Recommendations is an entire section of your Google Ads account dedicated to helping you improve your campaigns. Recommendations can introduce you to new, relevant features, help you get more out of your budget by improving your bids, keywords, and ads, and can work to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your campaigns. 

This article gives you an overview of the recommendations you may see, and gives you guidance on how to understand and apply recommendations. 

The recommendations you see are customized to be relevant and helpful to you. That means you won't see every kind of recommendation, and sometimes you might not see any. If you don’t see recommendations for your account, be sure to check back again soon—Google Ads regularly discovers recommendations for you, and regularly launches new recommendation types.

Recommendations for Google Ads manager accounts

In the new Google Ads experience, it's easier to use recommendations to help improve the accounts you manage. Now, instead of signing in to each individual account you manage, just sign in to your manager account and go to the Recommendations page to see the available recommendations across your managed accounts. 

Available recommendations

Ads and extensions

"Ads and extensions" recommendations help you refine your ads, create new ads, show your best ads most often, and organize your ads into better ad groups. Extensions recommendation types, in particular, help maximize the performance of your ads and can improve your ads’ clickthrough rates. You might see these recommendations:

• Add ad suggestions: Try new versions of your ads and let the best ones show. 
• Add call extensions to your ads: Make your ads more prominent and improve your CTR. 
• Add price extensions to your ads: Make your ads more prominent and improve your CTR. 
• Add responsive search ads: Create responsive search ads to show more relevant ads to potential customers.
• Add seller ratings extensions to your ads: Make your ads more prominent and improve your CTR. 
• Add sitelink extensions to your ads: Make your ads more prominent and improve your CTR 
• Add structured snippet extensions to your ads: Make your ads more prominent and improve your CTR. 
• Create different versions of your ads: Create more ads and let ad rotation show the best one. 
• Create new ad groups from existing keywords: Show people more relevant ads by organizing your keywords by theme. 
• Create new, more relevant ads: Make your ads more relevant by including your keywords in your ad text. 
• Create new versions of your ads: Try new versions of your ads and let the best ones show. 
• Use optimized ad rotation: Automatically show your best ads at auction time. 

Bids and budgets

"Bids and budgets" recommendations can help you find the right bid strategy to meet your business goals. You might see these recommendations:

• Bid more competitively: Raise your bids to show your ads more often than similar advertisers.
• Bid more efficiently with Enhanced CPC: Automatically optimize your bids at auction time for searches more likely to lead to conversions.
• Bid more efficiently with Maximize clicks: Get more clicks at a similar cost with a fully automated bid strategy.
• Bid more efficiently with Maximize conversions: Get more conversions at a similar cost with a fully automated bid strategy.
• Bid more efficiently with Target CPA: Get more conversions at a lower or similar CPA with a fully automated bid strategy.
• Change your device bid adjustments: Optimize your spend on specific devices and increase your return on investment.
• Fix low-traffic ad groups: Fix ad groups that rarely show because your bids are too low. Estimated first page bids can help.
• Lower your bids: Lower your bids to get more clicks for the same or lower cost. 
• Move unused budgets: Your ads stopped running on your busiest days. Get more traffic by moving unused budget to the ads that need it most.
• Raise your bids while staying within your budget: Show your videos more often without increasing your budget. 
• Raise your budgets: Keep your ads running on your busiest days by fixing your limited budget. 
• Set audience bid adjustments: Optimize your audience bid adjustments based on how well they are converting. 
• Switch to Smart Shopping campaigns: Get more conversion value at a similar cost with Smart Shopping campaigns.
• Upgrade your conversion tracking with data-driven attribution: Give credit for conversions across multiple ad interactions with data-driven attribution.
• Use estimated first page bids: Show your ads on the first page of search results. 
• Use estimated first position bids: Show your ads at the top of search results. 
• Use estimated top of page bids: Show your ads above search results. 
• Use standard delivery: Optimize your limited budget and get a better ROI.

Keywords and targeting

"Keywords and targeting" recommendations can help you reach more people who are interested in what you offer. You might see these recommendations:

• Add audiences: Get more insightful reporting at no extra cost. 
• Add negative keywords: Reduce wasted spend by not showing on searches that are irrelevant to your business. 
• Add new keywords: Show your ads on more searches relevant to your business. 
• Add phrase or broad match versions of your keywords: Show your ads on more searches relevant to your business. 
• Add trending search terms as keywords: Show your ads on trending searches relevant to your business.
• Create a Smart display campaign: Get more conversions at a similar CPA with a Smart display campaign.
• Create Dynamic Search Ads: Get more conversions at a similar CPA with Dynamic Search Ads.
• Expand your reach with Google search partners: Reach additional customers at a lower CPC on YouTube and partner sites. 
• Pause poorly performing keywords: Reduce wasted spend on keywords that perform poorly. 
• Promote landing pages missing from your ads: Landing pages relevant to potential customers are missing from your ads.
• Remove conflicting negative keywords: People didn't see your ads because of conflicting negative keywords. Remove them so your ads can show.
• Remove non-serving keywords: Make your account easier to manage by removing non-serving keywords. 
• Remove redundant keywords: Make your account easier to manage by removing redundant keywords. 
• Set up audience sources: Access remarketing features to increase your ROI by showing more impactful and personalized ads. 
• Upload customer lists: Access remarketing features to increase your ROI by showing more impactful and personalized ads. 

Repairs

"Repairs" recommendations help you fix issues with your account and improve the overall health and performance of your account. You might see these recommendations:

• Add ads to each ad group: Get your ads running by adding ads to each ad group. 
• Add keywords to each ad group: Get your ads running by adding keywords to each ad group. 
• Fix certification issues: Your ads are not running because of certification issues. Apply for certification to show your ads.
• Fix your ad destinations: Your ads were disapproved because of destination issues. Fix your ad destinations to show your ads.
• Fix your ad text: Your ads were disapproved because of editorial issues. Fix your ad text to show your ads.
• Fix your conversion tracking tag: Make sure you don’t miss any conversions by fixing your conversion tracking tag.
• Improve your mobile site: Avoid losing customers on mobile devices by improving your mobile site. 
• Set up conversion tracking: See which of your clicks turn into customers and access features such as automated bidding.

Ad suggestions

Ad suggestions are variations of your existing ads that may boost the performance of your Search Network campaigns. Ad suggestions initially surface in your account on the Recommendations page for you to review, and you can choose to apply or dismiss them. Note: Ad suggestions marked as "auto-apply" will start serving after 14 days if no action is taken. Find out more about ad suggestions. 

Working with recommendations

Apply a recommendation

To apply a recommendation, click View on the recommendation you want to use, then click Apply. To apply all recommendations of a specific type, click Apply all in the recommendation card. New keywords may need to await review and approval before they are eligible to trigger your ad.

If you apply a recommendation in error, you can undo it in your account's Change history page. 

Track performance

Wait some time before evaluating how your applied recommendations have affected your account’s performance. Keep in mind, an applied recommendation could have a positive impact on your performance even if performance metrics worsen because of other changes you’ve made, seasonality and other factors. All of the changes you’ve made by applying recommendations will appear in your account's Change history page. 

Dismiss recommendations

You know your products and goals best. If a recommendation doesn't seem relevant to your ad campaign or appropriate for your advertising goals, you can dismiss a single suggestion within a recommendation by hovering over the top right corner of a suggestion, then clicking the “X.” You can also dismiss an entire recommendation by clicking the 3 dot icon in the recommendation card, then selecting Dismiss all. 

Why you might not see recommendations

Recommendations won't always be available for every campaign at all times. There are a few common reasons why you might not see recommendations.

• Your account doesn't have any billing information. Find out how to submit your billing information.
• Your account doesn’t have any campaigns, ad groups, or ads. Learn how to create a campaign. 
• Your ads aren't receiving any traffic. Learn more about why your ad might not be showing.
• Your ads recently started running.
• Or, best of all: Your campaigns are already optimized.

If you don’t see recommendations in your account, be sure to check back again soon—Google Ads regularly discovers recommendations for you, and also launches new recommendation types.