Why I Left the Google Ads Partner Programme and Why You Might Want to as Well

The Flawed Incentive Structure

Let me explain.

To stay in the Google Ads Partner programme, agencies must meet three core requirements:

  • Spend: You need to manage a combined ad spend of at least $10,000 (or local equivalent) over a 90-day period.
  • Certifications: At least 50 percent of account strategists must pass Google’s certification exams.
  • Performance: This is the most controversial, your manager account must maintain a minimum optimisation score of 70 percent.

Sounds fair on the surface, right? But that last point is where things fall apart.

What Is Optimisation Score, Really?

Google’s optimisation score is presented as a helpful indicator of account health. It ranges from 0 to 100 percent and appears next to each account in your manager dashboard. But it is not based on your actual performance outcomes like return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, or customer lifetime value. Instead, it reflects how many of Google’s own automated recommendations you have implemented.

The more recommendations you apply, the higher your score. The fewer you follow, the more your score drops, even if your campaigns are profitable and well structured.

These recommendations often include:

  • Increasing daily budgets, regardless of current spend efficiency or budget caps already set for a reason
  • Broadening keyword match types, which can drastically lower targeting precision and invite irrelevant traffic
  • Turning on auto-applied suggestions, which allows Google to make changes without human review
  • Switching to automated bidding strategies like Maximise Conversions or Target ROAS, even when they underperform manual or enhanced CPC bidding

The optimisation score does not account for client goals, business context, or real-world return. I have managed campaigns where manual bidding, narrow keyword targeting, and controlled budgets outperformed all automated setups, yet the score remained stuck at 55 percent, with red warning flags and an endless list of suggestions to "improve" it.

It is not a performance score. It is a compliance score.

Even worse, it creates an inherent conflict of interest. Agencies are incentivised to follow suggestions that benefit Google’s revenue, not the client’s bottom line. Higher spend, broader reach, less control. You get penalised in the score for saying no to waste.

This puts agencies in a difficult position: follow Google blindly and maintain Partner status, or act in your client’s best interest and risk losing the badge.

Many choose the badge. I did not.

Who Does This Really Serve?

Let us be honest, the optimisation score is not designed to serve advertisers or their agencies. It is designed to serve Google.

I have seen clients spending £10,000 or more per month being pushed into recommendations that increased their daily spend by up to £5,000, not because performance justified the increase, but because it was one of the fastest ways to increase the score. These clients were not startups throwing budget at growth, but established businesses with strict ROAS requirements and cash flow plans.

Campaigns that had been carefully built and refined over months, with strong targeting, sustainable returns, and stable growth, suddenly started flagging as underperforming. The culprit? Refusal to apply low-quality recommendations like switching from exact match to broad match keywords, or replacing structured assets with dynamically generated ones that lacked message control.

In one case, a campaign running on manual bidding with a 600 percent return was flagged for underperformance because it was not using Target ROAS bidding. Activating that recommendation cut returns by more than half and started inflating costs with little to no strategic targeting.

This is not optimisation, it is manipulation. Google uses the Partner Programme to apply soft pressure. Not only does it nudge agencies toward behaviour that increases Google’s ad revenue, it creates a competitive disadvantage for those who push back.

Agencies are forced to choose: do what is right for the client, or play the game to keep the badge. And let us not forget that the badge, for many, is more than vanity. It is visibility in Google’s Partner directory, it is client trust, and it is sometimes a requirement in public tenders.

This is not a partnership. It is a power imbalance designed to protect one party’s commercial interest, and that party is not you.

Google Has Lost Its Way

In the early days, Google was one of the most product-focused companies on the planet. Its mission was to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Relevance and utility were core to how Search worked. Ads had to earn their place. The user came first.

But that era is gone.

Today, Google is increasingly a monetisation engine. Search results pages are dominated by sponsored listings. It is common to scroll through multiple blocks of advertising before reaching organic content. Even worse, the relevance of these ads has declined. Deep pockets can now outbid strong content. Real user needs are being buried under algorithmically curated noise.

This erosion of quality has not gone unnoticed. Users complain. Marketers adapt. Agencies struggle to balance performance with platform requirements. And the outcome is predictable, more people turning to alternative tools for answers.

Large Language Models and answer-first experiences like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini offer a path forward. They strip away clutter and focus on direct value. If the future of search becomes answer-based rather than click-based, Google’s dominance will be tested. And perhaps then, the balance will shift back toward users and advertisers.

Until then, we need to make choices.

Mine was clear: put the client first, even if that means walking away from a badge that no longer means what it used to.

What I Do Instead

I still run Google Ads campaigns. But I do so on my own terms, optimised for the client’s business, not for Google’s internal metrics.

Instead of chasing an arbitrary optimisation score, I:

  • Evaluate Google’s recommendations critically, implementing only those backed by data, strategic fit, and commercial logic
  • Optimise toward clearly defined business outcomes, whether that is leads, sales, ROAS, or profit, not abstract system health markers
  • Track and evaluate actual conversion quality, not just volume
  • Keep budget control central to the strategy, scaling only when data shows consistent returns
  • Use controlled tests to compare manual and automated bidding in context, rather than blindly trusting Google’s claims
  • Ensure every campaign is tailored to the client’s market, product lifecycle, and cost structure, not just “industry benchmarks”

Clients deserve results, not scorecards. I document all changes and explain what I do, so clients know exactly what is being spent and why. There are no black boxes. No blind trust in algorithms. Just a performance-first mindset that respects the money on the table.

Partner status is not the same as partnership.

You do not need a badge to deliver clarity, accountability, and results.

If you are running campaigns and keep being told to "just trust the system" while your returns shrink, it might be time to re-evaluate. Not just your ad account, but the whole system around it.

You might not need to optimise your optimisation score.
You might just need someone who puts you first.