Which automated suggestions in Google Ads should I turn off?

When should we take Google’s auto-adopted suggestions? There are many advertisers who are deceived by Google because they don’t understand. So, in this guide, I will explain:

What Google’s auto-adopted suggestions are in general
How to turn them off
What each specific suggestion means (and how it affects your ad account)

I hope you can fully understand the principles behind Google’s auto-adopted suggestions to prevent Google from burning ad spend unnecessarily.

What are Google’s auto-adopted suggestions?

Google’s auto-adopted suggestions are suggestions that Google automatically makes to “optimize” your ads. While the line of defense for optimization is to improve the goal, this is not always the case in reality. Auto-adopted suggestions can range from tweaking ad creatives and keywords to changing bidding strategies. When these suggestions are enabled, Google can automatically make changes to your account without you having to set them up manually. While the purpose of this feature is to simplify ad management and improve performance, it can have some negative consequences.

To make matters worse, many advertisers enable certain suggestions without knowing it. This can result in ads that are inconsistent with the advertiser’s original ad strategy, leading to a rapid consumption of budget, which usually benefits Google.

Risks of Auto-Applied Suggestions
Google’s auto-applied suggestions can trick you into spending less efficiently than they otherwise would. Google’s suggestions are often more aligned with Google’s profit motive than your advertising business goals.

Five key risks of enabling auto-applied suggestions:
Loss of control: Enabling these suggestions can cause you to lose control over key aspects of your campaigns, such as keywords, copy, and bidding strategies. This can result in drastic changes to your campaign performance. For example, Google may add broad-matched keywords that are irrelevant to your business, wasting ad spend and reducing campaign performance.
Misaligned goals: Google’s primary goal is to maximize advertising revenue. This can result in increased ad spend with lower advertising revenue. For example, Google may suggest that you bid more to get more impressions, but this will quickly deplete your budget.
Lack of customization: No matter how comprehensive Google’s insights are, auto-suggestions cannot take into account all aspects of your business. Every advertiser has their own unique business goals, target audiences, and competitive landscape. Automatic changes can ignore the peculiarities of your business, resulting in poor advertising performance.
Increased costs: One of the biggest risks of auto-applied suggestions is increased advertising costs. Google’s recommendations often suggest spending more money on advertising, whether through higher bids, larger keyword lists, or more ad placements. If not carefully reviewed, these recommendations can lead to significant increases and depletion of your advertising budget.
Decreased performance: Inappropriate recommendations can lead to decreased ad performance. For example, Google may recommend some broad match keywords, which results in lower click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates. Similarly, changes to bidding strategies can lead to inefficient ad spend, which in turn reduces your return on investment (ROI).
In short: be wary of Google’s automatically applied recommendations and only accept them when they make sense for ad optimization.

How to turn off auto-application recommendations
It’s crucial to know how to turn off auto-application recommendations in your Google Ads account. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Navigate to the Recommendations tab In your Google Ads account, go to the Recommendations tab on the left sidebar. This tab displays various recommendations for optimizing your campaigns.

You can also view your optimization score in the Recommendations tab, which Google uses to indicate the overall health of your ads.

Step 2: Go to Recommendations settings
In the Recommendations tab, look for the Auto Apply icon.

Clicking this icon will take you to the Auto-applied suggestions settings page. This page lists all the different types of suggestions Google has for your advertising account.

Step 3: Review and adjust your suggestion settings On the Auto-applied suggestions settings page, you’ll see a list of suggestions with checkboxes next to them. These checkboxes indicate whether auto-apply suggestions are enabled or disabled.

Carefully review each suggestion to determine whether it aligns with your advertising strategy and business goals.

Step 4: Disable unwanted suggestions
Review any suggestions you don’t want Google to automatically apply to your ads to prevent Google from making changes without your explicit approval. Or simply click the line in the bottom right corner and choose to reject.

Dive deeper into Google’s suggestions
I’ll show you some categories of Google’s automatically applied suggestions and whether you should apply or reject them.
Let’s take a deeper look:
Ads and assets

1. Use optimized ad rotation: Yes

This suggestion uses Google’s smart bidding algorithm to optimize ad rotation, ensuring that the best performing, most relevant ads receive the most exposure. By enabling optimized ad rotation, you can improve your campaign’s overall performance by allowing Google Ads to prioritize ads that are more likely to convert.

2. Add responsive search ads: No
   I don’t want Google to control our ad creatives. Google’s automated ad creation may not align with our business goals and result in poorly performing ads.

3. Improve Responsive Search Ads: No
   Similar to the previous point, manual control of ad creatives is essential for advertising. Make sure all creative elements are aligned with the marketing strategy.

Keywords and targeting

1. Expand your reach with Google search partners: Depends
   This can be useful for campaigns with limited impressions, but in most cases you should manually review your performance before making a decision.
   The bottom line is: search partners can sometimes drive low-quality traffic. The effectiveness of this setting varies. If you have this feature enabled, review the results and keep a close eye on your performance data.
2. Remove redundant keywords: No

Just like ad creative, you never want Google to control your keywords. By manually reviewing your keywords, you can ensure that your ads are showing for the most relevant, best-performing terms.

3. Remove keywords with no impressions: No

Performing manual reviews on a regular basis is a more effective way to manage keyword performance in Google Ads. Non-serving keywords may still have value, and automatically removing them could limit your ad reach and impact.

4. Remove conflicting negative keywords: No
   Conflicting negative keywords can be managed by regularly reviewing your account and making adjustments based on performance data from your Google Ads account.

5. Use optimized targeting: No
   Optimized targeting is a display targeting setting. If it is enabled, Google can reach audiences similar to those who have converted in your current display campaigns.

The reason we recommend not selecting this option is that if you are running a remarketing display campaign, you want Google to target only remarketing audiences. If you allow Google Ads to automatically apply optimized targeting, your remarketing campaign will no longer be true remarketing.

Performance Measurement

1. Upgrade conversion tracking: It depends
   While it is generally recommended to use a data-driven attribution model, special cases (such as products or services with long sales cycles and high-priced items) may require different attribution. Understanding the product sales process and customer conversion journey is crucial to choosing the right tracking method. We recommend enabling this feature without special circumstances.

Keywords and Targeting

1. Add new keywords: No
2. Add broad match keywords: No
   As mentioned before, we cannot expect Google to control our advertising keywords.

3. Use placement extension: No
   Placement extension may reduce campaign performance by including ad placements that are not aligned with your business goals.
   Bidding
   There are many nos here, but the main reason is the same: never let Google control your bidding strategy.