I've been navigating Google Reps since 2006. Back when Google still sent you branded socks and mini-fridges as swag. Back when the rep relationship felt like a partnership.
I have nothing against the people. I've been on the other side of that curtain. I understand the quarterly targets, the approved talking points, the product pushes with deadlines attached.
But I want to be honest with you about something most people figure out too late:
Following Google rep advice is almost never in your interest.
Here is the script, and what it actually means:
"You should expand your match types."
Translation: your exact match keywords are eating into broader inventory we need you to buy. Broader match means more spend, more impressions, more variance, and less control. Your CPA will go up. Their revenue will go up. Guess which one they're measured on.
"Your Quality Score could be improved."
Translation: please spend more on the keywords where you're currently losing the auction. Quality Score is a real metric but it is also a lever reps use to justify increasing bids on terms that may not convert for you.
"We recommend enabling Performance Max."
Translation: please hand us the keys. PMax is a black box. You will spend more. You will have less visibility into where it goes. For large brand accounts with massive conversion data it can work. For most mid-market companies it is a budget vacuum with a dashboard.
"Your budget is limiting your campaign."
Translation: you have a budget. We would like it to be larger. This recommendation appears regardless of whether increasing the budget would improve your returns.
"We recommend the automated bidding strategy."
Translation: stop telling us what to pay per click. We would like to decide. Smart Bidding requires significant conversion data to work correctly. Below roughly 50 conversions per month per campaign, it will spend your money learning things you could have told it manually.
"Check the Recommendations tab — there are some quick wins in there."
This one deserves its own paragraph.
The Recommendations tab is not a list of things that will help your account. It is a list of things Google's algorithm has decided would increase your spend. Sometimes those things overlap with what is good for you. More often they do not. Every recommendation you dismiss lowers your "Optimization Score," which is a metric Google invented to make you feel bad about not spending more.
Dismiss liberally. Sleep well.
"Your location targeting looks good, but you might be missing nearby opportunities."
Translation: you are correctly targeting the cities where your customers are. We would like you to also target the cities where your customers are not. "Presence or interest" is the default location setting in Google Ads, which means someone in New York who googles "Vancouver plumber" can trigger your Vancouver plumber ad. This is not an opportunity. This is noise with a billing attachment.
Check your location settings right now. If it says "Presence or interest" change it to "Presence only." Do this before you do anything else in the account. This is the single most common source of wasted spend I find in every audit I run, and it is almost always there because a rep or the platform setup wizard set it to the wrong default.
The rep will not tell you this. It would cost Google money.
The reps are not bad people. They are running a script designed by a team whose job is to grow Google's revenue. Those interests and your interests occasionally align. When they do, take the advice. When they don't, and you can usually tell, smile, say you'll take a look, and don't touch anything.
Twenty years of this. The accounts that perform are almost always the ones where a careful human is still making the decisions.
Rob
P.S. The one thing reps are actually useful for: getting credits applied when something breaks on Google's end. That's the call worth taking.