to help you with this post.

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