Google Ads Recommendations: Are They Good?

Google Ads has recently given the advertiser the option to automatically accept Google Ads recommendations within the ad account. Google’s goal here is to have the advertiser automatically accept and implement some recommendations in order to time and money on maintenance. At Top Floor, we are hesitant to let Google automatically change anything in Ads accounts for us. We like to have control over what is changing and when, We want to make sure it makes sense for each account since every account can perform differently. We are going to go over the big groups of recommendations from Google and find if they are good recommendations to automatically apply.

Bids & Budget Recommendations

The Google Ads recommendations page has 6 recommendations for bids and budgets that can be automatically applied (See image below).

Google Ads will often recommend only one of these bid strategies based on performance. If a change has been recently made to one of these strategies, Google may not even recommend moving to a new one. At Top Floor we do recommend only choosing one strategy per campaign. The run-time of each campaign is important to selecting a strategy since some of these strategies require historical data in order to perform well, and this may not work for newly implemented campaigns. Have specific questions about your bid strategy? Let us know!

Keyword Recommendations

In Google Ads, there are many recommendations related to keywords and targeting within your campaign. There are nine Google Ads recommendations (image below) that can be split up into four goal-type categories. We can cover each based on their goal.

Goal – Reduce Wasted Spend

Negative keyword research is a great way to see what search keywords are spending the budget. This may be a safe auto-apply option according to other articles, at Top Floor we still would want to be the ones implementing these keywords. We wouldn’t want to leave it to Google to decide what is relevant to our business. 

Goal – More Traffic

There are four Google Ads recommendations that help get more clicks and hopefully some conversions as well. They are:

• Add search partners.
• Use broad or phrase match.
• Add new keywords.
• Add DSAs.

In terms of making these recommendations automatic, we just want to make sure we know exactly what is being implemented. Especially with adding new keywords, we would recommend going through these since they could be keywords that could eat the current budget.

Goal – Account Maintenance

Account maintenance recommendations include the following:

• Remove blocking negatives.
• Remove non-serving keywords

These recommendations are safer to automatically apply to your account. At Top Floor we typically don’t remove non-serving keywords in the account because they are not hurting the account, they are just not serving or spending. We keep them in the account in case search volume does rise for these keywords in the future.

Goal – More Volume in Display Network

The recommendation for dynamic ads can be automatically applied to the display network. It will try to get more reach while staying with the current cost-per-conversion. This can be a good recommendation to accept if you want to advertise on Display and the ad is relevantly created.

Ad Recommendations

There are two last recommendations in Google Ads that may come up on the Google Ads recommendations page. They are:

• Use optimized ad rotation
• Add responsive search ads

These are recommendations that are good but should not be automatically applied. Optimized ad rotation will show ads that are expected to perform the best. This may stop other ads from showing in the ad group and we don’t normally see the clear benefits of this strategy. Responsive Ads are becoming more important to Google as time goes on. So, we recommend taking the time to create these instead of automatically accepting Google’s recommendations.

Conclusion – Are Google Ads Recommendations Good?

Yes, overall they are good. At Top Floor, we don’t automatically apply many of these recommendations because it can be an easy way to lose control over targeting in the account. We do value these recommendations from Google and take a look at them every week or bi-weekly to see how we can improve the account. We will make changes based on the recommendations but won’t press that handy “Apply All” button. 

If you have any questions or thoughts on your Google Ads recommendations page, reach out to our certified experts and we can help answer any questions!