Google Ads Account Level Auto-Apply “Recommendations” Worth Enabling or Not
Should You Auto-apply Account Level Recommendations?
Auto Applying account level recommendations is the next step on from “Google Ads Optimisation Score” recommendations which are bespoke to each campaign. I find Optimization Score a useful summary that helps raise my gaze out of the under growth by providing some oversight on performance and what type of things Google approves of and rewards and therefore what kind of practices it frowns upon.
Auto-applying these recommendations, at all times, at account level, is putting a lot of faith into Google’s bid algorithms and its ability to know how to deal with brand guidelines and search queries in a business context. Hint: Google cannot possibly know what’s best for your business outside of a Search context and therefore how would it know how to apply this, inside a Search context.
My Auto-Apply Recommendations & Reasoning
How to Use “Bid More Efficiently….” Options in the “Grow Your Business” Section
The “Bidding” sub-section is a confusing area of this the auto-apply feature and I’ve had it explained to mean different things from different people within Google so it seems some work needs to be done to re-design the messaging around this. My take on it is this.
If all the campaigns in an account use, for example, “up to Max Conv Value” bid strategy then all the “lower” bid strategy boxes can be ticked. What is not clear is how this recommendation is then applied at campaign level and how it is made clear if a “lower” bid strategy is being over ruled by this setting/feature or not. I’ve tested this by enabling the boxes as shown below and then editing a campaign bid strategy to eCPC. The campaign allowed eCPC to be set and there was no messaging anywhere within Google Ads to say otherwise.
Setting to “Adjust your CPA or ROAS targets”
Hugely intriguing setting and not one as yet touted to any great extent by Google! This is an additional but separate bid strategy not available anywhere else in Google Ads i.e. it is not an option to select this as a campaign or portfolio setting. By way of additional explanation google says; “Get more conversion value (revenue) by adjusting your ROAS targets”.
What it isn’t
This is different from “Max Conv Value” which should be only used on campaigns that are limited by budget where the bid strategy will try to deliver as much revenue as possible for the available budget
It is also different from tROAS which is used on campaign not limited by budget AND where the business wants to control the limiting factor by having a minimum level of performance (by which ROAS is a proxy to achieve this).
What It Is
It is a flexible bid strategy that goes beyond the manually set tROAS bid strategy and automatically adjusts tROAS to bring in more revenue. It’s like “max conv value” for campaigns not limited by budget. It also implies that whatever the budget is then Google will try very hard to spend it to get one more dollar. It seems like this will always favour adjusting ROAS downward to drive more revenue.
How is this different from Max Conv Value?
What happens when this is enabled, what will it do and how is this communicated and reported?
I have no idea at this moment in time as there is no consistent advice or best practice for this setting coming out of Google that satisfactorily explains it!
