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Responsive Search Ads

Improving Ads Using Responsive Search Ads

One of the tasks for us as a digital marketing agency is improving our clients quality scores within PPC. To improve your quality score (QS), you’ll need to understand the individual factors influencing it.

One of these factors is click-through rate (CTR) – generally the higher the CTR, the better the QS. We achieve a high CTR by increasing our ad text relevance to a search term. plus refining ad text through regularly writing and testing new ads. Google has made simplified the ad testing process through responsive search ads. We will explain what we mean by this below:

What Are Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive search ads simplify the creation and management of search ads. With more than 3.5 billion searches each day, they make it easier to serve relevant ads to each user search query. They are Googles most flexible search ad format.

You are able to enter up to 15 distinct headlines and up to 4 separate description lines, which will enable Google to pick the most relevant combination – meaning we are given the best possible chance of winning the search auction.

What Are The Key Benefits Of Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive search ads have three main key pros which we benefit from here at Summon. This includes improved time management, flexibility and a remaining sense of control. We will expand more on this below:

1. They’re Time-Saving

Writing three different ads for Google Ads to test and show the most relevant ad can be very time-consuming. With responsive search ads, we only need to create 1 ad with several variations of headlines and descriptions. Google ads can then test these for us and serve the most relevant messages to our target audience.

2. They Offer Flexibility

Depending on your industry, target audience and your digital marketing aims – you’ll benefit from targeting searches on different devices (desktops, mobiles and tablets). It’s really important to alter ads depending on your targeted device – you don’t want to miss out on a potential conversion because of an ad being displayed incorrectly or partially. Responsive search ads are flexible and can easily adapt to different device widths while giving you more room to share your message with your potential customers.

3. You’ll Have More Control

Responsive search ads give us the right amount of control when it comes to our digital campaigns. We still get to provide all the headlines and description lines and can determine the structure of our ads. By default, headlines and descriptions can appear in any given order when you create a responsive search ad. However, you remain control as you have the option to pin headlines and descriptions to a specific position.

4. Improved Ad Performance

Responsive search ads help to improve PPC ads by allowing them to compete in more auctions and match more user searches. Ad groups with responsive search ads have been known to have a 5 to 15% higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to ad groups with no responsive ads! This isn’t a surprising statistic, because more relevant and tested ads should drive more impression and clicks for a specific ad group.

The below image shows the different ad combination that is possible when we provide 3 to 15 headlines and 2 to 4 description lines. As you can see, it mixes and matches the different variations of headlines and description lines – meaning your ad will have an increased chance to match more queries.

How do responsive search ads work and what is required from us?

There are some different steps required to set up responsive ads – but it is generally a straightforward process. You’ll firstly need to provide text assets and allow Google machine learning to combine these.

Enter the Texts Assets

You provide a minimum of 3 but up to 15 headlines, allowing 30 characters each; a minimum of 2 but up to 4 description lines, allowing 90 characters each; and 1 final URL.

The Text Assets Combined By Google Machine Learning

After we provide our text assets, Google machine learning creates the best ad tailored for a specific search through a combination of these. These ads are then optimised for performance.

This ad format makes it very easy and time-saving for us to create more ads per ad groups, by giving us the ability to add more text assets at any point in time. We’re able to suitable make changes and improvements to our pre-existing ads.

Write A Unique Text Assets Per Line

We enter different messages in each ad line because as we mentioned earlier, Google’s systems decide on how to mix and match the text assets. It’s good to make each line use a different method or theme, we can then ensure similar lines are not combined and we are not creating a repetitive or boring ad.

Add Keywords In Your Text Assets

The relevance of keywords to ad copy is also an important factor when writing responsive search ads. It is crucial to create a variation of keywords in each ad line to gain the best possible chance to win ad auctions. If you’re not sure where to start, you can read more about keywords in PPC here.

Use The Pining Function

For our clients who want to keep a specific messaging in their ad copy, we have the option to keep their headlines and descriptions at a set position. We touched on this earlier – the pining function available on Google Ads is a great way to maintain control. It is possible to either pin only one headline or description to a specific position or to pin several, allowing more flexible dynamic matching.

Ad Strength Indicator In RSAs

After serving Google with our text asset, we can optimise our ads by following the suggestions given by Google ad strength indicator. This indicator measures the ad copy diversity, quality as well as its relevance to provide recommendations that could be as straightforward as adding new headlines. Simple but effective changes can make a huge difference in terms of reaching out to your target customers. The index scores responsive search ads from poor to excellent.

Get in touch

If you have any questions for our London digital agency, please feel free to get in touch.