In this tutorial, Austin LeClear argues that Google Ads’ Optimization Score is essentially a fabricated metric that does not reflect actual campaign performance. He walks viewers through the Google Ads interface, showing where the score and the Recommendations tab appear, and explains why the score should not be trusted as a success indicator. LeClear provides a downloadable cheat sheet that lists every Google recommendation, its official definition, and his agency’s guidance on whether to apply or dismiss it. He demonstrates how to selectively dismiss low‑value recommendations—such as adding broad‑match keywords or changing CPA targets—while using the tab as a reminder for genuinely useful actions like completing enhanced conversions. A case study of a client who blindly applied all recommendations illustrates the potential fallout: conversions halved and CPA more than doubled. The video concludes with best‑practice advice for agencies: review recommendations weekly, manually vet each change, and rely on the cheat sheet to maintain control over account performance.
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Google Ads optimization score is an absolute lie. Yeah, I said it. Google wants you to believe that the higher Your score to 100% equals greater success for your account. It's a totally made up thing. So in this video I'm going to break down what is the optimization score, which optimization recommendations you should actually be paying attention to, which ones you should ignore, and does the score actually impact the the success of your ads? So let's dive in. All right. What exactly is an optimization score? So I'm on Google's official support page here. Optimization score is an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform. Optimization score runs from 0 to 100%. With 100% meaning that your account, your account can perform at its full potential. Sounds good. Right now it's totally made up. So Google basically gamified applying the recommendations that they want you to apply in the account, which usually ends up just making Google more money. So it was a well done effort on their part. But the smart marketer knows you have to be very cautious with these recommendations. And the optimization score is absolutely made up. So a lot of times clients will get worried when they see an optimization score in their account that's low. Again, this is based off 0 to 100%. So let's say they go in, they see a 60%, they freak out. Why is my account at 60% when in reality it means literally nothing on the performance of the account? Whether you're at 10% or 100%, that number does not change a single thing on how your ads or campaigns or ad groups or keywords or anything in the account actually performs. So let's dive into a real account and take a look at where we see these recommendations and which ones we should actually be applying. So if I am in the account at the campaign level, I'm going to actually click back here to all the campaigns. You'll see a column here called the optimization score. So you'll see, based off of our campaigns that we're running, you'll see it's giving us a score. 65. 74.8, 86, 78, 81. Now where can I actually go then to see all of the recommendations they're giving us. So if you go to the left side here and hit the recommendations tab, now you're inside your actual score and then the recommendations that they're going to give to you for the account. So in this account, which by the way is, is exceeding the goal, this is an E commerce business, we're hitting the target ROAS that the client wants and grew 50 year over year. So the account is actually doing really well. Now, Google's given us a optimization score here of 72.8%. So you may think if you don't actually know what an optimization score really is, you may think, wow, my account's not doing great. I'm just average. Again, it's just made up. It's made up based off of these recommendations. So if you look here at the recommendations, we're seeing bidding and budgets, keywords and targeting, ad and assets and measurement. Now we have created a complete cheat sheet. This will be in the description below that you can reference anytime in the future. This is every single Google Ads recommendation that Google has publicly stated. We give you their definition of what the recommendation is and then we highlight in yellow what we would recommend doing. So you don't have to simply go in there and rely on Google, who's really just there to, you know, make more money for Google. Again, this will be in the description below. And this is a massive resource to be using. This is exactly how our team is thinking about these recommendations and how we're managing our client accounts. So let's go back inside of the recommendations for this E Commerce client now. Let's just take a look. So target all eligible shopping products would instantly get us a 10.5% increase in optimization score. So now we would go up to, you know, 82% or 83%. So just hitting apply here would give us this 10 increase. I don't want all of their shopping products being targeted. For this particular case, this account, they have limited SKUs, but there's some SKUs that we actually just don't want to run. They're unprofitable and very low ticket. So for through conversations with the client and historical performance data, we have made the decision not to run some of those products. So those have been excluded. Google's algorithm is picking that up. That's saying, oh, your feed has a thousand SKUs and you're only running 900. Well, you should be running all 1,000. And that's a. Has no idea, has no other information other than that. And so let me show you how unimportant some of these are and how unimportant then this optimization score is. All. All I'm going to do is literally click these three dots and I'm going to hit dismiss. I don't want to do this. It's going to ask you why it's optional. I never even give the feedback anymore because I have to do this. So Often. And I'm just going to hit dismiss all. Boom. We are now in 83%. Look at that. Plus 10%. I didn't even apply the recommendation and Google's like giving me the green arrow up and congratulating me for moving our optimization score up. So it's kind of funny how all of this works and this means nothing. Now again, I know I'm trashing on it. There are good recommendations here. It's an SOP at our agency for our analysts managing client accounts to actually review the recommendations tab on a weekly or bi weekly basis. There are things that us as human beings are going to miss. So there are things in here that are good to see. In fact, here's one right here. Finish setting up enhanced conversions. This particular client, their developers are working on the enhanced conversion setup. If we forgot about that for some reason, this is actually a really good reminder. So how our team uses the optimization score in the recommendations tab is just by using it as more of a reminder of anything that we may miss. There are times we might miss adding ad extensions to a particular campaign. So it's not all bad. So we, we actually do like this sometimes. But, but 90% of the time we're in here dismissing it or manually going in and making those changes. So adding new keywords, I'm going to. I'll keep these keywords in here. I don't think they'll give too much away. It's saying, hey, you should add some of these new keywords. I would not just go hit apply all. It's got 26 keywords it wants us to add. You see this view? 26 recommendations. I could hit apply all. That's what Google wants you to do. I do not want Google adding randomly 26 keywords. In fact, let's just take a look real quick in here and make sure. Smile teeth is one they want us to do. By the way, this is like a veneers company and so that's why you're seeing a lot of these dental sort of terms. Some of these are okay. Fake teeth veneers. Best fake teeth veneer. I don't know about that one. Smile teeth is really weird. Not exactly sure why they're recommending a smile teeth. So anyways, none of these are really that great. Some of them were running in other match types. So they're giving us some keywords that they want us to do. You see this broad, they're saying add all of these as broad. That's a big thing. Right now Google's trying to do so this is something you never would want to hit apply, right? You don't want Google just adding all of these. You actually want to be manually reviewing those again. That's going to be in the cheat sheet that we have available on exactly the steps that you should be taking on some of these recommendations. So I'm not going to be adding any of those. Did not see anything that we're missing there. So I'm going to hit this dismissal and boom, we went up, you know, a decimal there. But we did go up. So there are all the recommendations. You do not want to go apply all these recommendations. In fact, let's hop into an account that actually did apply all these recommendations and let's see what happened to the results. I am inside old client's account. I still have access to it. I'm going to blur everything out. But it was one where they took it back in house and we still had access. And sometimes it's like, well, let's just see how the performance is doing. After they brought it back in house, they took this back over in June of 2023. Look exactly what happened here. From May 2023 to June 2023, they went from 600 conversions at A$25 CPA to 300 conversions at a $36 CPA. What the heck happened? I did bring out several other months. This is not a seasonal business. And you can know, you just notice this. That is a massive flip flop of the red and blue lines. You don't want your red lines, the CPA going up and you don't want the blue line, your total conversions going down. That's exactly what happened. So we saw this and we're like, whoa, hold on. What did, what did this client do? So we went and looked in the change history and they went and literally hit apply all to all the applied recommendations. So they were adding a bunch of broad match keywords because that's what Google recommended to do. And what ended up doing is resulting in a ton of terrible irrelevant search traffic for them. They removed keywords that Google said was redundant. Even though they were top performing keywords, they increased. This one's very interesting. They changed the campaign target CPA to $200. The goal was a 25 CPA in the account and somehow they just 10x the the CPA goal. So I'm showing you this because this is the disaster that can happen to an account if you just go in and start applying the recommendations that that Google wants you to have. So I hope this video saves you some time. On understanding the optimization score. I hope it saves you some money where you're not actually applying some of these recommendations and ending up with a massive tank in your performance of your account due to applying some of those recommendations. And I hope you find the cheat sheet helpful and a good reference in the future. If you do get these recommendations from Google and you don't know what to do with that said, I will see you on the next video. Thanks.
