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New Ad Strength Scores for Google’s Responsive Search Ads

Back in July we reported on the new Responsive Search Ads format introduced in Google Ads, which enables advertisers to use Google’s machine learning to generate relevant ads at scale, with multiple headlines and descriptions that are tested in combination to produce the best performing ad formats. A new Ad Strength tool will help this process.

Now when you create new responsive search ads for your adgroups, you’ll see an ‘ad strength’ score, both when you write a responsive search ad and as a column in Google Ads. Ranging from “Poor” to “Excellent,” this metric measures the relevance, quantity and diversity of your ad copy. Combined with actionable feedback, ad strength makes it easy for you to improve the effectiveness of your ads.

Ad strength will be available as a column and has begun rolling out across Google Ads account. It will also appear in the responsive search ad creation interface over the next month with the score and suggestions, such as adding more headlines or making them more unique. Support for responsive display ads will follow in the coming months.

To get started with ad strength, Google recommends providing as many distinct headlines, descriptions and other assets as possible. This will help Google’s machine learning generate a larger number of relevant, effective ad combinations.

It can be a challenge to create multiple ad messages but Google provides the ad strength tool as well as a preview of the different ad combinations as you build them, so that you can see what your ads might look like and you can browse through them to double-check your work. You can also view reporting for headlines, descriptions, and top combinations to help you see what’s showing up most often on the search results page.

For a responsive search ad, Google advises that if you’re having trouble coming up with lots of different options, then focus on creating at least five headlines. For a responsive display ad, they suggest providing up to 15 images and five logos, headlines, and descriptions per ad.

Once the responsive search ads have been set up, the combinations of headlines and descriptions will be used by Google to display to searchers, and the more impressions and clicks that an adgroup achieves, the more ad variants will be shown and the better performing combinations will be identified sooner.

If you’d like to know more about these new ad formats and how to best set them up in your Google Ads account, please get in touch.