Increase Conversions By Using Responsive Search Ads

Today, Google officially announced that Responsive Search Ads (RSA) will become the default ad type for Search campaigns in Google Ads, but the expanded text ads can also be created. Google said that due to COVID-19, search queries like “takeout restaurants” have grown over 5000%, and meanwhile searches for “online learning” have grown over 400%2 in the last year.

What Are Responsive Search Ads?

Responsive Search Ads are Google’s newest, largest, and most flexible search ad format. Unlike traditional search ads, where you write your headlines and descriptions together to create 1 static ad text, when writing a Responsive Search Ad you can write up to 15 different headlines and up to 4 different descriptions. Collectively, those headlines and descriptions can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations, which means the ad testing possibilities are nearly endless!

RSAs allow advertisers to input multiple headlines and ad copy variations, and Google Ads uses machine learning to determine which variations to use based on what queries people are searching for. The variations are tested to determine which combinations perform best. The Ad strength score lets search marketers understand how to improve their RSAs for better performance.

Google recommends that advertisers not using RSAs currently consider the following best practices:

• Use Ad strength when writing your headlines and descriptions to understand the effectiveness of your ads.
  Take advantage of location insertion and countdown customizers to show ads that are relevant and meaningful to your customers.
• Use Smart Bidding and broad match keywords with responsive search ads to help optimize the performance of your ads while maximizing your reach.
• Review cross-campaign asset reporting to understand which creative assets resonate most with your customers.

How Responsive Search Ads Works?

The more headlines and descriptions you enter, the more opportunities Google has to serve ads that more closely match your potential customers’ search queries, which can improve your ad performance. After you enter headlines and descriptions, the RSAs assembles the text into multiple ad combinations in a way that avoids redundancy, different from expanded text ads.

Next, in any given ad, a maximum of 3 headlines and 2 descriptions will be selected to show in different combinations and orders. Over time, Google Ads will test the most promising ad combinations, and learn which combinations are the most relevant for different queries.

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