You Can Now Dismiss a Recommendation and That Won’t Count Towards Your Optimization Score in Google Ads

In an email to Google Partner Program members around the world, Google announced changes to the Program structure and badge criteria. The changes were initially slated to take place June 2020, but due to the pandemic will now go into effect beginning in February 2022.

New requirements. Google said that Partners requested two major changes to the requirements in consideration of the current economic situation and to make badge criteria more transparent:

1. Partners can either dismiss or apply recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score. While the optimization score requirement was slated to take effect in June, it previously only allowed for application of recommendations. However the Google team took search marketers’ feedback regarding the ability to dismiss recommendations for clients where it may not have made sense to accept. “We know that our Partners know their clients and accounts best,” a Google spokesperson told us.
2. The spend threshold will remain at a 90-day spend of $10,000 US across all of a partner’s managed accounts. Before the pandemic, the Partner badge requirements were set to increase to $20,000 every 90 days. However, the Partners team listened to ad mangers’ feedback and kept the requirement at $10,000.