Understanding And Improving Your Optimisation Score In Google Ads

Inside Google Ads, there is a metric known as the “Optimisation Score” that ranges from 0% to 100%, and its purpose is to indicate how well the campaigns in an account are set to perform, based on recommendations by Google. However, it should be noted that whilst recommendations by Google might appear to be beneficial to your account and campaigns, it can be argued that Google does not have the advertiser’s best interests at heart when suggesting them. They are a tool used by Google to take control away from the advertiser which can lead to increased costs with little to show in terms of campaign performance. Admittedly, some Google recommendations can be beneficial to the account, but only if you know what you are doing and are aware of how the suggestions work. The purpose of this blog is to inform you of the changes that would negatively impact your account, as well as to make you aware of the good suggestions.

Changing your bidding strategy

Oftentimes in an account, Google will be pushing for you to change your bidding strategy to the likes of maximise conversions and maximise clicks.

Maximising conversions is beneficial for a PPC account, but only if it has consistently delivered conversions over an extended period of time. Maximise conversions is a fully automated bidding strategy – therefore, an account that generally has few conversions per month that changes to a maximise conversions bidding strategy will try and spend the full daily budget, possibly raising your CPC as bidding becomes more aggressive. The same can be said for the maximise clicks strategy, as it will aim to drive as much traffic as possible to your ads whilst spending the full daily budget. Because of this, you may want to look at setting a max cost per click limit or CPA target to better manage this spending.

Google may also recommend that you use a portfolio bid strategy if there are multiple campaigns that share the same bid strategy but have different budgets. This is to be avoided, especially if there is one campaign that performs significantly better than the others as the budget will be shared across all campaigns instead of assigned to specific campaigns.

Changing your keywords

Google has a tendency to push for accounts to switch to broad match keywords as a means of gaining more control over which user searches your ads are served to Broad match keywords will expand the reach of your campaigns, even to those that are very loosely interested and sometimes not interested at all (for example if you’re advertising for a ball point pen as a keyword, then you could trigger searches for pencils, felt tips, fountain pens and so on). Time will be spent browsing through and sorting irrelevant search terms if this is turned on – all whilst wasting your budget in the process.

Redundant keywords are recommended by Google to be removed. Defined, redundant keywords are where there are multiple keywords in an ad group that can trigger the same search terms, therefore Google wants these removed to manage the account easier. By doing this, the budget could be used more efficiently, however, it should be noted that they could potentially still serve.

Google also recommends that accounts remove non-serving keywords, which are keywords that have not received any traffic over a long period of time. This is recommended to neaten the account, and there is no downside to keeping them active in case they do end up eventually serving.

Changing your budgets

It is no surprise that Google wants account owners to increase their budget so that they can spend more on ads – and they try to justify this in the recommendations section by showing the predicted increase in clicks alongside a budget increase example. A higher budget can improve performance and overall campaign efficiency if a campaign is already performing well, however, there are ways to benefit the account without having to spend more. Some of these methods include optimising keywords, improving the overall ad copy, and regular monitoring of performance. 

Understanding how the optimisation score works inside Google ads is an important aspect of managing successful PPC campaigns. Whilst some of the optimisation score recommendations can prove useful, it is important to provide caution when considering some of the suggestions. Google’s only goal is to increase its own revenue, meaning that not all recommendations will necessarily benefit the account. 

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