Knowledge base
What is optimization score, and should I chase it?
A percentage measuring how closely your account matches Google's recommendations. Useful for a neglected account, weaker for a deliberately conservative one.
Optimization score is a percentage Google Ads assigns to every account based on how many of its recommendations you have accepted. Accepting more recommendations raises the score.
For an account that has been neglected for months, chasing the score is a reasonable shortcut back to a sane baseline. For an account someone is already managing deliberately, chasing the score for its own sake is a mistake, because the score has no visibility into your margins, your close rate, or which recommendations would actually help your specific business. A recommendation that raises the score, broader match, a higher budget, an automated bid strategy, is not automatically one that raises your profit. Use it as one input, and be able to say which recommendations you rejected and why.