What Is The Google Ads Optimisation Score And Should You Chase It

If you have spent any meaningful amount of time inside a Google Ads account, you have almost certainly come across the optimisation score. It sits there in your recommendations tab, usually somewhere between 50% and 90%, and it has a habit of making advertisers feel as though they are doing something wrong. But is a lower score really a problem, and should you be chasing a perfect 100%? The answer, as with most things in paid search, is a little more nuanced than Google would perhaps like you to believe.

What Is The Google Ads Optimisation Score

The Google Ads optimisation score is a real-time estimate, expressed as a percentage, of how well your Google Ads account is expected to perform. It runs on a scale from 0% to 100%, with 100% meaning that Google considers your account to be operating at its full potential based on the recommendations it has generated for you. The score is calculated by looking at your campaigns, your settings, your bidding strategies, your ad assets, and a range of other factors, and it updates dynamically as your account data changes.

Each recommendation that Google surfaces in your account carries a weighted impact score, and applying or dismissing those recommendations adjusts your overall optimisation score accordingly. So if Google is telling you to raise your budgets, add broad match keywords, or switch to a Smart bidding strategy, and you choose to ignore those suggestions, your score will reflect that. The system is designed to push you towards adopting Google's recommended practices, and it is worth understanding that distinction clearly before you start making account changes based on the number alone.

How Is The Score Calculated

Google calculates your optimisation score by analysing a range of signals across your account. These include the health of your bidding strategies, the quality and variety of your creative assets, keyword coverage, budget allocation, and whether you have adopted features like responsive search ads, automated bidding, or conversion tracking enhancements. Each active recommendation in your account is assigned a percentage value, and the sum of those values represents the gap between your current score and 100%.

The important thing to understand here is that the score is based on Google's recommendations, not necessarily on what is best for your specific business. Google's algorithm does not fully understand your margins, your customer lifetime value, or the strategic reasons you may have chosen to run exact match keywords over broad match. It is working from patterns and statistical modelling across a vast number of accounts, and whilst that has genuine value, it does not replace informed human judgement.

Why Google Surfaces This Score

It would be naive to look at the optimisation score without acknowledging the commercial context in which it exists. Many of the recommendations that Google surfaces, such as increasing budgets, expanding keyword match types, or enabling additional ad formats, have the effect of increasing your spend on the platform. That is not to say the recommendations are always wrong or unhelpful, because many of them genuinely are worth considering. But the optimisation score is, at least in part, a mechanism designed to guide advertisers towards behaviours that benefit Google's revenue as well as their own performance.

Google is transparent about the fact that the score reflects their recommendations. The Google Ads help documentation states clearly that applying recommendations can improve your score, but that does not mean every recommendation is appropriate for every account. Understanding this distinction is the first step towards using the score intelligently rather than reactively.

Should You Chase A Perfect Score

This is the question most advertisers eventually ask, and the straightforward answer is no, you should not treat a 100% optimisation score as a goal in its own right. A high score might indicate a well-structured account, but it can equally indicate an account that has simply adopted every recommendation Google has made, regardless of whether those recommendations align with the advertiser's actual objectives.

Consider a scenario where you are running tightly controlled exact match campaigns for a high-value service with a very specific target audience. Google may recommend switching to broad match and raising your bids. Applying those recommendations would raise your optimisation score, but it could also expose your budget to irrelevant search queries and erode your return on investment. The score would look better on paper whilst your actual results deteriorated.

Rather than chasing the number, the more useful approach is to read through each recommendation carefully, evaluate it on its own merits, and make a deliberate decision about whether to apply it or dismiss it. Dismissing a recommendation in Google Ads does not harm your account performance, it simply removes that item from the score calculation. A well-managed account with a score of 72% that has been built around strategic, deliberate decisions will nearly always outperform an account at 95% that has been optimised for the sake of a metric.

When The Optimisation Score Is Actually Useful

Despite the caveats, the optimisation score is not without value. For advertisers who are newer to Google Ads, or for accounts that have not been actively managed for a period of time, the recommendations tab can surface genuinely useful opportunities that might otherwise be missed. Things like missing ad extensions, campaigns without conversion tracking, or ad groups running on a single keyword can all be flagged through the recommendations system, and those are worth addressing.

The score also provides a useful starting point when auditing an unfamiliar account. If you take over a client's campaigns and the optimisation score is very low, it is worth reviewing the recommendations to understand what Google has identified. Not all of them will require action, but some may point to structural issues or missed opportunities that are genuinely worth fixing.

For more established advertisers managing complex accounts, platforms like Optmyzr or WordStream offer their own account health and recommendation tools that can complement Google's native scoring with a more independent perspective.

A Smarter Way To Approach Account Health

Rather than fixating on the optimisation score, it is far more productive to build your own framework for evaluating account health. This means tracking metrics that directly reflect business outcomes: cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate, and impression share for the terms that matter most to you. These numbers tell a much more honest story about whether your campaigns are performing well than a percentage calculated by an algorithm with its own commercial interests.

When you review Google's recommendations, approach them as suggestions from an informed but not infallible source. Some will be excellent. Some will be neutral. Some will be actively inappropriate for your situation. The skill is in knowing which is which, and that comes from understanding your own account, your own audience, and your own business goals well enough to make those judgements confidently.

It is also worth making a habit of dismissing recommendations that you have reviewed and decided against. This keeps your recommendations tab clean, updates your score to reflect your actual decisions rather than ignored suggestions, and makes it easier to spot new recommendations when they appear.

The Bottom Line

The Google Ads optimisation score is a useful reference point, but it is not a measure of success. It is a measure of how closely your account aligns with Google's current recommendations, and those recommendations are generated by a system that does not have complete visibility into your business strategy, your margins, or your customers. Treat the score as a prompt for review, not as a target to chase. The advertisers who get the most from Google Ads are the ones who understand what the platform is doing and why, and who make informed, deliberate decisions rather than optimising for metrics that look good in a dashboard but may not move the needle where it actually matters.