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Google Ads Poll: Do You Pin Your Headlines And Does It Work Or Not?
Sometimes, you want to show headlines in a specific order, yet if you pin them, Google punishes you with a lower ad quality rating, and who knows, you might lose performance somewhere. Is it better to let Google handle it or to pin one’s headlines?
The team at Ultragranular
[View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/18cb9tu)
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1 Reply
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I pin just the first part, because i want my brand name to be placed first. the rest is up to google. i did not noticed any peformance issue because of it
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I only pin when the client requires it (“FDIC Insured” for a bank), but ad score is much better when you don’t pin. Also Google only guarantees the first 2 pins will actually be shown first: “Content pinned to Headline position 3 and Description position 2 are not guaranteed to show in every ad.” [Link to Google support article](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9438230?hl=en#zippy=%2Ctips-for-pinning).
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I posted this in similar thread a few weeks back. However, it seems extremely relevant, so I’ll repost it again here…
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It’s important to note that RSA ad strength is quite deceiving and has no bearing on quality score or ad positioning. Contrary to what the Google reps will tell you, it’s just an arbitrary grading scale that means nothing in practice.
[https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9921843?sjid=16404457445863181499-NC](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9921843?sjid=16404457445863181499-NC)
Under the ‘Best Practice’ section of that page: “***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.”*
Before I discovered this, I was constantly chasing “Good” or “Excellent” ad strength ratings. But it always resulted in ads that would appear with less-than-ideal readability and lower performance, as a result.
Now I ignore ad strength completely, sticking to just 3 headlines and 2 descriptions, mostly pinned to specific positioning. Since adopting this approach and taking back control of my ad messaging, CTR’s are higher and CPCs are lower, as I suspect quality scores actually improved. Impr/click share metrics haven’t declined, either. Which is the big indication that Google isn’t penalizing me for not following their RSA score guidelines.
Come to think of it, across my client accounts, all of which are spending $300k+/month, I don’t believe I have a single RSA that doesn’t currently have a “Poor” RSA ad score. Yet performance has never been better and nearly all of my search campaigns are experiencing significant year over year conversion/ROAS improvements.
You can easily test this yourself. In the same ad group, create one ad with a “Good” or “Excellent” ad strength score and one with more hyper-focused messaging and fewer headlines/descriptions, resulting in a “Poor” ad strength score. Make sure to set “Ad Rotation” to “Rotate Indefinitely” at the campaign level or for that particular ad group.
Run those two ads side by side for a couple weeks. At the ad level, monitor Impr. Top %, CTR’s and CPC’s. At the ad group level you can also monitor Impr. Share and Click Share, to see if those metrics increase or decrease during the test. So long as your hyper-focused ad is still relevant to the keyword targeting of that ad group and reads well, I’m willing to bet that is going to be your winner.
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