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Google Ads Strategy

Does anybody actually act on the optimisation score?

G
Greg Pallister Asked Sep 05, 2024
3 2679
Account sat at 71 percent this morning. The recommendations to get it to 100: switch four campaigns to broad match, raise two budgets, remove sixteen negative keywords, and adopt a bidding strategy the account already tried and abandoned in March. Applying all of that would spend more money. That's the through-line of nearly every recommendation I have ever been shown... and the score is presented as a health metric, as though 100 percent is a well-run account rather than a compliant one. I'm not saying it's all worthless. Broken tracking and disapproved ads show up there and those are worth knowing about. But I have watched agencies chase that number to keep a badge, and clients ask about it because a rep told them to. So, genuinely: is anyone getting value from it beyond the technical warnings? And do you dismiss the rest, given dismissing also raises the score, which tells you something about what the score measures.

Replies (3)

M Marcus Hale · Sep 06, 2024
We use it as an inbox, not a score. Once a week, read the list, action the two or three that are real - usually a broken conversion action or an ad group with one ad - and dismiss the rest. The number itself we ignore completely, and we told the client why once, in writing, so it never comes up again.
D dave ramos · Sep 06, 2024
my rep called about this exact thing. asked him what the score would be if i applied everything and then it all performed worse. he said the score doesnt measure that so thats the answer isnt it
J Jenna Krause · Sep 09, 2024
The technical ones are genuinely useful and I would not want them buried, which is the real cost of the score being noisy - people stop reading the list entirely and then miss the conversion tracking warning that actually mattered. (Also worth knowing that dismissing counts toward the score. Once you know that, it is hard to read the number as anything other than a compliance measure.)

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