Should You Apply Google's Suggestions?
Why to check with your team before applying Google's suggestions or changing campaign settings while we manage your account.
While we're managing your Google Ads, you'll notice the platform is full of prompts — "Apply this recommendation," "Turn this on to get more customers," little suggestions and an "optimization score" nudging you to make changes. It's completely natural to want to act on them; they look helpful and official.
Here's our honest ask: while your account is under management, please leave these to us — and if anything catches your eye, just ask. We mean that warmly. You're never bothering us by asking.
The short version: Your account is being actively managed to a plan. Google's automated suggestions aren't built around that plan, so applying them can quietly work against it. See a suggestion, or wondering why we are (or aren't) doing something? Reach out to your team — we're always happy to explain.
Your account is being actively managed
Everything in your account is set a certain way on purpose. There's a strategy being executed in a deliberate order — which settings are on, which are off, and when each one changes as the account matures.
When a campaign setting is changed, or a Google suggestion is applied, it can pull against that strategy — often in ways that aren't obvious from the account view. Spend can rise, traffic quality can drop, or the account can be knocked back into an earlier stage of its learning process, resetting progress we've built. Because these effects are usually invisible day to day, a small change can cost more than it appears to.
Why Google's suggestions aren't tailored to you
Google's recommendations are generated automatically to apply across millions of advertisers, and they tend to favor more reach and more spend. That isn't automatically wrong — but they aren't built around your budget, your market, or the stage your account is in. Your team is.
So a prompt that reads like "more customers" can, in your specific situation, mean more spend on lower-quality traffic. We review every recommendation against your strategy and apply the ones that genuinely help — while skipping the ones that don't.
A few settings we manage carefully
These are some of the settings and suggestions we most often see switched on by accident, and why we keep them the way we do:
| Setting | Why we keep it the way we do |
|---|---|
| AI Max | Uses very broad matching that pulls in loosely related searches. In practice that means paying for a high volume of clicks that aren't your customers — draining budget on irrelevant traffic. |
| Display Network | Shows image ads across other websites and apps. That's "push" advertising to people who aren't searching for you, rather than "pull" advertising to people looking for you right now — much lower intent, plus a fair share of accidental clicks. |
| Auto-apply recommendations | Lets Google change your settings automatically, without review. That removes the strategic control we use to keep the account efficient, and changes happen that don't fit the plan. |
| Bid strategy (Maximize Clicks → Maximize Conversions) | There's a right order here. Early on, the account needs click volume so there's enough data to learn from. Optimizing for conversions comes later — you have to gather conversions before the system can reliably optimize toward them. Switching too early starves the account of what it needs. |
| Search Partner Network | Extends your ads to sites beyond Google Search. That traffic tends to be lower quality, with less visibility into where clicks come from — more spend, less return, and less transparency. |
Several of these are tools we do turn on later, at the right stage — the key is when and why, and that's exactly what your team is managing for you.
See a suggestion? Just ask.
This is the most important part: you're always welcome to reach out. If you...
- see a Google recommendation and wonder whether to apply it,
- get an email from Google urging you to turn something on,
- notice a setting and aren't sure what it does, or
- simply want to understand why we're doing — or not doing — something,
...send it our way. You don't need to touch anything in the account — forward it or ask the question, and we'll explain exactly how it fits (or doesn't fit) your strategy. We'd genuinely rather answer ten questions than have a well-meaning change set your results back.
Still stuck?
Saw a suggestion, or have a question about a setting? Send it over and we'll walk you through it.
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