Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 58 - Responsive Search Ads
What makes a good Responsive search ad?
Is it the one with excellent Ad Strength?
One where the assets are rated good or best?
One with the highest CTR?
You know we're going to dive deep into this topic today.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 58: Responsive Search Ads.
Our first question comes from Zoha Naveed on LinkedIn, and they ask, is it compulsory to use keywords in my ad copy? I have a difficult time keeping up the Ad Strength without using keywords.
No, it's not compulsory to use keywords in your ad copy, but you definitely should.
Think about it from the user's perspective. Let's say I searched for “leakproof water bottle.” If the ad doesn't say leakproof water bottle somewhere, or at least water bottle, then why would I ever click on that ad?
The easiest way to ensure that your keywords are included in your ad copy is to use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. You can use this in your headlines, descriptions, even in your Display path. And importantly, so many people get this wrong, when you use Dynamic Keyword Insertion, it does not insert the user's search into your ad. It inserts your keyword that matched to the user's search into your ad. So only your keywords will ever actually show in the ad.
However, this means that if you're using Broad Match keywords, Dynamic Keyword Insertion may not be terribly useful to you. And if you're using competitors' brand names as keywords, I would caution you against using this. But otherwise, definitely test Dynamic Keyword Insertion as an easy way to ensure your keywords are included in your ad copy. Yes, it will also help you get a better Ad Strength.
One more tip on this topic. This is another reason you don't want too many keywords in an ad group. I was on a coaching call last week with a new client who had 800 keywords in a single ad group. Needless to say, they booked the call because they were not seeing good results. Their bigger issues actually turned out to be Search Partners and an overly restrictive target CPA, but I advised them as I'll advise you. Aim for 5 to 15 keywords per ad group to ensure that your ad text will be relevant to your keywords and therefore relevant to the user's search. Don't do this for the Ad Strength gains. Ad Strength is an arbitrary metric. Do this to provide a good user experience, improve your CTR, and get more relevant traffic to your website, which means more conversions.
If you want to learn how to set up a Responsive search ad like a pro, it's one of more than 100 tutorials included in my course, Inside Google Ads. You can join now at learn.jyll.ca. That's learn.jyll.ca or follow the link in the episode description.
Our second question today comes from Ezra Sackett on LinkedIn. And they say, I have never found solid Google documentation on what asset performance is looking at to give the grade. If it's based on objective, would a Max Conversions campaign use CVR and Max Clicks use CTR? Have you found clear documentation on what asset performance grades are using to give the rating?
This is a perennial problem. And I love that you asked this, Ezra, because I have investigated this very deeply. When Google tells you that one of your headlines or images or videos or whatever is best or good or low performing, what does it mean?
I actually spoke to a Google product manager about this recently, someone who specifically manages Responsive search ads. And their answer was, essentially… they don't know.
They obviously didn't say, “I don't know.” They gave their usual line about, “It depends on the campaign objective.”
And so, as Ezra pointed out in this question, I prompted, “a conversion based campaign would use conversions and a click based campaign would use clicks, right? That's how it works?”
And then I didn't get definitive confirmation. This product manager could not confirm that that's the way this works!
This is why my advice is to take the performance ratings with a grain of salt. Like Ad Strength, your performance ratings for your assets are a helpful tool, but they are not the be-all and end-all of how your ads are actually performing.
You're going to want to look at the conversions column to see what they've actually been driving value-wise for your business. And then the Combinations Report is helpful just to give you an idea of what combinations are showing most often and what those look like. But it doesn't mean that those are best performing according to whatever your definition is. It is best performing according to Google's amorphous, not quite defined, unknown definition of what that is.
Now for our third question today, I wanted to turn to someone I know who is an expert in many aspects of Google Ads, but especially in Responsive search ads. Boris Beceric is a Google Ads coach and specialist based in Germany, and he's here to share some of his top tips about what makes a great responsive search ad.
Boris: Thanks, Jyll.
So for this one, I think I'm going to whittle it down to two somewhat obvious tips and then one that's not so very obvious.
So the very obvious one is to craft headlines that contain a mixture of benefits and features and social proof, if you can. So try to make them as diverse as you can. Don't be repetitive, because otherwise you're going to end up with ad copy that sounds and reads like it's been written by AI. We don't want that. We want to appeal to real people searching for our products and services.
And now the second one may not be so straightforward. If we're looking at the keywords that we have in the ad group that we're writing the ad for, then it's important to align the number of assets with the available impressions that you have. So if we imagine writing ads for a local lead generation campaign, and we're having maybe 5,000 available impressions per 30 days, then it makes no sense to be stuffing the ad with 15 headlines and all 4 descriptions. Because what's going to happen? Google is just going to take forever to test all the possible combinations. We don't want that. We want to feed the machine diverse headlines with good calls to action, but we don't want to overwhelm it. Otherwise, testing is going to last forever and Google is not going to know which combination is going to perform really, really well for us.
And then the last one is a tip that you should align your ad with your keyword and with your landing page content. So for that, I would really urge you to write landing page headlines that maintain the ad relevance. So directly as the first visible element on your landing page, I think users should absolutely find one or more elements from your RSA.
These are my three most important tips I want to say.
Jyll: Thank you, Boris. Now, the second one you shared about aligning the available impressions to the number of assets, I love the way you phrase that because it's true. You don't want to have too many infinite combinations when there's not that much volume going through. So do you have any kind of guiding rules of thumb for how to think about whether you should only have 5 or 6 headlines or 10 headlines or 15? How should people think about that?
Boris: With up to 5,000 impressions per month, it’s probably fine to go with 5 to 8 headlines, max 2 to 3 descriptions. I want to say descriptions aren't all that important anymore. Of course you should put some decent effort into them and make them readable and make sense. But I think the headlines are where the meat and potatoes of your work should be. And then with your 5,000 to 15,000, 20,000, 25,000 impressions, then you're good to go with 12 headlines, I want to say, then everything above that - even above 50,000 impressions per 30 days, then you're good to go with all the 15 headline assets that you can write and all the four descriptions. As a reminder, please make sure to not repeat to make them diverse. If you can't write 15 headlines that are diverse and convincing, then don't write 15 headlines for the sake of writing 15 headlines.
Jyll: Thank you, Boris, for sharing your Responsive search ads tips with us.
Between Boris's advice and our earlier discussions about Dynamic Keyword Insertion and asset performance ratings, I hope we've busted some myths and given you some tantalizing tidbits to help you create better Responsive search ads.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. What calls to action would you test in your RSA for an ecommerce business? What are your best ecommerce CTA ideas?
The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real life Google Ads problem solving.
Last Episode's Challenge was this. Let's say you have a client. They operate in a tiny town. It doesn't even show up on your planning tools, it's so small. Let's say they don't agree to my recommendation to just target everyone in the town with a Demand Gen campaign. What do you suggest next? What's your Google Ads strategy for the small town business?
My answer to this challenge is that your client communication about that strategy is way more important than the content of the strategy or the results you actually get.
Running Google Ads on a small budget in a limited niche is running Google Ads on hard mode. So you need to figure out if all the juice is going to be worth the squeeze. And by that, I mean - setting up a bunch of Search campaigns with all kinds of Exact Match keywords and complicated Offline Conversion Tracking and all this stuff... It probably just won't be worth it. So at a minimum, we're probably going to have to use Maximize Clicks or really shallow micro-conversions in order to use Maximize Conversions. (If you need a refresher on micro-conversions, check out Episode 39 of this podcast from October 24th, 2024.)
If we're going for Search, yes, Exact Match, and probably just a handful of keywords. But even if they push back, I might still suggest my strategy of “let's just try to reach everybody.” They don't like Demand Gen, fine. Maybe we actually go the opposite direction from our Exact Match strategy and we go Broad and anything that anyone in this town is searching for vaguely related to our products or services. Yeah, let's go for it! Let's show an ad.
Again, I'm only recommending this if we're in such a small, small town, like 10,000 to 20,000 people, that it just doesn't make sense to try to be niche, because even for our, I don't know, $20 to $50 a day in ads, we can reach everyone in the town for that budget. So it's a rare circumstance to be in, but really important if you're operating at a super small budget or at a really large budget, the things you're concerned about change and the adjustments you might need to make to your strategy change.
It actually reminds me of a coaching client I was speaking to earlier this week. They normally operate with the kind of businesses that spend $200 to $300 a day, and they got this new client that wants to spend $3,000 a day. And so we spent a lot of our bi-weekly meeting talking about that, how usually we were so focused on ensuring we were laser targeted and not having any waste and exact matching, but with 10 times the budget, the focus is suddenly different. We have to ensure we spend it responsibly, but that normal laser focus strategy wouldn't work.
So with the relative budget level and opportunity size you're working with, that will dictate the kind of Google Ads strategy you're going to want to use. You have to be flexible, because what worked for one client over here is not necessarily what's going to work for this client over there.
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.