Article5 Ways To Improve Your Google Search Ad Creative
One of the most common complaints / points of frustration I hear from Google advertisers is that their search ads aren’t performing remotely close to their previous levels – CTRs & CVRs are down, CPCs are up, and transparency into actual ad appearance is at an all-time low.
The big question: what can you do about it?
To answer that, we’re going to break down the three primary issues I see with most Google accounts, then highlight five tactics we’ve used to improve the performance of our search ad creative.
Issue #1: Generic Copy
Here’s a painful truth: most RSAs are chock-full of headlines that say nothing – no differentiation, no emotion, no originality – just as many keywords crammed into 30 characters as your thesaurus (or ChatGPT) will allow, with the occasional “learn more” or “visit our website” to get people excited (spoiler alert: precisely no-one wants to learn more).
Issue #1’s closely-related (like West Virginia close) cousin is the “Copy-Pasta” RSAs, aka the ads someone has clearly copied-and-pasted into each ad group in a campaign (or worse, an account), with no customization, no effort to improve relevance to the targeted keywords/theme, nothing.
The easiest way to diagnose if this is impacting your ad account is to actually review your targeted SERPs. If you want to make it fun, print one out, use a sharpie to cover up the icons/advertiser names, and see if you can identify which ad is yours (or your client’s) based exclusively on the headlines/verbiage. This is often an eye-opening activity for brands (or agencies) who are convinced their ads are unique and differentiated.
Anyone who spends any time looking at SERPs will tell you that most are seas of sameness. This is the end state of web optimization: everyone looks and sounds exactly the same. The problem is that when everyone says exactly the same thing, most people immediately go for the brand they’ve heard of / know of – not because their ads are better, but because that’s the easiest point of differentiation.
Result: if you’re not the incumbent, household name brand, your CTR goes down and CPA goes up.
Issue #2: Wrong Ad Copy
The only thing worse than being generic is being flat-out wrong – whether it’s an incorrect discount code, a non-existent promotion/offer, or straight-up misinformation (we’ve seen classes advertised for the wrong days, car models advertised that were sold months ago, flights that no longer existed, rooms that were no longer available, services that the company didn’t even offer) you name it, I’ve probably seen it.
I understand how this happens – especially for larger accounts with hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands) of ads. It’s easy to miss one. Google doesn’t make it easy to view, manipulate or audit your ads, but agencies (and freelancers, and in-house people) aren’t paid to do easy things.
The truly insidious part about the “wrong” ad copy is that many times, these ads are higher performers because they say something different than what the user was expecting – of course you’re going to click on an ad touting a 20% off offer you thought expired months ago. Why not click on the ad promoting a service you thought a known brand discontinued years ago?
Of course, the conversion rates on those ads tend to be lower – and most users don’t appreciate what they perceive as false advertising. But the ad metrics themselves? Those tend to look pretty good. And Google is nothing if not a fan of playing the hits. Result: Google over indexes toward your “wrong” ad, resulting in more spend going to something that’s not real, possible or offered.
Issue #3: Untested / Blender Ads
The final – and most insidious – issue I see with most ads is what I’ve dubbed the “blender” creative: every message/point is thrown into every ad, regardless of the topic, keywords, audience profile, etc. – and Google is left to figure out which combination (out of 43,680 possibles) is right for a given user.
This is exactly what Google wants – and it’s often rewarded with a “good” or “excellent” ad strength score.
The problem is that there’s no way for you (the advertiser) to actually understand what’s driving the outcome (good or bad) – which makes troubleshooting near-impossible. In a very real sense, blender ads try to be all things to all searchers, and end up being nothing to everyone.
That’s not to say there isn’t a place for bigger-picture testing (there is!) – but an entire account (or campaign) should not be run on the “prayers up to Google” strategy. That’s a recipe for sadness.
So, knowing this, what should you do? How do you make better ads? I have five tactical recommendations:
1. Get To Know Your Audience + Speak Directly To Their Problems:
Most people want to be the star of their own show; they want ads that make their lives better from the click. To illustrate what I mean, consider two ads I was just served for “Emergency Plumber Near Me”:
Option 1:
Emergency Plumber Near You | 24/7 Baltimore Plumber | Call Roto Rooter Now
Option 2:
We’ll Be At Your Door in 30 | We Don’t Leave Until It’s Fixed | Call or Text Any Time
Which one are you more likely to click?
I’m guessing you’ve said Option 2 – and for good reason: it actually speaks to the user’s pain points and problems. Whoever wrote this clearly understood that anyone looking for an emergency plumber at 11 pm on a random Thursday evening is having themselves a night (and not in the good way) – and the last thing they want is to be waiting around, wondering if it’s going to get fixed or having to deal with an answering service / call center.
Solution?
Every one of those fears is allayed in the ad text. There’s no keyword stuffing, there’s no marketing fluff bullshit, there’s just an ad that speaks directly to the exact person querying the search. This is a perfect example of an ad that’s designed for the searcher, not the platform.
While this is a particularly extreme example, the pattern holds true across just about every industry: if you find yourself in a space where the vast majority of advertisers are using headlines like:
- #1 [Thing]
- The Best [Thing] for [Purpose]
- [X] Best [Things]
- [Keyword] by [Brand]
- #1 [Keyword] For [Industry]
You have a GOLDEN opportunity to do something better. The easiest way forward?
- Identify the pain points the searcher is trying to address (for example: exactly no-one wants project management software. Every business owner/executive, however, wants to ensure that nothing gets dropped / productivity doesn’t slip / their people are able to get done what they need to get done, without hassles, headaches or nonsense).
- Clearly define how your solution / product / gizmo enables this result better than anyone else.
- Articulate the end-state of using your product / service / gizmo (more profitable, happier, whatever).
- Say that.
It’s the simplest formula in the world. I wish more advertisers would follow it
2. Use Ad Customizers
Google Ad Customizers are the most under-utilized feature in the entire Google Ads platform. They are absolutely-freaking-wonderful. And no, we’re not talking (only) about the location or keyword insertion things. We’re talking about the OG customizers.
If you’re unfamiliar: an ad customizer (found under Business Data → Ad Customizers) is a variable that is set and can be inserted anywhere in an ad (headline, description, asset), but can be updated account-wide on a single screen.
Why does this matter?
Because if you’re the kind of advertiser who likes to highlight things like:
- Years in business
- Number of awards
- Number of 5* reviews
- Discounts
- Number of Products in Stock
- Collections/Model Years
- Number of employees
- Number of customers
- Delivery cutoff times
- Satisfaction Scores
- As Featured In
- Start Dates / End Dates
Ad customizers will change your life. With customizers, the days of manually updating every ad in your account to the latest-and-greatest are over. With a single change, every ad that uses a given customizer is updated to the new value. It’s magical.
This can be taken a step farther, too – you can create Ad Customizer lookup tables, which (effectively) allows dozens, hundreds, even thousands of campaign/ad group combinations to be consolidated down to a handful (or less) while maintaining or improving ad relevance due to the customizers.
Given Google’s inexorable march toward automation, this is the absolute best of both worlds: granular control over specific elements of an ad and hyper-consolidation that increases the flow of data by orders of magnitude.
Here’s an example:
In the above ad, everything highlighted in Green is actually generated by a customizer, which is powered by a shopping feed. The result? Each element is updated in near-real-time, so every ad is both correct AND maximally relevant to the searcher. For something like this particular shoe store example, instead of running 600+ ad groups across one or more campaigns that highlight brands, product style, discounts, and inventory, you can run one (or maybe a few more if you want to be an overachiever). This is a gamechanger.
3. Get Aggressive
There’s an endemic among advertisers today: no-one wants to go negative. There’s a palpable fear of directly attacking a competitor; most of the time, I hear that customers don’t like brands that attack other brands, or that going negative will open the brand up to attacks, or that legal (everyone’s favorite scapegoat) isn’t comfortable with [whatever].
Here’s the thing: who cares?
If sitting nicely and politely alongside your competitors on the SERP isn’t getting you the attention that you want, it’s time to take a page out of the 3 year old’s operating manual: cause some chaos. Be bold. Be aggressive. Demand attention.
I can’t recall how many meetings I’ve sat in with CEOs, CMOs and other executives, listening to them bemoan how their target audience doesn’t understand the value of their product/service, doesn’t “get” it, or is actively harming their own interests by using a competitor. I can only tell you it’s been too many.
My default response in these situations is a single question: “Have you told them?”
When the blustering and faux-offense dies down, the answer is usually, “Well, not exactly, but they should know and see from our [yadda yadda yadda]…”
It’s a hell of a lot easier to just say you’re better (+ why). In plain language. When your target audience is looking for answers.
Remember: your audience knows far less about your product/service than you do; they’re just looking for something to make their life better, easier, more efficient, whatever. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they most certainly don’t know the location of your competition’s dirty laundry.
So, help them find it. Be aggressive. Attack.
Yes, one or two of those competitors will probably (eventually) take notice, and they might fire back in a few weeks or months (whenever they can get legal to approve it). But, while they’re figuring out the right way to respond to your aggressive ad, you’ll be winning additional customers/clients.
Everyone loves you when you win.
4. Test RSAs Using Variants
Most advertisers who are doing some kind of ad copy testing are doing it wrong. In most accounts, I see one of two setups:
- Multiple RSAs in Ad
- Group Experiments
Neither produces the kind of rigorous, systematized improvement that you want from an ad copy testing program. These setups give the illusion of rigor, which is often more dangerous.
If you’re unfamiliar, Ad Variations aka Variants (located in Experiments → Ad Variations) are a wonderfully powerful feature inside Google Ads that allows you to dynamically substitute one ad element (headline, description, final URL, etc.) for another in RSAs.
The advantages of this are twofold: (1) you have actual control over the asset served (in an experiment, there’s no guarantee a test headline will ever serve, for instance) and (2) you get actual data back on the incremental performance of the test vs. the control.
If your goal is to test specific assets (headlines, descriptions, landers), you should be using Variants. You can read more about my approach to it here.
5. Use Labels & Notes
Last – and certainly not least – are Labels + Notes. Two features that are chronically under-used by most PPCers, but which can provide INCREDIBLE insights over time.
Labels can be added at most levels of Google Ads (Campaign, Ad Group, keyword, Ad), and enable you to filter, sort, modify or aggregate data from all other elements at the same level sharing that label. For ad copy, labeling each RSA (“competitor” or “ETA” or “pinned” or “unpinned” or “Bold Claim”) can allow you to surface campaign or account-wide insights on the performance of those asset types that would otherwise be immensely difficult to obtain.
Labels are also incredible for any kind of automation (script or API-based), as you can target campaign elements using a specific label for an automation, rule or modification.
Better ad creative starts with understanding what’s working. A well-designed, properly-implemented label system will unlock entire new levels of insight in a fraction of the time any other analysis might take.
Notes are exactly what they sound like: notes made on the account. As you’re doing ad creative updates, note what changes were pushed, and when – so that as you see changes in ad performance, you’re not forced to review change logs just to understand what’s going on.
Avoid those three issues, and implement the five tactics above, and you’ll be well on your way to better performing, higher-converting search ad copy.
Until next week, enjoy that summer sun!
Cheers,
Sam
