Long before AI was a buzzword, Google has been trending towards automation within Google Ads. While their advancements in bidding automation have driven performance and saved search marketers a lot of time by not having to manually adjust bids and budgets every day, I think a lot of these changes have led to a degradation of Google Ads as a media vendor platform.
You see this in their recommendations section, campaign types like Demand Gen and Performance Max, the incessant pushing of broad match keywords, and their dynamic creative and ad groups.
Google is favoring ease of use over control and utility. This makes Google more accessible to people who may not be seasoned marketers and ultimately leads to more ad spend for Google (as well as paying less Google support reps). It’s nice that small business owners, new marketers, and other business stakeholders can run a campaign that drives results with a few clicks of a button, but this oversimplification of advertising is something that all marketers should carry a healthy skepticism about.
This topic is a big one, so I just want to focus on one little corner of it – Ad Strength.
Maybe it’s my innate desire for more human voices as we, a little carelessly, barrel towards the age of AI, but this is a Google Ads feature that I have fought against more over the past year despite being around for quite a while.
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> Does a Better Ad Strength = Better Performance?
What is Ad Strength?
Ad Strength is Google’s in-platform scoring metric that tells you how effective or relevant your ad is as you’re building ad copy. As you’re building out your ad, Google will provide tips to improve Ad Strength such as “try adding more headlines” or “make your descriptions more unique” – All of which sound good theoretically, but very quickly you’ll see how much of a facade this feature is, and how much it’s really trying to push you to let Google decide for you, more than it’s trying to make the best ad.
Google's support page says this:
“Ad Strength has 2 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”
That doesn’t really give us much to work with, so let’s dive into what it looks like in Google Ads.
Is Ad Strength Accurate?
Let’s look at an example of what I mean. Just to really emphasize my point, I’ll show you an extreme version of how this tool shouldn’t be taken literally.
Here’s an ad for a personal loan service:
Google says this is a poor ad; I only put in 3 headlines and 2 descriptions (the minimum) so it wants more headlines and descriptions with more variety in order to get the most out of Responsive Search Ads.
However, here’s why I think this is a pretty good ad:
- It has a value prop in the headline
- Shows requirements in the headline to filter unqualified users
- Has a timeline in the description
If you searched for a personal loan and saw this ad at the top of the SERP, I bet you’d at least click to see what they’re all about.
Now, let’s do what Google wants:
Ah yes, this is a much better ad. Thanks, Google.
- At best: your ad looks amateur with redundant headlines and descriptions
- At worst: your ad is non-sensical, inaccurate, off-brand, and might sound sketchy
Yet, Google thinks these are good ads. That’s because Google is only looking at a set of checkboxes that gives them more control and isn’t actually processing the context of your ad in the SERP, your website, or your audience.
Does a Better Ad Strength Actually Correlate to Better Performance?
Maybe I’m being a little unfair, I’m abusing Google’s platform a bit in the example above to showcase an extreme situation. But let’s look at the data to see if Ad Strength really does lead to better performance.
Here’s aggregate data from multiple Seer clients on only non-brand search campaigns to keep it a fair comparison:
Immediately you can see that Good ads have the best cost/conversion (mainly from low CPCs, and remember a big component of CPC is ad relevancy).
Additionally, Average ads have a significantly higher conversion rate than the others, leading to both Average and Good ads with the better cost/conversion.
You may also look at this and think “Well, poor ads clearly are bad given this data, right?” – and while that may be true in this aggregate data set, here’s a single client’s Ad Strength data:
In this more narrow example, Poor ads actually perform the best.
Admittedly, Poor ads only account for about 2% of clicks in this account, so it’s possible the data is a small sample size on a very specific set of keywords. But even so, Average ads (which account for 26% of all clicks in the account) perform the second-best here from a combination of lower CPCs and good conversion rates.
So what does all of this mean?
When you ignore Google recommendations and craft ads and messaging tailored to your goals and audiences on a case-by-case basis, you actually can outperform Google’s recommendations.
The Takeaway
As AI and automation become more prominent in media platforms, it’s really important to understand how it’s being used and the actual intent behind it.
Do you need Google to tell you what a good ad looks like? If you know your audience, I don’t think you do. Do you need Google to know what exact bid to place for the specific person who searched a keyword to gain a conversion? You absolutely do.
Knowing when to balance AI automation and the human eye is going to be a necessary skill in this new age of marketing.
Things like Ad Strength, Google recommendations, and other indicators of quality should be used only directionally to inspire even better, more strategic thinking.
