Why you shouldn't worry about ad strength for Google Ads

If you’re a PPC advertiser, you’re certainly no stranger to scores in your ads account, for example,?quality score?or optimization score. With?Responsive Search Ads?(RSAs) replacing Expanded Text Ads, advertisers are now increasingly exposed to a new type of score called Ad Strength.

In this post, I’ll explain what the Responsive Search Ads ad strength is, how much it matters, and how it compares to the other optimization scores that have been around longer.

What is Ad Strength?

Google defines Ad Strength as follows:

Ad Strength provides you with feedback to help you focus on providing the right messages to your customers. It shows how well an ad creative follows the best practices for optimal performance, ranging from “Incomplete”, “Poor”, “Average”, “Good”, to “Excellent”.

It is the newest type of score advertisers see in their accounts associated with Responsive Search Ads.

Does Ad Strength matter?

Google states this is a best practice score intended to?make a great first impression. This is an important choice of words and means it’s not learning from your actual performance. And while a good first impression matters, long-term results matter even more.

Ad strength uses a machine learning model that looks at which ad attributes tend to correspond to good outcomes for an advertiser. For example, will an advertiser who has 10 different variations of a headline perform better than a similar advertiser who has 15 different variations of the same headline?

Do ads that include the primary keyword of an ad group tend to have better performance than ads that do not include the same keyword?

Will ads with too many redundant phrases perform worse than those without redundancy?

These are super helpful insights to get things started, and we can all learn something from history’s lessons.

However, once you’ve got a good baseline ad, forget ad strength because while it reflects what has worked well for the masses in the past, it doesn’t care about what works for you. An advertiser whose ad with ‘poor’ ad strength starts to perform very well will still be labeled as ‘poor’.

Let me say that again. Ad strength does not change based on your performance!

Hence it’s possible that advertisers with fantastic conversion rates, low CPAs, and tons of profits could have poor ad strength. They’re not following the general wisdom, but they’re still successful. To think differently is not rewarded by this model.

So if you’re an experienced marketer, there’s nothing wrong with creating an ad that you think will perform really well, even if it has poor ad strength according to Google’s predictions.

What matters much more, in that case, is close monitoring and methodical experimentation to make sure that the actual performance is reflective of what you believe the ad can achieve.

Does Poor Ad Strength Impact Ad Serving?

While you may agree with me so far, ignoring ad strength could be a bad idea if doing so impacts how often your ads will serve, so read on to learn how ad strength impacts ad serving...