If you have a Google Ads account, you’ll have seen optimisation score. It is that number at the top of the recommendations page, usually blue, always climbing toward 100%. Google wants you to believe a higher score means a better performing account. It does not. The optimisation score measures one thing: how many of Google’s recommendations you have accepted. That is not the same as account health.
Experienced specialists know this. They also know that several of those recommendations, especially the auto-apply settings, will quietly damage a lead generation account if left on. Here is what to switch off and why.
The Auto-Apply Settings That Hurt Lead Generation Accounts
Under the recommendations settings tab, you will find a section called auto-apply. These are settings Google will change for you automatically unless you turn them off. Most are harmful for accounts that depend on lead quality, not impression volume.
Remove conflicting negative keywords. This is one of the most dangerous settings in the interface. Negative keywords exist to block traffic that will never convert. If a negative keyword conflicts with an active keyword, Google may remove the negative keyword automatically, letting the unwanted traffic back in. The correct approach is to review the conflict yourself and decide whether the negative keyword or the original keyword should go. Keeping this setting off gives you that control.
Use optimised targeting. Optimised targeting hands your campaign over to Google’s machine learning using signals you cannot see and cannot control. For a small to mid-size South African budget, this is almost always a bad trade. Google’s automation needs volume to learn effectively, typically at least R10,000 in monthly spend per campaign. Below that threshold, optimised targeting is not optimisation. It is permission to spend badly.
Add new keywords. If your goal is leads, your account should only contain keywords that have proven themselves. Auto-apply can add keywords based on Google’s idea of relevance, not your idea of lead quality. Those new keywords burn impressions, consume budget, and push your proven keywords down the auction. Over months, account performance drifts downward and you cannot point to a single decision that caused it.
Add broad match keywords. Broad match has a place in certain account structures, but auto-applying broad match versions of your existing keywords is reckless on a limited budget. Broad match is designed to cast a wide net, and most of what comes back is irrelevant. For a lead generation account trying to control cost per lead, this setting is a budget leak.
Use display expansion. The Display Network includes a significant number of made-for-advertising sites that exist to monetise impressions, not to generate leads. If your business depends on qualified enquiries, display expansion is not a shortcut to more conversions. It is a tax on your budget.
The Recommendations Section: Which to Ignore and Which to Take Seriously
Beyond auto-apply, the standard recommendations section is full of suggestions that serve Google’s interests more than yours. Here is my take on each one.
Opt into the Google Search Partners Network. The Search Partners Network is opaque. You do not get the same click and conversion transparency, and traffic quality is inconsistent. There is a narrow case for it, businesses with almost no search volume that need additional impressions to gather any data at all. For most South African lead generation accounts, the answer is no.
Create a Performance Max campaign. Performance Max is not a campaign type I recommend for small lead generation budgets. The learning phase typically needs 30 days and a meaningful budget to settle into a pattern. If you cannot afford to feed the system through that discovery window, you are paying for Google’s education with your money. Tightly controlled Search campaigns built on real search term data are the smarter move for most accounts.
Optimise your budgets. This recommendation is worth listening to. Many South African businesses are simply not spending enough to get a useful result. Conversions are a percentage of clicks, and clicks are a percentage of impressions. As a rough rule, you need at least 100 clicks in a month to have a reasonable chance of generating one conversion. If your average cost per click is R20, that is R2,000 just to test the water. In some industries, like finance, cost per click can run over R100, which means the floor for meaningful testing is much higher. If your budget cannot reach that floor, the campaign is set up to fail before it starts.
Turn on AI Max for search campaigns. This is the recommendation I am most cautious about. AI Max gives Google permission to generate ad copy it believes will perform better. The legal and brand risk is real. The system can include a competitor’s name in your ad, or write copy that misrepresents what you do, and once it is live, the damage is already public. Final URL expansion is less risky, but it only works if text customisation is on, which is where the problem lives. For most lead generation accounts, keep AI Max off and write your own ad copy. You are accountable for what your ads say.
Trust the Data, Not the Score
The optimisation score is not a measure of how well your account is performing. It is a measure of how many of Google’s suggestions you have accepted. Experienced specialists know the difference. They switch off the auto-apply settings, ignore most of the recommendations, and use the search term report as their real source of truth. That is what produces leads. Not a number on a dashboard.