Google Ads Optimisation Score | Guide your account optimisations
Google has now launched an Optimisation Score in Google Ads in order for advertisers to understand account optimisation potential. The score runs from 0% to 100%, with a score of 100% meaning that your account is performing to it’s fullest potential. It’s found in the Recommendations tab, all in an effort to make this dashboard more actionable for advertisers to drive real value across their Search activity.
We’ve been told to expect this for a while now, and previous variations of this score have been visible in the ‘Opportunities’ tab in the old Google AdWords interface called ‘Account Health Score for Search’. But now, with the revamped ‘Recommendations’ tab, this score becomes a lot more useful and actionable for advertisers.
What is an Optimisation Score in Google Ads?
The Google Ads optimisation score looks at various elements across your accounts to see if they are working to their full potential. They then offer recommendations in the recommendations tab and use this to see if there is room for improvement. If Google thinks that a recommendation can have more impact on your account performance, it will give more weight in the overall optimisation score.
Your optimisation score looks at the following:
- Ads & Ad Extensions
- Bids & Budgets
- Keywords & Targeting
- Repairs
- Plus more
According to Google Ads, your optimisation score is calculated in real-time and understands the following to calculate:
- Statistics, settings and the status of your account and campaigns
- Relevant impact of available recommendations
- Recent recommendations history
- Trends in the ads ecosystem
Note
The optimisation score only works for Search campaigns. It also doesn’t factor into things like Quality Score or Ad Rank calculations.
How should you use the Optimisation Score?
You should use it as a health check to audit your accounts
You could be on the side that thinks Google’s best practice isn’t always your best practice. If so, you’ll still find use with this score as a visual representation of how healthy your account is. If it’s super low, then you know that there is something significantly wrong with the setup of your account.
The visuals help focus your optimisations efforts if you don’t quite know where to start
What’s also useful is the visual percentages alongside each of the key areas of focus (e.g. Bids & Budgets etc.) to help guide your optimisation efforts to the areas that are going to have the biggest impact on account performance. By clicking on these, Google Ads will surface the recommendations that matter most.
Take action using the recommendations
With the new recommendations tab, it’s now super simple to implement the changes within a few clicks. Of course, you may have specific reasons for not implementing the recommendation (e.g. due to strategy or KPIs), but perhaps you could use Drafts & Experiments if you are apprehensive about any major changes.
This helps to improve best practice across the whole industry
It means that we should get better standards set across the industry. This is healthy for Advertisers, Users and Google
For advertisers…
Still now, there is bad practice being undertaken across every auction. This can be frustrating for advertisers who are working to drive better quality ads and good performance, whilst others are ruining the experience for potential customers by having terrible ad copy or appearing for results that are sometimes completely irrelevant. This of course also increases CPCs in the auction.
For users…
If the experience is more relevant for users from search to the ad copy to the landing page, they’ll benefit. If the users benefit, so do advertisers and Google.
For Google…
Of course, if Google can ensure that advertisers are adhering to their best practice and adopting more machine learning to help make better decisions for them, then ultimately users get a better experience with their ads. If this happens, then Google make more revenue. Google are taking much more control over advertiser accounts through all of this, as well as through recent products such as Responsive Search Ads. At what point does it become too much?
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