There are two purposes of an ad:
Get people to click
Get people to take a desired action
Google ads messaging and creative are becoming more and more important in the overall Google Ads ecosystem. More has changed on this front since the start of 2019 than in the 10 years prior.
Ad changes
Expanded text ads or ETAs had included a headline 1, headline 2 and description line for years, and now there is a 3rd headline and 2nd description line, but they don’t all show every time, so we need to think about how to best represent our product or service with the new copy pieces and a little dash of uncertainty. Headline 3 does not show up as much as we would normally like, but both description lines typically show.
Google Ads also introduced responsive search ads or RSAs, where you can include up to 15 ad headlines and 4 description lines, then Google uses its machine learning to determine which ad to show to the end user. We tend to see improvements in click through performance but not always in conversion behavior with RSAs, but they tend to offer a great way to see improvements on long tail search terms that come through on Beta or Gamma campaigns. RSAs also allow for you to see which combinations Google is showing most frequently, which means which combinations it is associating the highest quality score for your selected terms.
Generally speaking, we see the best performance from optimizing our headline 1 to be as closely related to our keyword as possible. We can do this one of two ways, we can edit the headline 1 manually to make it sound more natural or include the keyword as directly as possible using dynamic keyword insertion or DKI. Our approach is to test out each at launch, and to include RSAs to get an idea for what types of messaging we should be including in ETAs.
Our launch formula is as follows:
Ad concept 1 with DKI
Ad concept 1 with manually optimized headline 1
Ad concept 2 with DKI
Ad concept 2 with manually optimized headline 1
Responsive search ads with elements not included in Ad Concept 1 or 2
