If you manage Google Ads accounts, you've likely seen those bright blue banners urging you to implement Google’s “Recommendations.” Google even assigns you an Optimization Score, encouraging you to get it to 100%. But here’s the truth: chasing a perfect score can do more harm than good.
At Nerdy Media Inc we are all about making the smart the decision. While Google Ads recommendations can be helpful in some cases, blindly applying them can waste your budget, reduce control over your campaigns, and skew your strategy away from what actually works. Here’s why you should sometimes hit “dismiss” instead of “apply.”
1. Google's Goals Aren’t Your Goals
Google’s primary objective is to get advertisers to spend more money. Your goal is to get the best ROI.
Many recommendations—like increasing budgets or switching to broad match keywords—are designed to help Google increase ad volume. That might help you gain impressions, but more traffic doesn’t always mean more conversions. In fact, it often means more unqualified clicks that drain your budget.
2. Broad Match Recommendations Can Hurt Relevance
One of the most common suggestions from Google is to use broad match keywords or to switch from phrase or exact match. While broad match can expand reach, it also introduces a lot of noise.
Your ads might start showing up for terms that aren’t relevant to your business, leading to lower CTRs, poor Quality Scores, and higher CPCs. If you've invested time building tightly themed ad groups, this kind of automation can unravel that structure quickly.
3. Automated Bidding Isn’t Always Smart
Google loves to push smart bidding strategies like Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, or Target ROAS. While these can work well in accounts with stable conversion data, they’re not ideal for newer campaigns, low-conversion-volume accounts, or industries with long sales cycles.
Switching to smart bidding too early can sabotage performance, especially if Google doesn’t have enough data to optimize effectively. Manual bidding or enhanced CPC often provides better control in these situations.
4. Ad Suggestions Can Dilute Your Message
Google sometimes creates ad copy for you and recommends adding it to your campaigns. While it's convenient, it’s also risky.
These auto-generated ads are often generic and lack the nuance, tone, or unique selling points that differentiate your brand. Over time, this can dilute your messaging and hurt CTRs and conversion rates.
5. You Know Your Business Better Than Google Does
At the end of the day, Google doesn’t know your business, your customers, or your strategy as well as you do.
Things like seasonal trends, competitive positioning, target audience nuances, or even how leads are handled post-click—Google can’t see any of that. That’s why you need to apply your own logic and experience before implementing any automated suggestion.
When Google Ads Recommendations Do Help
This isn’t to say all recommendations are bad. Some suggestions—like fixing disapproved ads, adding sitelinks, or identifying underperforming keywords—can be genuinely useful. The key is to treat recommendations as insights, not instructions. Google Ads recommendations are like a GPS: useful guidance, but sometimes you need to take a different route based on what you know about the terrain.
As a marketer or business owner, your job is to make decisions based on data, context, and strategy—not just an algorithm’s idea of “optimization.” So, the next time Google tells you to “apply all,” take a moment and ask: Is this really better for my bottom line?
Because sometimes, the best optimization decision is to click “dismiss.”