What is optimization score in Google Ads, and should I follow it?

Each recommendation carries a score uplift, from under 0.1% to 100%, which reflects Google’s estimate of its impact on the campaign’s metrics. Apply one with an uplift of 5% and the account’s score goes up by 5%. The uplifts on a page can add up to more than 100, because applying one recommendation can invalidate others.

Dismissing counts as well. Google says that applying or dismissing recommendations changes the score, and that an account can reach 100% by applying or dismissing all of them. So an account that dismisses every recommendation reaches 100% with nothing in it changed. A score of 100% says every recommendation has been decided, one way or the other.

A dismissal isn’t permanent. Google dismisses a recommendation for 28 days or 60 days, depending on the reason for the dismissal, and it can come back after that if the campaign is still eligible.

Google says it plainly: optimization score is not used by your Quality Score. Quality Score is a diagnostic of how your ad quality compares with other advertisers’, which the low Quality Score guide covers. Google’s page on Ad Rank lists six factors: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your assets and other ad formats. Optimization score isn’t one of them, and neither page gives it a part in the auction. What a recommendation changes can move those factors: a bid, an ad, a match type.

It isn’t a forecast of results either. Google says the Recommendations page doesn’t predict whether your ads will do well. It uses data from the past, your campaign’s performance and what people search for on Google, to give you an idea of how each recommendation might improve your performance.

The score does count in one place outside your account. To be a Google Partner, a company’s registered manager account needs a minimum optimization score of 70%, beside $10,000 of ad spend over 90 days across the accounts it manages, and certifications. Google adds that the company is in control, with the ability to apply or dismiss recommendations based on its assessment and its clients’ goals. If an agency manages your account, that requirement is one reason it watches the score.

Recommendations are at Campaigns › Recommendations. The page shows your account’s score and its recommendations in five sections: All recommendations, Bidding & Budgets, Ads & assets, Keywords & Targeting and Repairs. Select a section’s name to see only its recommendations. Google’s list of every type adds three groups: automated campaigns, measurement and other.

Google generates a recommendation from your account’s performance history, your campaign settings and trends across Google. Recommendations are trained on 7 to 90 days of data, most of them on 28. Bidding and budget recommendations come with impact estimates, which for Search and Performance Max campaigns allow for conversion delay.

An account can show none. Google’s reasons are no billing information, no campaigns or ads, ads that get no traffic or only recently started running, or campaigns that are already optimized.

Changes proposed by a Google Ads account representative appear on the same page for you to review. If you agree with them, Apply all applies them.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Recommendations.
2. 02Select View recommendation on a card to read its details. Each recommendation shows its score uplift.
3. 03To take it, select Apply. Apply all on the card applies every recommendation of that type.
4. 04For a bid or budget recommendation, Save as experiment tests it against your original setup before it reaches the whole campaign.
5. 05To leave it, hover over the top right corner of the recommendation and select the X. The 3-dot icon on the card, then Dismiss all, dismisses every recommendation of that type.

Everything you apply is listed in Change history. Google says a recommendation applied in error can be undone there within 30 days, and that a partial application can’t be undone.

A dismissal at the campaign level covers every recommendation of that type for the campaign, and other campaigns can still show it. At the account level it covers every campaign. A card stays until all of its bundled recommendations are applied or dismissed: accept 5 of the 10 keywords on a card, and it remains until you select Dismiss all. To bring a dismissed one back, select Dismissed at the top of the page, then the 3-dot icon on its card and Undismiss all.

A week after you apply a bid or budget recommendation, the page’s Results tab compares the campaign’s performance with Google’s estimate of what would have happened without it, as a 7-day rolling average over the 28 days after. The report stops if you change the bid or budget by hand.

Auto-apply has Google apply the types of recommendation you choose without asking each time. It’s set for the whole account, never for one campaign, and Google applies a type only when it finds it relevant, so some are applied often and others never.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Recommendations and select Auto-apply settings.
2. 02The types sit in two bundles, Maintain your ads and Grow your business. Expand each to read what’s ticked.
3. 03Select the History tab. For each type that’s on, it says how many times it was applied in the past week, when it was last applied and when it was first turned on.
4. 04To turn a type off, untick it on the Manage tab and select Save. Or select it on the History tab and select Disable: a red dot then marks it as off.

Google lists the types it can apply in four groups:

• Ads and assets: improving your responsive search ads, adding dynamic search ads, and optimized ad rotation.
• Bidding: among others, adjusting your CPA or ROAS targets, setting a target CPA or target ROAS, and moving to another bid strategy.
• Keywords and targeting: among others, adding keywords and broad match keywords, search partners, Display expansion, and removing redundant keywords, non-serving keywords and conflicting negative keywords.
• Measurement: upgrading your conversion tracking.

Budgets aren’t among them. Google says auto-applying recommendations won’t increase your budget, and that budget raising isn’t included in this iteration of auto-apply. Since January 26, 2026 it no longer adds new responsive search ads.

What it applied is also in Change history, which shows who opted the account in, and under Admin › Account settings, where Auto-apply lists the types switched on. A queue at the bottom of the Recommendations page shows what will run on a given day, and you can dismiss one there first. Google emails a weekly summary if you turn on campaign maintenance notifications.

Keep the types that fit how you run your account, and turn off the ones you’d rather decide each time. A type that moves a target changes what every conversion may cost, so read its history. The common mistakes guide has auto-apply among its ten.

Google makes four recommendations about a budget, each for its own reason:

• Raise your budgets: you missed out on 5% or more of your potential traffic last week. The Limited by budget guide covers that status.
• Raise your budgets for upcoming traffic increases: Google’s simulations show you may miss 5% or more of your future weekly traffic at today’s budget.
• Adjust your budgets: its simulations show the campaign could receive more conversions with a smaller relative increase in overall cost per action.
• Move unused budgets: budget one campaign leaves unspent goes to one that runs short.

Read the third closely. As Google words it, the campaign’s cost per conversion goes up, by a smaller share than its conversions do. That is an average over the whole campaign. When an average rises, the conversions that were added cost more than it, and what they cost is the figure to judge.

Google’s API describes a recommendation’s impact as weekly figures. The sum needs four of them:

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Recommendations, select Bidding & Budgets, then View recommendation on the budget recommendation.
2. 02Read its impact estimates: what the campaign costs and what it brings in a week at today’s budget, and the same at the budget Google recommends. Where it gives only the change, more cost and more conversions, those are the added figures already.
3. 03Subtract to get what the raise adds: the added cost, and the added conversions or conversion value.
4. 04Divide. Added cost by added conversions is what each added conversion costs. Added conversion value by added cost is the return on the added spend.
5. 05Hold that against the campaign’s own target CPA or target ROAS. With no target, use what your other campaigns pay for a conversion, or return.

So the forecast itself says where to stop. Here a step to $84 pays by the campaign’s own target and a step to $105 doesn’t, though the campaign as a whole would still read above its target at both. Raise a budget in steps of about a fifth, and check the return after each.

A forecast is an estimate from past data. Google says actual results can differ with market shifts and seasonality, with competition in the auction, and with other changes you make. Save as experiment tries the budget against your original setup first. On a campaign for your own brand name, ask whether the added conversions are new business: the branded keywords guide says how to tell.

Google also forecasts traffic. Where its simulations show traffic is expected to increase by 5% or more, it recommends Set a target CPA to capture upcoming traffic increases, or the same with a target ROAS: get these conversions at a similar CPA by setting a target and raising your budget. Google’s API guide describes the first as setting a target CPA on a campaign that has none ahead of a seasonal event, and the second as raising the budget and changing the bid strategy from Maximize conversion value to Target ROAS.

The rise is Google’s forecast, and nothing in your account confirms it ahead of time. What you can check is the target. Go to Campaigns › Campaigns, set the date range to the last 30 days, and read the campaign’s Cost / conv., or its Conv. value / cost. Then compare:

• Google’s target is looser than what the campaign achieves (a higher CPA, or a lower ROAS). It lets each conversion cost more as searches rise. If you want the extra volume, set a target near what the campaign achieves now.
• It’s about the same. The target holds the cost per conversion the campaign gets while the volume grows.
• It’s tighter. Google’s own pages warn of this: a target CPA that’s too low may cause you to forgo clicks that could result in conversions, and a target ROAS that’s too high may limit the traffic your ads get. Start near what the campaign achieves, and move in steps.

A handful of conversions can’t tell one target from another. Google recommends evaluating a target CPA over the last 30 days with at least 30 conversions, and the Target CPA and Target ROAS guide covers setting one. The budget is a separate decision: raise it for the days the rise lasts only if more at that cost is worth having, and set it back after.

Every day Goldbeater reads the budget and target recommendations Google has made on your enabled campaigns that spent in the last 30 days, with the forecast each carries: Adjust your budgets, and the two that set a target ahead of a rise in searches. A recommendation you dismissed in Google Ads isn’t raised, nor is one to lower a budget, or one that comes without its forecast.

For a bigger budget, Goldbeater works the sum above on Google’s forecast week at the budget it recommends: the added cost over the conversions, or the conversion value, the raise adds. It holds that against the campaign’s own target CPA or target ROAS. Where the campaign has none, it uses your typical campaign: the median return across your campaigns where your conversions carry real values, else the median cost per conversion among the campaigns that convert. The finding is low severity on either side of that line:

• Within it: raise the budget toward Google’s about a fifth at a time, and check after each step that the return stays at or above the line, or a conversion still costs no more than it.
• Past it: Goldbeater doesn’t advise the raise, and says to dismiss the recommendation.

Either way the advice opens with what Goldbeater’s own budget checks find of the campaign: held back by its budget at its target, limited by its budget under its target or with none, held back by its target or by rank, losing too few searches to its budget to call it held back, or changed too recently to judge. On a campaign whose name says brand, or one three times as efficient as your typical campaign, it adds that the added conversions may be people who would have come anyway.

That is the recommendation worked above: the finding’s return on the added spend is the table’s $84 row, and its own table lists every budget Google offered. The finding is advice, and drafts no change: a raise is the budget check’s to draft or to offer, from Goldbeater’s own read of the campaign, as the Limited by budget guide shows on this same campaign.

For a target ahead of a rise, Goldbeater says the forecast as Google’s: the date, the target and the budget. Beside it, it puts what the campaign paid for a conversion, or returned, over its last 30 days, and tests on the campaign’s own conversions whether Google’s target differs from that by more than chance explains, at 5% a side. Where the campaign does better than Google’s target, it advises a target near what the campaign achieves now, set a few days before the date. Where the two can’t be told apart, it says the target holds about what the campaign gets. In both it advises the bigger budget for the days the rise lasts only. Where Google’s is tighter, it warns that a target the campaign doesn’t reach may cost it conversions. With no conversion in the 30 days, it says to wait for a month of them. It’s low severity, and advice only.

Several of Google’s recommendations name a problem Goldbeater checks for with a rule of its own, read from your account’s figures. Each has a guide:

• Raise your budgets and Move unused budgets: a campaign held back by its budget, and budget left unused beside it, in the Limited by budget guide.
• Set a target CPA and Adjust your CPA targets: a campaign with the conversions for a target and none, and a target it hasn’t reached in 13 weeks, in the Target CPA and Target ROAS guide.
• Add sitelink assets to your ads and Add callouts to your ads: campaigns with too few, in the sitelinks and callouts guide.
• Improve your responsive search ads: ads Google rates Poor or Average, in the ad strength guide.
• Refresh your Customer Match lists: a list gone out of date, in the Customer Match guide.
• Expand your reach with Google search partners and Add broad match keywords: once either is on, whether it converts far below the rest, in the search partners guide and the broad match guide.

The audit checklist has every line Goldbeater checks, with where to find it in Google Ads.

What does optimization score mean in Google Ads?

The meaning Google gives it is an estimate, from 0% to 100%, of how well your account is set to perform, shown beside a list of recommendations. Each recommendation carries a score uplift, and the score rises by it when you apply the recommendation or dismiss it.

What is a good optimization score?

Google’s help pages give no figure for a good score. They say 100% means your account can perform at its full potential, and the one line they draw is for agencies: a Google Partner’s manager account needs at least 70%. Since dismissing counts, a score says how many recommendations were decided, not how many were right for you.

Does optimization score affect Quality Score or Ad Rank?

Google says optimization score is not used by your Quality Score. Its page on Ad Rank lists six factors, among them your bid and the quality of your ads and landing page, and optimization score isn’t one of them.

Does dismissing a recommendation raise my optimization score?

Yes. Google says applying or dismissing recommendations changes the score, and that an account can reach 100% by applying or dismissing all of them. A recommendation is dismissed for 28 or 60 days, depending on the reason, and can come back after.

How do I turn off auto-apply recommendations in Google Ads?

Go to Campaigns, then Recommendations, and select Auto-apply settings. Untick the type on the Manage tab and select Save, or select it on the History tab and select Disable. Auto-apply is set for the whole account, one type at a time.

Can auto-apply raise my budget?

Google says no: auto-applying recommendations won’t increase your budget, and budget raising isn’t included in auto-apply. It can adjust a target CPA or target ROAS if you opt into those types.

Should I apply Google’s budget recommendation?

Work out what it adds first. Divide the cost Google’s forecast adds by the conversions it adds, or the added conversion value by the added cost, and hold that against the campaign’s own target. If it’s within the target, raise in steps of about a fifth and check each. If it’s past it, dismiss the recommendation.