15 Ways To Improve Conversion Rates In Google Ads via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

Are you tired of pouring money into Google Ads campaigns with poor conversion rates?

You’re not alone.

Many businesses struggle to convert ad clicks into meaningful actions like purchases, sign-ups, or leads. But fear not, because in this article, we’re diving into real-life tips and tactics that can make a tangible difference to your conversion rates.

From refining your keyword selection to crafting compelling ad copies and optimizing your landing pages, we’ll explore practical, actionable tips that have proven to help improve Google Ads conversion rates.

Read on to understand how these strategies will help you turn your clicks into conversions.

1. Implement Proper Conversion Tracking

This first one seems like a no-brainer, but it’s often overlooked by many accounts.

The only way to understand whether your Google Ads campaigns are performing or not performing is to properly set up conversion tracking.

The most common ways Google Ads conversion tracking is implemented is through:

The other key component to proper conversion tracking is identifying what conversions make sense to track.

Oftentimes, brands have one big conversion in mind. For ecommerce, that is likely a purchase or a sale. For B2B companies, it’s likely a lead or a demo signup.

But what about all the other available touchpoints before a customer makes that leap?

Consider tracking “micro” conversions on your sites to really identify the positive impact your PPC campaigns have.

Examples of “micro” conversions to track include:

• Email newsletter signups.
• Free samples.
• Whitepaper download.
• Webinar signup.
• And more.

Taking a step back from the ins and outs of the platforms helps you hone in through the lens of a consumer. Setting up accurate measurements from the purchase journey can make a big impact on how you structure and optimize your Google Ads campaigns.

2. Optimize Keyword Lists

The second way to help increase Google Ads conversion rates is continuous optimization of keyword lists.

The Google Ads search terms report is a perfect tool for this. Not only can you see what users are searching for, in their own words, that leads to conversions, but you can see what is not converting.

We’ll get to negative keywords later.

Screenshot taken by author, April 2024

Keep in mind which match types you’re using throughout the keyword optimization process.

Broad match keywords have the biggest leniency when it comes to what types of searches will show for your ad. It also has the largest reach because of its flexible nature.

Turning some of your top-performing Broad match keywords into Exact match can help increase those Quality Scores, which can lead to lower cost per click (CPCs) and better efficiency for your campaigns.

3. Match Ad Copy To Landing Pages

Alright, so you’ve gotten a user to click on your ad. Great!

But you’re finding that not a lot of people are actually purchasing. What gives?

Surely, it must be a problem with the PPC campaigns.

Not always.

Typically, one of the most common reasons users leave a website right after clicking on an ad has to do with a mismatch of expectations.

Simply put, what the user was promised in an ad was not present or prominent on the landing page.

A great way to optimize conversion rates is to ensure the landing page copy is tailored to match your PPC ad copy.

Doing this ensures a relatively seamless user experience, which can help speed up the purchase process.

4. Use Clear Call-To-Actions

If a user isn’t performing the actions you’d expect to after clicking on an ad, it may be time to review your ad copy.

Since the emergence of responsive search ads (RSAs), I’ve seen many redundant headlines and generic call-to-actions (CTAs).

No wonder a user doesn’t know what you want them to do!

When creating CTAs either in ad copy or on the landing page, keep these principles in mind:

• Use action-oriented language that clearly communicates what you want them to do.
• For landing pages, make sure the CTA button is visually distinct and easily clickable. It helps if a CTA is shown before a user has to scroll down to find it.
• Test different CTAs to determine what resonates best with users.

Examples of action-oriented CTA language could sound like:

• “Download Now”
• “Request A Quote”
• “Shop Now”

Try steering away from generic language such as “Learn More” unless you’re truly running a more top-of-funnel (TOF) campaign.

5. Optimize For Mobile

With mobile phones so prevalent in our society, it’s shocking how many websites are still not optimizing their mobile experience!

Creating a landing page with desktop top-of-mind should really be revisited, given that mobile traffic has overtaken desktop.

So, what can you do to help increase your conversion rates on mobile?

• Use a responsive web design to accommodate different mobile layouts.
• Make sure the site speed has fast loading times.
• Create any mobile-specific features like CTA placement to make sure it’s easily viewable for users.
• Optimize form fills on mobile devices.

6. Experiment With Ad Copy Testing

Ad copy is one of the biggest levers you can control in your PPC campaigns.

Even slight changes or tweaks to a headline or description can have a big impact on CTR and conversion rates.

Having multiple ad copy variants is crucial when trying to understand what resonates most with users.

Part of the beauty of Google’s Responsive Search ads is the number of headline inputs you can have at once. Google’s algorithm then determines the best-performing ad copy combinations to increase conversion rates.

Google Ads also has tools built into the platform for more controlled testing if that is a route you want to take.

You can create ad variants or create an experiment directly in Google Ads for more precise A/B testing.

Screenshot taken by author, May 2024

It’s also important to test one element at a time to isolate the impact of each change. Testing too many elements at once can muddy up analysis.

7. Utilize Ad Assets

Ad assets are a great way to help influence a click to your website, which can help improve conversion rates.

Assets like callouts, structured snippets, and sitelinks can provide additional detail that couldn’t be shown in headlines or descriptions.

When your Ad Rank is higher, you have a better likelihood of showing ad assets, which helps increase the overall visibility of your ad.

Your ad assets can be customized to fit your campaign goals, and can even show specific promotions, special product features, and social proof like seller ratings.

8. Don’t Be Shy With Negative Keywords

A sound negative keyword strategy is one of the best ways to improve Google Ads conversion rates.

You may be wasting your paid search budget on keywords that aren’t producing conversions.

You may also notice that some broad keywords have gone rogue and are triggering your ads for terms they definitely shouldn’t be showing up for!

As mentioned earlier, the search terms report can help mitigate a lot of these types of keywords.

You can choose to add negative keywords at the following levels:

• Ad group.
• Campaign.
• Negative keyword lists to apply to campaigns.

You also have the ability to add negative keywords as Broad, Phrase, or Exact match.

Alleviating poor-performing keywords allows your budget to optimize for your core keyword sets that lead to conversions.

9. Set Proper Bid Strategies

The type of bid strategy you choose for your Google Ads campaigns can make or break performance.

In recent years, Google has moved towards its fully automated bidding strategies, using machine learning to align performance with the chosen goal and bid strategy.

Currently, Google has five Smart Bidding strategies focused on conversion-based goals:

• Target CPA (Cost-Per-Action): Helps increase conversions while targeting a specific CPA.
• Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Helps increase conversions while targeting a specific ROAS.
• Maximize Conversions: Optimizes for conversions, not focused on a target ROAS outcome, and spends the entire budget.
• Maximize Conversion Value: Optimizes for conversion value, not focused on a target ROAS outcome, and spends the entire budget.
• Enhanced CPC: A way to automatically adjust your manual bids to try to maximize conversions.

Choosing the right bidding strategy is just one piece of the puzzle.

The inputs of the chosen bid strategy are just as important, where more context is needed to have a successful campaign.

For example, suppose you choose a Target CPA bid strategy for a search campaign and set the target CPA to $50.

However, in that campaign, you notice that your average CPC ranges anywhere from $10-$20.

Suddenly, your impressions go down, and you’re not sure what’s happening!

It could be your bid strategy inputs.

In the example above, if you have high CPCs but set your target CPA to just slightly higher than the CPCs, that means you need to have a stellar conversion rate in order to stay within that $50 CPA threshold.

Additionally, many make the mistake of setting the same target CPA for all campaigns, regardless of Brand or Non-Brand intent.

Most often, Non-Brand keywords will have much higher CPAs than Brand terms, so the inputs should be set accordingly based on performance.

Make sure you set your Target CPA thresholds high enough initially for the campaigns to gather information to meet expectations.

10. Add Audience Segmentation

As keyword match types tend to get looser, there is more emphasis on leveraging audience segmentation to reach the right people.

Using audience segments allows you to tailor your ads towards specific groups or utilize audiences as exclusions so your ads aren’t triggered.

Examples of audience segments within Google Ads include:

• Demographics: Can be based on gender, age, household income, education, and other areas.
• Interests and behaviors: Based on hobbies, lifestyle choices, website browsing behavior, and purchase history.
• Actively researching or planning: Based on a user’s past or recent purchase intent.
• Past interactions with your business: Can be based off previous engagements like website visits, add-to-cart, other online interactions, existing customer relationship management (CRM) data, and more.

By segmenting audiences within your PPC campaigns, you can customize ad messaging based on those segments.

This can lead to maximizing relevance and engagement, ultimately increasing conversion rates.

You can also use insights from GA4 to inform your segmentation strategy to identify high-value audience segments.

11. Create A Retargeting Strategy

On average, average e-commerce conversion rates range from 2.5 – 3%.

That means 97% of people leave a website without purchasing. Talk about a missed opportunity!

With a retargeting strategy in place, you have the opportunity to win back those missed customers and turn them into your brand champions.

Retargeting keeps track of website or app visitors who don’t take the desired action you’d like them to. You can create retargeting lists as niche or as broad as you prefer, but keep in mind that audiences must be a certain size before they’re eligible to use.

Examples of utilizing retargeting could be:

• Creating segmented lists of users based on certain category pages of a website.
• Users who have added an item to their cart but didn’t purchase it.
• Users who have viewed at least three to five pages.

These segments can be used to create retargeting campaigns, which show those users ads to help increase the likelihood of them converting. Be sure to set those ad frequencies within the campaign so you don’t annoy your audience, though!

12. Offer Incentives

These days, shoppers are more accustomed to expecting a discount whenever they purchase.

There’s certainly an argument that programming people to buy only during a sale can diminish a product’s value perception.

However, there are strategies that can boost sales and conversion rates without devaluing the product.

If possible, try making the offers more personal towards the user and their behavior.

Additionally, you can set smaller windows of sale times and incorporate real-time purchase behavior so users can see how many people have taken advantage of the sale.

13. Choose The Right Location Settings

One of the easiest ways to waste precious PPC dollars is to set up location targeting wrong.

Google Ads offers multiple ways to geo-target locations within the campaign settings to help reach your goals.

Location targeting allows you to set specific locations for your ads to show, including:

• City.
• Region.
• State.
• Country.
• Radius.

For example, if you have products that can only be purchased in the United States, you would likely target “United States” within the campaign setting.

Nowadays, it’s not as easy as just choosing “United States” (in this example). This is where advanced settings come in.

Within the Google campaign settings, you have two location-targeting options:

• Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your targeted location.
• Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.

Screenshot taken by author, May 2024

In the example above, it would make sense to choose “Presence” – otherwise, the campaign could show ads in areas where the products aren’t available.

If users in those countries click on the ad but see they can’t purchase when they get to the website, that is a recipe for poor conversion rates.

14. Use Social Proof To Build Trust

Brands can leverage social proof in their Google Ads campaigns to help boost conversion rates.

The goal of using social proof is to incorporate elements that demonstrate positive sentiment from customers, endorsements, or validation that the customer’s needs will be met.

There are many ways brands can add social proof to their campaigns:

• Seller ratings ad asset.
• Callout ad assets.
• Adding customer reviews and testimonials to the landing page.
• Share case studies and success stories on the landing page.

Additionally, strategies like creating limited-time offers with an emphasis on social proof can help boost sales and conversion rates.

This could mean showing in real-time how many customers have taken advantage of the offer, which creates urgency for the customer to act.

Focusing on social proof and validation can build trust, credibility, and confidence among potential customers – ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

15. Schedule Your Ads Based on Performance

Ad scheduling is an underestimated tool in Google Ads that helps improve conversion rates.

The beauty of ad scheduling is that you can control when your ad will or will not show.

Make sure to have ample budget and schedule ads when potential customers are most actively searching and are more engaged.

This can lead to higher effectiveness of the campaign and increased conversion rates.

For example, if you run a B2B software company, it’s highly unlikely that potential customers are searching in the middle of the night.

Optimize your spend by not showing ads at certain times of the day (such as the middle of the night) or days of the week (like weekends).

Screenshot taken by author, May 2024

If you’re not sure how to start optimizing campaigns by time, consider the following:

• Use tools like GA4 to understand when most purchases are happening on the website.
• Look for trends like website traffic, conversion times, engagement rates, etc., by time.
• Align your ad schedule with peak business operations times, especially if customer service is involved.
• Adjust ad schedules around key events like holidays or peak seasonality.

In Summary

There’s no magic bullet in Google Ads that will guarantee high conversion rates.

There are many variables that can add up to the overall performance of a campaign.

Small tweaks and optimizations like the 15 examples above can go a long way in increasing your Google Ads conversion rates.

From refining keyword selections and testing ad copy to improving your landing pages for optimal user experience, these strategies can help maximize the effectiveness of your PPC efforts.

More resources: 

Featured Image: The KonG/Shutterstock

Google Ads: A Quick Guide To Every AI-Powered Ad Creative Feature (And What’s Coming Soon) via @sejournal, @adsliaison

I know, we can’t go two minutes without hearing “AI” – much like in the early days (years) of “mobile” and “social media.”

In these early days of the generative AI era, creatives is an area where we’re seeing rapid development for advertisers.

We saw this at Google Marketing Live this year, too, with new AI creative capabilities announced for Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and YouTube ads.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I get it. With so many changes and new applications of AI in ad creatives, it can be hard to keep up with what’s available, how these features are designed to work – and how they’re evolving.

Want to maintain control of your ad creatives? I get that, too.

In this primer, we’ll look at the ways these features can support your unique creative strategy.

It’s important to remember the overarching goals of all of these features are to:

• Help generate ideas and scale relevant ad creatives to reach more customers.
• Save you time and resources.

What they are not designed to be are:

• Set-it-and-forget-it campaign tools.
• Replacements for your own creative inputs and insights.

Marketers need to bring their expertise to ensure the creatives that are generated are accurate and represent their brand.

This is also why these features are grounded in your own inputs, such as landing pages, manual assets, and keywords.

Here, we’ll break down each of the creatives features that use AI in Google Ads today, look at what’s coming soon, and provide an overview of how these tools can play a role in your creative efforts to drive performance.

Automatically Created Assets

First up, automatically created assets. When the automatically created assets (ACA) setting is enabled, it will create headlines and descriptions for your responsive search ads (RSAs) and Performance Max asset groups.

The aim is to augment your manual assets to provide incremental conversion opportunities by creating more relevant ads for more queries.

When enabled, RSAs assemble ad combinations that are predicted to perform best using both the assets you’ve provided and ACAs.

As of February, automatically created assets can use generative AI for advertisers with English language assets. We plan to expand to more languages.

Applicable campaign types: Search, Performance Max.

What it generates: Text assets for responsive search ads and Performance Max asset groups.

Setting location: Campaign level settings.

When it generates assets: After the campaign is live.

What it sources from: Automatically created assets are generated based on your ad’s unique context, which includes your landing page, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group.

Reporting: In the ad level asset report, these assets are labeled “Automatically created” in the “Asset source” column. Combination reports also include automatically created assets.

Controls:

• Opt in or out at the campaign level.
• Review and remove assets you no longer want to serve from the asset details report. The system removes any automatically created assets with low performance or if the asset source changes, well, automatically.

What else you need to know:

• Website content is used to generate ACA, so you need to be sure your website content is accurate, up-to-date, not misleading and in compliance with Google Ads policies and any applicable laws when automatically created assets are enabled in your campaigns.
• Automatically created assets should augment – not replace – your own headlines and descriptions. They can show alongside your manual headlines and descriptions and also don’t count toward asset limits.
• Draft and Experiments are compatible with ACA in Search campaigns. You will see automatically created assets on both the test and control arm. However, the control side will serve zero automatically created assets impressions.
• Ad Strength ratings also now reflect automatically created assets in responsive search ads and in Performance Max campaigns.
• Learn more about automatically created assets for RSAs here and Performance Max here.

Dynamic Assets

There are a number of automated assets (formerly known as extensions) options offered at the account level, such as seller ratings, automated locations, and longer headlines.

Here, we’re going to focus on the five dynamic asset types available:

• Dynamic Image assets.
• Dynamic Sitelinks.
• Dynamic Structured snippets.
• Dynamic Callouts.

Applicable campaign types: Most are eligible to show with all ad types across multiple campaigns.

Setting location: Campaigns > Assets > three-dot menu icon > Account level automated assets settings tab.

When it generates assets: When an asset is predicted to improve your ad’s performance, Google Ads automatically creates and displays it below your ad.

What it sources from: Dynamic assets are sourced from content and images on your landing page. Dynamic assets don’t currently use generative AI.

Reporting: Available from the Assets tab.

Controls: You may remove individual dynamic assets you no longer want to show from the Assets tab. Specific dynamic assets can be turned off entirely at the account level (see settings location above).

What else you need to know:

• Dynamic assets should be used in addition to, not as replacements for, your manual assets.
• As of March, dynamic assets can show alongside your manual assets. For example, if you only have two eligible manual sitelinks, your ad can show two additional dynamic sitelinks for four sitelinks in total.
• Review account-level automated assets, including dynamic assets, and their performance from the Assets tab.
• Learn more about account-level automated assets here.

Asset Generation In Performance Max

This feature is available when creating or editing your Performance Max campaigns. You can generate custom assets using text-to-text and text-to-image prompts.

Applicable campaign types: Performance Max. This was launched globally in May for customers whose Google Ads language is set to English.

What it generates: Text and image assets.

Setting location: Optional during campaign creation and asset group editing workflows.

When it generates assets: This option is available when creating new campaigns and asset groups and when editing existing asset groups.

Start by entering your final URL (a webpage or a social media page) in the “Asset generation panel,” and it will generate a summary of the business, including products or services being advertised in the asset group and unique selling points.

You then choose to “generate assets” for review and editing before publishing.

What it sources from: Gemini models are used to generate text assets based on your website.

For images, it will show assets curated from your website and social channels, our stock image inventory, and those generated via AI. You can also generate unique images using text prompts.

Autogenerated videos are created from the other assets in the asset group.

With image references announced at GML this year, soon you’ll be able to input the type of image you want in a text-to-prompt form and then upload a reference image. It will generate original images that match the original theme, style, and context. (English only to start.)

Reporting: The assets you approve and publish will be reflected in your asset reports.

Controls: During campaign and asset group construction, you can review, edit, and remove any assets prior to launching your campaign.

What else you need to know:

• Asset generation may not be available if your site is related to a sensitive category, is not in English, and/or recently launched online.
• There are also some content restrictions when generating images. For example, the tools will avoid generating content with individual people or products with brand names and logos. Often, this means you’ll receive no results for requests like this, but sometimes, you might see an irrelevant response for a prompt that requests people or brands. More on generated images here.
• Assets created by generative AI go through an Ads Policy review and may not be approved.
• You should review all assets for accuracy and compliance with Google advertising policies or applicable laws before publishing them.
• Learn more about building asset groups with generative AI here.

Conversational Experience For Search Ads

Introduced in November, this is the chat-based feature powered by large language models to help when creating new Search campaigns. It’s somewhat similar to asset generation in PMax.

Applicable campaign types: Eligible Search campaigns where the language is set to English.

What it generates: Keywords, headlines and descriptions, images, sitelinks.

Setting location: You’ll see the option when you reach the “Keywords and ad” step during Search campaign construction, if eligible.

When it generates assets: During campaign construction.

What it sources from: Your text prompts and landing page. Image suggestions are either sourced from your landing page or generated by Google AI.

Reporting: The keywords and assets you approve will be reflected in their respective reports.

Controls: You’re able to review and revise suggested assets created in the conversational experience for accuracy and to ensure they are accurate and reflect your brand voice. You can also enter new prompts.

What else you need to know:

• Not available for domains in sensitive verticals or sub-verticals (for example, sexual content and gambling).
• Chat in natural language and rephrase your prompt if you aren’t satisfied with the response.
• The more unique details you use to guide and inform the AI, the more likely the generated ad assets will be unique and set your ads apart.
• It won’t always get it right. Be sure to carefully review all suggestions for accuracy before publishing.
• Learn more about using the conversational experience here.

Coming Soon … AI Creatives News From Google Marketing Live

Brand Guidelines For Performance Max

With brand guidelines for PMax creative assets, you’ll soon be able to set your brand colors, either by providing them directly or confirming the colors we detect from your website.

We’ll also aim to closely match the brand font detected on your website.

These guidelines will then be applied to auto-generated videos and responsive display ads, which are also getting a much-needed, modern facelift.

You will be able to review and edit your brand guidelines at any time. Brand guidelines is now in beta, and will be rolling out generally in the coming months.

AI Image Editor In The Asset Library And In Performance Max

Retailers will soon be able to integrate products from their Google Merchant Feed into the image editor in Google Ads (in the U.S. to start).

Editing tools now include cropping, background removal, adjusting color, and removing or restoring aspect ratio. You’ll also be able to create more variations of your assets.

You’ll find the image editor when you create a new image from the Asset library in your Shared library under Tools.

Animated Image Ads For Shorts

Animated image ads in Shorts will be built automatically from the images in your account for a more Shorts-native feel.

For example, when you add your feed to Demand Gen, it will be able to pull product images together and animate them into one ad.

Shopping Ads: 3D Spin & Try on

With 3D Spin, you’ll be able to show 360-degree views of your products in Shopping ads. Shoes will be our first product available with 3D Spin.

You’ll need to have high-resolution images from at least five angles for the 3D view to be assembled. These can show in both Shopping ads and free listings. More details here.

Already available for apparel in free listings, try-on ads are launching with tops. Users can choose to see apparel in this category on models of all different sizes right from the ad.

You’ll need high-resolution images that are at least 512 x 512 pixels, but ideally 1024 pixels or higher. The image should feature one garment on one front-facing model or mannequin in a simple pose. More details here.

Ok, But Are “AI Ads” All Going To Look The Same?

If everyone uses AI, will ads all look the same? It’s a good question.

As we’ve covered, most of these tools use your own unique assets as their primary source to help steer Google AI.

That means, the more unique your landing pages, existing assets, and prompts are, the more that generated assets will uniquely reflect your business.

Hopefully, this primer will give you a clearer picture of what’s available, where these tools appear in your account – and where we’re headed with ad creatives capabilities – to help spark your creativity and ultimately improve campaign performance.

More resources: 

Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

Ad Strength Deep Dive: All Your Tough Ad Strength Questions Answered via @sejournal, @adsliaison

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Ad Strength in Google Ads, including debate about its value, how it works, whether it plays a role in the auction (it doesn’t), and how to think about it in your accounts.

Like almost everything in paid advertising, there’s nuance to Ad Strength. No, it’s not a perfect indicator of how your ads will perform nor do well-performing ads with lower Ad Strength mean it’s useless information.

And what’s up with Ad Strength decreasing with pinning? We’ll get into that, too.

What Is Ad Strength?

It’s first important to understand the fundamentals of Ad Strength and what it’s designed to reflect.

Ad Strength is a diagnostic tool developed with the introduction of responsive search ads (RSAs) to help advertisers understand how the diversity and relevancy of their creative assets can maximize the number of relevant ad combinations that may show for a query.

More ad combinations typically mean more opportunities to show relevant ads to more users.

Ad Strength has four ratings: Poor, Average, Good, or Excellent.

As you construct or edit your RSAs, you’ll see the Ad Strength rating adjust in real-time as you build out or edit your assets.

Having a variety of quality assets (e.g., ensuring your headlines aren’t repetitive) is not only helpful for the system to learn, but it also gives you the opportunity to serve relevant assets to subsets of searchers you may not have reached otherwise.

This is why you may see some assets perform well even though they have a relatively low number of impressions.

Why Does Google Ads Seem To Put So Much Emphasis On Ad Strength?

After years of building and testing static text ads, RSAs required a mindset shift in how to build, test, and optimize search ads.

The fundamentals of what makes a good ad haven’t changed, but the mechanics have.

Responsive search ads use AI to test and learn which assets and ad combinations perform best for each query.

Ad Strength was developed to give advertisers a tool to understand which attributes have been shown to correlate with the increased performance of RSAs.

You may have seen the stat that advertisers who improve Ad Strength for their responsive search ads from “Poor” to “Excellent” see 12% more conversions on average.

That’s a look across search campaigns globally, and of course, your actual performance improvements may vary from that average. However, it’s a statistically significant indication that Ad Strength can be a useful tool to consider as you build out and test your ads.

What Does Ad Strength Look At?

Ad Strength looks at four categories that have been shown to result in better performance through Google regression analyses (holdback experiments).

The categories Ad Strength looks at are:

• Number of headlines.
• Keyword relevance of headlines and descriptions.
• Uniqueness of headlines.
• Uniqueness of description lines.

The score reflects the variety and relevancy of your assets. Rating-to-rating improvements are expected to result in increased performance based on the factors we’ve seen lead to improvement.

Note that Ad Strength also now takes automatically created assets into account if enabled in your campaign.

We’ve also introduced the Ad Strength concept to Performance Max campaigns. More on that in a bit.

Is Ad Strength A Factor In The Auction?

This is probably the biggest misconception I hear about Ad Strength. No, Ad Strength is not a factor in the auction.

Ad Strength is a feedback mechanism for your creative assets. It is meant to be used as a helpful guide to improve the effectiveness of your ads. It is not used directly in the auction.

Ad Strength has no effect on bidding or the ability of your ads to enter the auction.

To quote directly from the “About Ad Strength” article in the Help Center:

“The Ad Strength rating of an ad doesn’t directly influence your ad’s serving eligibility.

Instead, the Ad Strength rating identifies opportunities (during the ad creation or editing stage) to improve your ads to optimize their performance.”

Does A Low Ad Strength Rating Limit My Impressions Or Prevent My Ads From Serving?

A low Ad Strength could explain a lack of impressions because it indicates that your ads likely don’t have the asset diversity or relevancy to be eligible for many auctions, and your ads are not resonating with users.

However, a low Ad Strength does not prevent ads from entering into auctions. Ad Strength is not a factor in the auction. In other words, the system doesn’t “hold back” or “promote” ads based on Ad Strength.

Ad Strength is a forward-looking tool that reflects whether you’re maximizing the number of high-quality, relevant ad combinations your ad can serve.

Is Ad Strength Related To Quality Score Or Ad Rank?

No.

The Quality Score that is shown in your account is a separate (and older) diagnostic tool that looks at expected ad click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.

It’s worth noting that Quality Score is also not used in the auction. Keywords are given a Quality Score based on historical impressions for exact searches of the keyword.

Quality Score reflects some of the values in Ad Rank, which determines whether your ad is eligible to show and where your ad is ranked relative to other eligible advertisers’ ads.

Ad Strength is not used in Ad Rank.

Further, bidding plays no role in Ad Strength.

Why Does Pinning Change My Ad Strength Rating?

We know pinning can be necessary and valuable, but it restricts the number of ad combinations that can be matched to a query.

That’s why you’ll see an impact on the Ad Strength when you use pinning. A lower Ad Strength score shouldn’t stop you from pinning when needed or helpful.

It’s also why we recommend pinning two or three headlines or descriptions to each position when possible to increase the number of combinations available. We know many advertisers find this to be a successful strategy.

What Should I Do If I See A Low Ad Strength Notification?

When you’re creating new ads, you’ll see Ad Strength suggestions based on the categories covered above.

Are these recommendations hard and fast rules? No. Like any best practice, they’re recommended starting points based on observed past performance.

A low Ad Strength notice indicates that your ads may have limited impression opportunities based on the number, diversity, and relevancy of the assets you’ve provided.

Again, though, a low Ad Strength won’t prevent your ads from entering auctions.

And, yes, you may see ads with lower Ad Strength perform well and meet your targets.

However, there may still be opportunities to remove low-rated assets and test new ones, or to add new assets that could appeal to subsets of your target audiences, for example.

Does High Ad Strength Guarantee Strong Performance?

Across campaigns globally, we see better performance on average when there is at least one ad with Good or Excellent Ad Strength in each ad group.

However, Good or Excellent Ad Strength doesn’t necessarily guarantee your ad will meet your performance expectations.

Regardless of your Ad Strength rating, you should continue to evaluate the performance of your ads and assets and continue testing and optimizing.

What Is Ad Strength In Performance Max & Demand Gen?

Ad Strength was introduced in Performance Max in February. In Performance Max, Ad Strength reflects the quantity and variety of assets that can serve across Google channels, not just search.

For example, Poor Ad Strength in Performance Max reflects that an asset group doesn’t have the breadth of assets to serve on all available inventory formats – and an Excellent Ad Strength reflects that you’ve included all asset types and have a diverse variety of text and other assets.

You can read more about the Performance Max asset recommendations for text, images, videos, and more in the Help Center here.

Similarly, Ad Strength is also available in Demand Gen campaigns. In this Help Center article, you’ll find Ad Strength guidelines for the various ad formats supported in Demand Gen, including single image, dynamic, carousel, and video.

How Should I Use Ad Strength?

To put it all together, Ad Strength is a feedback mechanism for creative content and meant to be used as a helpful guide to improve the effectiveness of your ads.

Ad Strength is a tool. It isn’t a key performance indicator (KPI). It isn’t used in the auction. It shouldn’t inhibit your testing.

Use Ad Strength as a guide to understand what may help improve performance during ad creation and optimization.

The reason we recommend having at least one ad with Good or Excellent Ad Strength per ad group is because that’s what has been shown to increase conversion performance on average.

To dive in even deeper, I recommend checking out the Responsive Search Ads technical guide. You’ll find more on Ad Strength on pages 5 and 6 of the guide.

More resources:

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