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Does anyone know why pinning headlines in certain positions harms ad strength so much? Seems like having {KeyWord:X} pinned in the first position would make perfect sense.
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1 Reply
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Google wants to rotate all headlines and descriptions in RSAs in order to find the best combination that users will engage with the most often. Pinning anything handicaps their ability to do this, so they consider it less strong of an ad.
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It is silly. You can’t have even put your own brand in the first position, if you are bidding on the most relevant service.
Bid on “Florists near me”
Pin “Amanda’s flowers” in position 1, and you get penalized.
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Not Ad Strength is not always accurate. Pin it, wait for Google to approve your ad and once approved, you might see a higher strength score than the one prior to being submitted.
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As others have said, Google is able to maximize reach if you don’t use pins, but this extra reach comes at the cost of ad specificity. Do a test: run excellent strength ads against ads that make intuitive sense based on what you know about your brand, products, and ideal consumers.
I’ve found that achieving excellent ad strength is detrimental to CPA, and although clicks and impressions increase greatly, a lot of the new clicks are junk.
Don’t pursue google’s approval, pursue results!
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Don’t worry that much about ad strength. Google is interested in data for Google’s sake and not yours or mine.
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It’s been proven by Brad Geddes that ad Strength is a vanity metric that is really just a score of how AI friendly your ads are and have no impact on ad performance or quality score.
The idea is that the more variation you give the AI, the more options it has to make your ads relevant to the weird ass keywords they want you to spend money on.
It’s simple: if you pin or limit headline/description options, your strength will be low. Your actual performance will probably be better.
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If you pin multiple headlines to the #1 position you can bring ad strength back up. 3-4 headlines seems to be the sweet spot. Doesn’t always work, but often does for me.
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Ad strength isn’t a measurement of your ads potential success, it’s a measure of meeting Google’s best practices for optimal performance, which includes the # of ad variations. You pinning reduces the number of variations.
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Ad strength partly impacts your ability to win auctions. It is documented by Google: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en
If your ads are excellent, and all other things are equal (noted this is a big if), you will win more auctions than an advertiser with poor or average ads.
That’s my interpretation of it, and it’s also anecdotally true in my experience (I used to pin words in all our ads and noticed a big improvement when I got all our ads excellent in quality score).
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Ad strength is a Google metric and isnt a realistic estimate on how your ads will perform. The reason it drops is because pinning headlines goes against Googles ideas of the right way to do things. You can still get a good ad strength with pinned headlines, but you need multiple pinned for each and variations.
Pinning gives you more control over the message and we’ve seen higher performance with pinned headlines over fully unpinned. You can replicate the old ETA ads in RSAs by pinning 1 or 2 headlines in each position. Review the actual ads Google puts together with unpinned and see if they really present your business well. A lot of times it reads horrible or has repetitive headlines or descriptions.
Also since they only show which of their ads got the most impressions and not which combination converted the best, they lose credibility with their ideas of the right way to do things.
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Pinning headlines in certain positions can harm ad strength because it can make the ad appear repetitive or irrelevant, which can decrease engagement and lead to lower ad placement and higher costs per click. Over-optimizing for a specific keyword can also harm ad relevance and performance. It’s best to focus on creating high-quality ads that appeal to your target audience.
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Pinning limits the ability of algorithms to spend(most times burn money on irrelevant keywords) hence the score decreases, as it is incentivised for you to spend rather than on results
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Don’t even bother looking at the ad strength
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Ignore Ad strength. Just look at Quality score.
I only used pinned headlines and descriptions. -
Ad strength is not a measure of potential performance. It’s strictly for indicating (a) the potential number of ad combinations, (b) the variety of ad copy, (c) relevance (matching) to keywords in the ad group.
If you add all possible copies without pinning Google “should” test hundreds of thousands of combinations. But it doesn’t, it will run 2-3 headlines and 1-2 descriptions 90%+ of the time based on your keywords. Often those headlines say the same thing 2-3x which is really bad.
This many benefits Google to maximize the number of impressions your ad can serve for. That’s valuable for advertisers, but only to a point, i.e. when the queries are relevant to what you offer.
So really you shouldn’t worry about ad strength much. The tool is really designed for new users.
Instead, focus on writing great copy. At my agency, we bucket copy into three types and then pin those into positions.
This way Google is forced to test more variations and to avoid duplicating the same benefit, offer, or value prop more than once. Every single ad that Google cranks out makes perfect sense to the reader and hits them with a primary offer, secondary feature/benefit, and call to action (when 3rd headline is running).
[https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/guide-to-optimizing-rsas/](https://www.tenthousandfootview.com/guide-to-optimizing-rsas/)
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