Are the recommendations in Google Ads good or bad?

Many inexperienced advertisers on Google Ads unsure how good Google's recommendations for their account are. If you haven't run ads before and don't have years of experience, having Google give you guidance might seem very appealing, but there is more than meets the eye.

I'll cover what you should know about recommendations in Google Ads in this article.

Recommendations tab & Google reps

Recommendations in Google ads can come from 2 sources.

1. The recommendations tab inside your Google Ads account.
2. A Google representative offering advice and suggestions on how to setup and run your account.

Both of these sources can seem very appealing. They also hammer down the same recommendations over and over again. It's important to note that most Google representatives read their recommendations from a list. They've usual haven't run ads before themselves. What's more, most of them don't work for Google but have been contracted through 3rd party agencies to supply the service.

Are the recommendations serving you or Google?

Google is a publicly traded company with high targets to hit each quarter. They're not bad people, it's just that their motives are different to yours.

As a general rule of thumb most of the recommendations are more aligned to their own goals rather than yours. The might repeat the same mantras over and over again, but most of their advice will help them reach their goals, increase your spend and probably lower the focus of your account.

I estimate that around 5%-10% of their recommendations are useful while the rest will do more damage than good.

If you're trying to improve or sustain your performance I would recommend ignoring most of the recommendations.

Recommendation that could actually be useful

While most of the recommendations in Google Ads are bad there are a handful of useful alerts:

• Remove conflicting negative keywords. This happens when you're trying to target a keyword but this clashes with a negative keyword that's already in place.
• Set up conversion tracking. If you don't have conversions set up in your account, then you definitely want to get some conversion tracking in place for better performance and monitoring.
• Setting up enhanced conversion. This method allows Google to track data more accurately.

Recommendations that could tank PPC performance

While the following recommendations may work in some situation, these general recommendations are dangerous for most ad accounts.

• Adding broad keywords without enough consideration.
• Adding new keywords.
• Using Performance Max when it's not a good fit.
• Enabling auto-apply. Eek!
• Expand your reach with search partners.
• Use shared budgets. Why!?
• Target all eligible products.
• Use display expansion. Don't!
• Use optimised targeting. Spoiler: It's not really optimised and will just spend your budget in the wrong places.

Conclusion: Google Ads system recommendations

If we had to sum Google's own recommendations in a few words I'd say this: They'll cause more damage than good and you need to treat them with a healthy dose of suspicion.

Recommendations inside your ad platform or the one read by your Google representative are focused more on Google's goals than they are your. You should ignore most of them but it might be good to review them in case they flag any errors.

About us

At Happy PPC we manage Google Ads for brands in the UK and the US. We specialise in performance marketing and work with ecommerce brands, property businesses and service providers. We're a friendly bunch so don't be shy and say hello@happyppc.com

Odi Caspi - Founder
Happy PPC