If you log into your Google Ads account, the Recommendations tab is usually full of suggestions. “Switch to broad match to reach more customers.” “Increase your Target ROAS budget.” “Add these keywords to your campaigns.” The notifications come with percentages attached: applying them will improve your optimization score by 14 percent, or 22 percent, or 8 percent.
It feels like free advice from Google. And some recommendations are genuinely useful. But a meaningful number of them are aligned with Google’s revenue interests, not yours. Knowing which is which is one of the most underappreciated skills in managing a Google Ads account.
Why Google Makes Recommendations
Google’s recommendations engine is automated. It analyzes account data and surfaces suggestions designed to improve “optimization score,” which is Google’s own internal metric for how well an account follows Google’s best practices.
Optimization score is not a measure of profitability. An account can have a 90 percent optimization score and be losing money. An account can have a 50 percent optimization score and be highly profitable. The score measures adherence to Google’s preferred settings, which correlate with higher spending, more automation, and broader reach.
Every recommendation applied to your account has downstream effects that Google’s interface does not show you. Understanding those effects is how you avoid applying changes that look like improvements but quietly cost you.
The Broad Match Recommendation
This is probably the most frequently harmful recommendation for ecommerce stores. The suggestion is typically framed as: “Expand your reach by upgrading keywords to broad match.”
Broad match is a keyword match type that tells Google to show your ad for searches that are related to your keyword, as interpreted by Google. This sounds reasonable in principle. In practice, “related” can mean semantically distant. An ad targeting “women’s running shoes” on broad match might appear for “athletic wear returns policy” or “how to clean white sneakers.”
For ecommerce stores where every click costs money and the goal is to drive purchases, broad match requires constant, intensive search terms review to catch irrelevant queries. Without that review, budget leaks steadily into searches that will not convert.
Applying this recommendation without having a robust negative keyword strategy in place, and without committing to weekly search terms review, typically increases spend without proportionally increasing conversions. ROAS declines. Google’s optimization score goes up.
The Budget Increase Recommendations
Google regularly suggests increasing campaign budgets. These come with projections: “Increasing your budget by 500 dollars per month could generate approximately 12 additional conversions.”
These projections are estimates. They are based on historical data and models, not guarantees. More importantly, they do not account for whether your account is ready to spend more effectively. As discussed elsewhere in this series, scaling budget on an account with structural problems, poor feed quality, or inadequate audience signals often produces worse ROAS, not more of the same results at the same efficiency.
A budget recommendation from Google is a suggestion to spend more money with Google. It may or may not be in your interest. The right question is not “would I get more conversions” but “would the additional conversions be profitable, and is the account structured to use more budget efficiently.”
The Target CPA and Target ROAS Changes
Google periodically suggests adjusting your Target CPA (cost per acquisition) or Target ROAS targets. The suggestions are often in the direction of lowering your ROAS target or raising your CPA target, which means accepting worse performance thresholds.
The framing is usually: “Your Target ROAS is too aggressive. Lowering it will allow more impressions and more conversions.”
This may be literally true. Lowering the target allows the algorithm to bid in more auctions. Volume goes up. But so does average cost per conversion, because the campaign is now winning auctions it was previously passing on, including auctions with lower probability of converting profitably.
The question is whether additional volume at worse efficiency is actually the right trade. For a store at a profitable ROAS and trying to grow, it might be. For a store where margins are tight, loosening the target may mean crossing into unprofitability.
Google’s recommendation is not wrong in all cases. It is presented without the context of your margins, which means you have to supply that context yourself before deciding whether to apply it.
Auto-Apply Recommendations: The Hidden Risk
Google introduced an “auto-apply” feature that, when enabled, applies certain recommendations to your account automatically without requiring manual approval. This feature is presented as a time-saver. It is also a way for Google to make account changes that serve its interests without you actively agreeing to each one.
Common auto-apply changes include keyword match type expansions, responsive search ad changes, and target adjustments. Any of these can affect performance significantly, and they happen silently.
If you have ever looked at your account change history and seen changes you do not remember making, auto-apply may have been enabled at some point. The setting should be reviewed and most categories should be turned off unless you have a specific reason to enable them.
The Recommendations Worth Considering
Not all recommendations are problematic. A few categories are generally worth evaluating:
Adding negative keywords that Google suggests based on search term analysis. If the recommendation identifies specific queries your ads are appearing for that are clearly irrelevant, adding those negatives is useful.
Fixing policy issues: disapproved ads, product disapprovals in Merchant Center, missing business information. These are genuine fixes, not spending recommendations.
Adding responsive search ad variations when you have very few ads in an ad group. More ad variations give the algorithm more options to test, which is generally positive.
The distinguishing characteristic of useful recommendations is that they fix a specific problem or gap, not that they suggest spending more, expanding reach, or reducing the control you have over where your budget goes.
Getting This Fixed
Knowing which recommendations to apply, which to dismiss, and which require your specific business context to evaluate is part of what active account management requires. A manager who applies Google’s recommendations wholesale is outsourcing strategy to an algorithm that does not share your goals.
If your account has accumulated auto-applied changes or you want to understand which recommendations are worth acting on, I can help. Reach out at adnanagic.com/#contact.
Part of the Google Ads for Store Owners series, written for ecommerce owners who want their ad spend to actually work.
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