Account activity and the optimization score

The account has to be alive

The policy asks for an active account — at least one running campaign — that produces results. An account with everything paused, or one that has been running for months with no clicks, is a candidate for deactivation. Google also sends a reconfirmation request annually; miss it and the account is suspended regardless of how well it performs.

"Produces results" is where most accounts are weakest, and it is worth being blunt about the scale. In our study of 706 accounts, 273 of them spend $935 a month between them — all of them together, against $10,000 granted each. Those accounts technically comply and practically do nothing.

The optimization score

Google shows an optimization score per campaign and per account, with a list of recommendations that raise it. Applying them all gets you to 100%, and Google states that a well-optimized account serves more often.

Treat the list as suggestions rather than instructions. The score counts applied recommendations, not outcomes, and some of those recommendations are measurably wrong for a grant account:

• "Broaden your match types" is usually good advice — broad match has 5.9% of keywords producing impressions against 0.1% on exact. But applying it to brand ad groups starts serving your brand ads on generic queries, which eats the click-through buffer you need to stay above 5%. Keep brand groups on exact.
• "Add dynamic ad groups" buys reach a keyword list will not catch, and pays for it in click-through rate. While dynamic groups do up to 45% of account impressions the cost is about 1% of CTR; above 70% it reaches 4.4% — the difference between a healthy account and one that needs rescuing.
• "Raise your budget" almost never helps. Across the portfolio only 1.2% of lost impression share went to budget; 98.8% was lost auctions.

The recommendations worth applying without hesitation are the ones that add material rather than loosen controls: missing assets, missing ads in a group, keywords with real demand, conversion tracking that is not firing.

What "results" actually depends on

If an account is active and still producing nothing, the optimization score is not where the answer is. Four things decide it, in this order: the $2 bid cap, the number of landing pages you promote, whether their titles name what people search for, and the size of your keyword portfolio. Work done out of that order is not less effective — it is ineffective. Fixing page titles on an account still under the bid cap produces an effect indistinguishable from zero; the same work after the cap is removed produces five times more.