What is Optimization Score Google Ads: Your Go to Guide to Better Understand the Metric

Google Ads is always looking for ways to help advertisers improve their campaign performance. Recently, the platform introduced yet another metric to its dashboard – the Google Ads Optimization Score metric.

If you don’t optimize your campaigns, you could waste a lot of money. Therefore, there are some obvious benefits of Optimization Score becoming a key consideration in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

Let’s find out all about it.

What is Optimization Score?

You can use the Optimization Score as a performance gauge to understand how well your Ads account is doing. The metric is presented as a percentage, ranging from 0 to 100.

The Optimization Score metric is available to advertisers at three different levels:

1. Campaign
2. Account
3. Manager Account

In addition to the score, the dashboard offers some Optimization Score recommendations. These are suggested changes that may improve your campaign performance, and you can see how much the score will be impacted for implementing each recommended change.

Your Optimization Score covers several core areas of your Ads campaign, including:

• Keywords & Targeting
• Bids and Budgets
• Ad copy
• Ad Extensions
• Possible recommendations

Key Factors that Impact the Optimization Score Metric

The Optimization Score metric is calculated in real-time. It varies depending on several factors, such as:

• Campaign settings.
• Account status
• Trends developing in the Ads account data.
• Recent recommendations history.
• Historical performance.

 
The score and the accompanying recommendations change whenever there are changes in these factors.

5 Benefits of Optimization Score

As optimization is a crucial part of running a successful PPC advertising campaign, it’s little surprise that the Optimization Score metric can be a useful barometer to track. Here are some great benefits of using this metric as a guiding star:

1. Optimization Recommendations to Guide You

The complex algorithms in Google Ads serve up expert tips that help you optimize your campaign. This metric and the additional recommendations are powerful assets that guide your advertising efforts.

2. Identify Campaign Issues

This metric makes it easy to identify problems in your PPC campaign. Not only that, but you get actionable tips to rectify issues. For example, you can use it to discover low-performing keywords that are hampering your return on investment (ROI).

3. Accurate Estimates of Ad Progress

The estimated impact of each recommendation is an accurate projection, which makes it possible to chart the future progress of your ads. If a recommendation suggests you can gain 5% in your score, you can be sure that your score will actually grow by 5% once the change has been made.

4. Holistic View to Understand the Impact of Changes

The Optimization Score recommendations include additional information, such as:

• Changing bidding strategies
• Implementing specific ad units
• Using extensions

 
This detailed breakdown provides clear insights into the impact of any changes. This makes the whole process of campaign optimization a lot easier.

5. Save Time

By using the insights from the Google Ads dashboard, you can optimize your campaign quickly. The recommendations and estimated impacts make it easy to do this in a flash, saving you considerable time.

5 Drawbacks of the Optimization Score Metric

We’d like to tell you that it’s all good new, however, that would be a lie. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks of using Optimization Score. Here are some things to be aware of:

1. If Recent Performance has been Poor, You May Get Misled

The Google Ads platform makes its recommendations and predictions based on past performance. So, if you’ve had some bad results recently, then the guidance you receive could lead to you removing some important keywords or changing core settings.

2. Your Budget May Be Increased

It’s possible that the platform may recommend you change your cost-per-click (CPC) bid. This would lead to a bump in impression share, however, your Ads budget would also increase.

3. Too Much Automation isn’t Good

Automation is great for saving time and putting tedious tasks on autopilot. That being said, too much automation can cause you to miss out on good opportunities. You should still keep a close watch on keyword bids and peak traffic times to maximize your ROI.

4. You May Get Tunnel-Vision

You may think that focusing on the Optimization Score metric will be enough to keep your campaigns on track. But this metric doesn’t give you the whole story – it doesn’t include insights on the other critical key performance indicators (KPIs) in your campaign.

5. No Drill-Down Analysis

While the recommendations do have additional details, there is no drill-down analysis. This big-picture view is good, but it is not ideal for certain situations when you want to examine problems in greater depth.

The Optimization Score is Just the Beginning

For advertisers today, it’s important to be able to align your accounts with the best practices from Google. In that respect, the Optimization Score metric is a great tool to incorporate in your campaign.

It can save you time and effort in optimizing your campaigns, helping you get more bang for your buck with your paid ads. Like many other features in Google Ads, it’s fun to play around with the Optimization Score metric.

However, don’t lose sight of the goal. Results matter more in the end, so don’t focus too much on this score. Instead, invest more of your efforts in implementing effective strategies.

If you want to perform advanced analysis to get deeper insights on your campaign performance, you should check out the powerful iPDF reports from PPCexpo.

These reports provide detailed analysis, which is segmented by many key factors, including:

• Keywords
• Match types
• Geographic locations
• Hour of day
• Day of week
• Device types
• Daily trends

 
Visit the PPCexpo Reports Library today to run the report you need.