Why you don’t want your Google Ads Optimization Score at 100%
On paper, it sounds like a good idea to increase your Google Ads Optimization Score to 100%. After all, Google designed it to give you an estimate of how well your campaigns will perform.
But in practice, taking all of the optimization tool’s recommendations may not make sense for your business.
Here’s why it may be better and cheaper to fall short of a perfect ad optimization score.
Reasons why you shouldn’t aim for 100%
1. Google’s recommendations don’t always make sense
Most of the time Google’s recommendations are helpful. They can point out strategies you haven’t considered and opportunities you didn’t recognize.
But sometimes, they don’t make any sense.
As Lewis Brannon pointed out, Google’s tool often advises you to do nonsensical things, like put certain keywords into an ad group that already contains them.
Even when the tool’s recommendations make sense, they may not be right for your business.
It may recommend that you include a keyword that drives a bunch of unqualified leads to your website, or implement dynamic search ads when you only offer one product or service.
When it comes to implementing Google’s recommendations, you have to tread likely and keep an eye on the results to make sure it’s the right move for your business.
2. Boosting your score can be costly
Taking all of Google’s recommendations can be pretty costly.
Google’s optimization tool, for example, often recommends that you implement automated bidding. But if you apply it, you’ll be giving up a lot of control over your account and ad spend. You could end up with a large, unexpected bill, and not much to show for it.
Pauline Jakober at Search Engine Journal said that she applied automated bidding to one of her client’s campaigns. It increased ad spend by a whopping 47%.
Google’s optimization tool had wanted to apply automated bidding to all of her client’s ad campaigns, which totalled over 200. We’re cringing just thinking about that bill!
And after spending all that money, you may not see a large enough increase in conversions to justify it.
According to PaperStreet, switching to automated bidding may only result in a small increase in conversions, and usually causes the quality of your conversions to go down.
At the end of the day, you shouldn’t give up control of your budget to a corporation that wants to make money. They’re not going to be as judicious with your money as you are.
What score should you aim for?
According to Search Engine Journal, you should aim for an optimization score of around 80%.
To get your score to climb higher than that, you’d have to take most of Google’s recommendations. And as we discussed earlier, some of Google’s recommendations don’t make sense, so you definitely don’t want to implement all of them.
Getting the score up past 80% just isn’t worth the investment of money, either.
So this year, you should aim to make your ad campaigns a little less than perfect, at least in Google’s eyes.