Your Google Ads optimization score is not a performance metric

A number sits at the top of your Google Ads account, coloured red or amber, telling you you’re at 68%. Then someone from Google calls, friendly and helpful, and offers to walk you through getting it to 100%.

Here’s the thing nobody says on that call: optimization score does not measure how your ads are performing. It measures how closely your account resembles Google’s preferred way of running an account. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where small advertisers lose money.

What the score actually is

Google’s own documentation is honest about this if you read it carefully. Optimization score is an estimate of “how well your Google Ads account is set to perform,” running from 0% to 100%, and it’s calculated from your settings, your campaign status, and the recommendations currently available in your account.

Read that again: it’s built from the recommendations you haven’t applied yet. The score isn’t looking at your cost per lead. It doesn’t know whether the calls you got last month turned into jobs. It has no idea that half your form fills are spam. It’s a checklist-completion percentage wearing the costume of a performance metric.

The tell is what happens when you dismiss a recommendation instead of applying it. The score goes up too. If a number can be improved by clicking “no thanks,” it was never measuring your results.

Why the call happens

The person on the phone is not your account manager, no matter what the calendar invite says. They’re in a sales function — sometimes at Google, sometimes at an outsourced partner working from a script — and they were assigned your account because it hit a spend threshold or a recommendation-adoption trigger.

That doesn’t make them dishonest. Most of them are pleasant and some genuinely know the platform. But nobody in that job has ever been promoted for telling an advertiser to cut their budget in half and turn off broad match. Their incentives point one direction, and yours point another. Once you understand that, the call becomes useful — you just have to hold the pen.

The recommendations worth applying

Not all of it is upsell. Some recommendations fix genuine breakage, and those you should take:

• Conversion tracking that’s broken or missing. If Google is telling you it can’t see your conversions, fix it today. Everything else in the account is guesswork until you do.
• Ad strength on responsive search ads — when it’s about missing headline variety, not about letting Google write them for you.
• Removing redundant or conflicting keywords where the same term is competing with itself across campaigns.
• Sitelinks and callouts. Free real estate on the results page. Just write them yourself.

That’s the honest list. Notice none of them involve spending more.

The ones that quietly cost you

These raise your score and lower your control:

• “Add broad match keywords.” Broad match hands Google the definition of a relevant search. On a big account with thousands of conversions a month, it works. On a plumbing account doing eleven leads a month, it means paying for “how to fix a leaking tap yourself.”
• “Increase your budget to capture more traffic.” Sometimes true. But the estimate attached to it assumes the extra traffic converts like your current traffic, which it almost never does — the cheapest, highest-intent searches are the ones you’re already winning. There’s a real floor your market requires, and we’ve done that math openly; it just isn’t calculated by a recommendation card.
• “Switch to a Smart Bidding strategy.” Fine when you have conversion volume. Below roughly 15–30 conversions a month, the algorithm doesn’t have enough signal and you’ve handed over your bids for nothing.
• “Upgrade this campaign to Performance Max.” The single most consequential thing you can accidentally click. We wrote a whole post on when it works and when it doesn’t.

Go and check whether Google is applying these for you

This is the part most owners don’t know about. Google offers a setting where recommendations get applied to your account automatically — across ads, bidding, keywords and targeting — without you clicking anything.

Whether it’s on in your account is worth five minutes of your life. Open Recommendations, look at the auto-apply settings at the top of the page, and see what’s ticked. Then open the History tab and read what has already been changed. We have opened accounts where broad match keywords had been added for months and the owner was convinced Google Ads simply “didn’t work for their business.”

If your ads are underperforming and you’re about to blame the channel, run that check first — then check the page the clicks land on, because that’s usually the real culprit anyway.

What to say on the call

Take the call. Free platform knowledge is free platform knowledge. Just run it on your terms:

Ask them to show you the search terms report and find you wasted spend. Ask what your cost per conversion has done over ninety days. Ask them to name a recommendation that would reduce your spend. And apply nothing during the call — say you’ll review it, then dismiss what doesn’t fit. Your score will thank you either way, which is precisely the point.

A 68% account with a €40 cost per lead is a better business than a 100% account at €140. The score doesn’t know that. You do.

If you’d rather someone else fielded these calls, that’s what our Google Ads work is — and if you’re spending under the floor where paid search makes sense for your market, tell us your numbers and we’ll say so before you sign anything.