For years now, Google search PPC campaigns have been prompting users to tick boxes each week to ensure their Google Optimisation Score (Google Opti Score) stays at a healthy percentage i.e. above 70%.

The question that  a lot of people want to know is: Does my Google optimisation score make a difference to my campaign performance when running Google ads?

TLDR: Absolutely not!

The way Google Opti Score works, is that it recommends a range of items that it believes you should be working towards generally speaking that they believe should make your campaign better. This can be a range of things but usually focuses on:

• Increase budget to show ads for longer

• Change bidding strategy to automated bidding

• Add more extensions to your search ads

• Enable auto created assets

• Enable expansion across display or search partners

• Remove redundant keywords

• Add images to your ads

• Beef up your headlines for your responsive search ads

Now. Not all of these are bad suggestions, but you need to take a look at why you are making these changes before doing them. Some of these can be singled out as changes that will spiral your campaign into nothingness overnight and could have a terrible impact on your sales, phone calls and form submission conversions.

Without boring you, one of the most obvious problems here is changing your ads to use the suggested ad copy to increase your ad quality score to “excellent” and raise your budget by 30% to show your ads more.

Your ads might already have such a strong headline, but Google is telling you that your campaign will underperform unless you make these changes. So you add headlines that they recommend despite them not feeling strong or relatable to your business objectives.

That initial headline that you had pinned to always show in position one which was promoting a free consultation? Well that’s only going to show 20% of the time now since you unpinned it and added another 5 headlines that are really boring.

Oh and that 30% budget increase? Best believe that your ads are now reaching more people with your super high quality score and budgeting through your budget with weak headlines.

“Oh your Cost Per Lead has doubled? Woops! Maybe one of our offshore “strategists” can help you out if you schedule a call.”

Here’s another piece of interesting information – Barely any of Google’s consultants have actually ran campaigns for actual clients, so the advice they give you is based off of the sheet that they are reading off of, and the training they have had once joining the Google cult.

Did you know that you can reach an optimisation score of 100% by dismissing the recommendations provided by Google? That’s right, by just going into the recommendations tab and clicking “dismiss” (and then providing a reason as to why you hate their stupid recommendation) you can easily reach your optimisation score of 100%. This is how large digital marketing agencies keep their fancy Google partnership status without actually doing what Google tells them to do. Rest assured, the really large agencies that are working with Google to keep their Premier Partnership level are definitely having phone calls and regular meetings with Google to make sure they are being good little compliant agencies and following the best practice rules (which are heavily focused on automation and making agencies jobless).

Conclusion

Your Google Ad accounts optimisation score does not affect performance whatsoever. You can let it sit at 20% or lower and still have conversion rates through the roof. But if you are still paranoid, you can easily tick the boxes as dismissed and achieve a 100% optimisation score.