Recommendations is an entire section of your Google Ads account dedicated to helping you improve your campaigns. It is the new and improved version of the “Opportunities” feature that we used to see in the previous AdWords. Originally, these recommendations appeared only on the Recommendations tab, but now Google is expanding its recommendations beyond the Recommendations page and into the Google Ads web interface.
When the recommendations box appears in the user interface, the performance graph appears significantly smaller. It is obviously very important to Google that we are seeing these recommendations.
These recommendations fall into four main categories: Ads & extensions, Bids & budgets, Keywords & targeting and Repairs. In our experience, we have found that the “Ads” recommendation section is particularly useful; Google will alert you to ad groups with too few ads for significant testing, as well as areas you can increase your use of Ad Extensions. Google Ads will even create suggested ads for you to start testing against the current ads.
The “Keyword” recommendations section can also be very helpful. One of these useful tools within the “Keyword” recommendations is the “Remove non-serving keywords” tool. This allows you to find keywords that have been active for at least a year without serving a single impression. Removing these very low-traffic keywords can help make account management much easier as well as improve account Quality Score. Another similar tool is “Removing redundant keywords”; which gives you the opportunity to reduce duplicates and other redundancies, again making managing your accounts easier.
The “Repairs” recommendations will help you fix issues with your account and improve the overall health and performance of your account. The “Bid & Budgets” recommendation can help you find the right bid strategy to meet your business goals, help ensure your campaigns are not limited by budget and advise you where you need to raise keyword bids. 360 OM always recommend leveraging Google Experiments to A/B test bigger changes such as bid strategies.
Although these recommendations can be very helpful in allowing us to expand keyword portfolios and ad copy performance, they must be carefully reviewed. You will often see the option of “Apply All” on the recommendations section – we would strongly recommend not to use this feature, and to always ensure that you carefully review each recommendation before implementation.
In the end, the Google Ads Recommendations are a great way to help you improve your Google Ads campaigns, without necessarily making you spend more money. However, it still requires careful decision making to take full advantage without negatively impacting campaign.
This post was written by Genevieve Poultney, PPC Manager at 360 OM
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