About Ad Strength for responsive search ads

Ad strength provides you with feedback to help you focus on providing the right messages to your customers. Ranging from 'Incomplete', 'Poor', 'Average', 'Good' to 'Excellent', ad strength is a tool designed to help you optimise the performance of your ad. A higher ad strength will maximise the performance of your ad. Ad strength has two components: the overall rating that indicates the effectiveness of a relevant ad, and the specific action item(s) that can improve the strength of the ad.

The 'Ad strength' column

In the page menu on the left, you can click Campaigns , then click Ads to display a table of that campaign’s ads. The 'Ad strength' column in the table shows an ad's ad strength rating such as 'Average' or 'Excellent'. You can click on this rating to view feedback on improving your ad along with a link to where you can make that change. If the 'Ad strength column isn't pre-populated in your account, click the Columns icon above the campaign's table, open the 'Attributes' folder, check ad strength and click Apply.

During ad creation

While creating or editing an ad, you will be able to view an indicator of your ad strength. You should follow the descriptive call to action recommendations to improve your ad strength. Your ad’s strength rating and action items will change dynamically as you fill out your ad’s assets.

Below are the common call to action recommendations to improve Ad Strength:

• Add more headlines or descriptions for better performance: You can provide up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, so make sure to provide as many as you can. You can maximise the number of ad combinations by providing the maximum number of headlines and descriptions. Asset suggestions are displayed in the ad creation process to help you write high-performing headlines and descriptions. You can accept the suggestions as is, edit them or use them as inspiration.
• Add unique headlines and descriptions: Ensure that your headlines and descriptions are different. Describe what you’re selling and your unique selling points that may appeal to different customers that you’re trying to attract. Adding unique headlines and descriptions increases the number of combinations that can be generated to maximise the performance of your ads. Try to avoid adding repetitive words, phrases, or ideas.
• Unpinning some assets: Pinning reduces the overall number of headlines or descriptions that can be shown. Therefore, the less you pin, the more combinations you can create. If you must use pinning, consider having multiple unique assets pinned to the same position.
• Include more keywords in your headlines or descriptions: Try including text from your keywords within your headlines and descriptions. Your ad group’s popular keywords are shown in the ad creation process to assist you in creating relevant headlines and descriptions. You can also use keyword Insertion to improve your ad’s relevance.

Ad strength helps you make the best first impression

For instance, if you're creating a responsive search ad and the text 'Make your description more unique' appears next to the indicator representing your ad’s strength, you can go back to your description and modify it to dynamically improve the effectiveness of the ad. If neither the indicator nor the text change, you're recommended to revise further.

Ad strength continues to help improve your ads even after the ad has been created and started showing. For instance, you might bulk upload a batch of new responsive search ads and the headlines could be redundant for some of them. In the 'Ad strength' column, you may notice an 'Average' rating, with the specific action 'Increase the length of the headline'. You can leverage that feedback and follow the necessary steps to modify your headline and improve the strength of your ad.

Even after you have reached good or excellent ad strength, it's still important to track it as ad strength could change over time according to factors, such as keyword relevance.

Common issues

Here are some common issues that result in incomplete Ad Strength:

1. Final URL is missing: Add a final URL to your ad.
2. Missing ad group: Assign your ad to an ad group.
3. Missing keywords in ad group: Add keywords to your ad group. Your responsive search ad won’t serve without keywords.

FAQs

How does ad strength take automatically created assets into consideration?

For campaigns where automatically created assets are enabled, ad strength will consider both the assets you’ve provided, as well as the assets that have been automatically created when calculating rating and action items. When creating a new campaign or responsive search ad, ad strength is calculated only using the asset you provide, as automatically created assets haven't been generated yet. As soon as automatically created assets are generated, ad strength will update.

*Source: Google internal data. Date range: 28 February 2023 to 1 March 2023