Ad strength in Google Ads: Why Average is better than Excellent

There’s an ongoing debate in the PPC community about whether ad strength is a metric worth measuring or optimizing for. 

While Google states that ad strength doesn’t directly influence ad serving eligibility, it’s often treated as a proxy for ad quality – up to a point.

Understanding ad strength

Google’s ad strength metric is designed to guide advertisers in creating higher-quality ads. 

Google wants to show the best combination of headlines and descriptions for every user. 

This ensures high ad relevancy and more clicks (revenue) for Google. 

Ads are rated from Poor to Excellent, and Google offers recommendations on how to improve your score.

Google says advertisers who improve their ad strength from Poor to Excellent see an average 12% increase in conversions.

What Google recommends

Google generally recommends:

• Adding a high volume of unique, unpinned headlines and descriptions.
• Adding popular keywords to the ad copy. This can be done manually or with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI).

Finally, Google will only rate ads as Excellent if ads are completely unpinned.

Dig deeper: Top Google Ads recommendations you should always ignore, use, or evaluate

Pinning headlines

Responsive search ads (RSAs) allow users to “pin” a headline to a specific position. 

For example, an ad group containing keywords largely related to emergency plumbers may have headlines like: 

• “Emergency Plumber Near You.”
• “Emergency Plumber Call 24/7.”

There are also likely headlines like: 

• “Accredited by the BBB.”
• “Thousands of 5-star Reviews.”

Pins allow you to force the headlines that contain something similar to the user’s search into Position 1 and pin the value propositions into Position 2. 

This is pretty common practice among many advertisers: 

Sweetwater knows you’re looking for a Fender Guitar, so they make sure their ad matches that, then follow it with a value proposition – that they have the best selection. 

Nike does the same. Looking for soccer bottoms? We’ve got those. 

Want an Audio-Technica turntable? Best Buy has that, and you can pick it up curbside.

But this is completely counter to Google’s recommendations, and will not earn you an Excellent ad strength score. 

It should come as no surprise that we see ads like this: 

You can tell that the people running Google Ads for Google Play, Google Ads, and Google Store are all following Google’s best practices. 

I doubt a human would write “Discover apps with Google Play – Download apps on Google Play” as a headline.

This is the problem with striving for an Excellent ad strength rating.

Completely unpinning your headlines can lead to odd combinations – multiple keyword-stuffed headlines or a string of repetitive value propositions – resulting in ads that feel spammy, awkward, and robotic.

But ultimately, personal opinions don’t matter – good marketers rely on data. 

Fortunately, I have some to share.

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The data on ad strength

We’ll look at two sets of data:

• Anecdotal.
• Aggregate. 

Anecdotally, here are two accounts I recently audited:

Account 1:

Account 2:

In both, ads rated as Poor tended to have higher CPCs and lower CTRs. 

That tracks. If the ad lacks popular keywords or includes too few headlines, it likely struggles with Quality Score’s “ad relevance” component.

The more surprising finding came from Account 2: even the Excellent ads showed higher CPCs and weaker performance.

My theory? A similar ad relevance issue.

When headlines are completely unpinned, many combinations likely lack the right keywords.

That drags down ad relevance, which pushes Quality Score lower and CPCs higher.

To validate this beyond isolated audits, I analyzed performance across 3,660 generic (non-brand) search campaigns from the last 30 days.

Each campaign was bucketed by the predominant ad strength across its ads.

From where I sit, the takeaway is pretty clear. 

ROAS tends to hold steady, unless you’re running AI-generated ads that mash together odd headline combos, killing relevancy and inflating CPCs.

That’s why Best Buy, Sweetwater, and Nike pin their headlines – even if Google doesn’t.

(P.S. Google, if you need someone to rewrite your RSAs, I know a guy.)

Conducting your own analysis

To perform this analysis on your own account, navigate to the Campaigns > Ads report. 

Copy my columns as shown here:

Download the data and create a pivot table like this one:

Feel free to use Pivot Table Analyze > Fields, Items, & Sets > Calculated Field to add calculated metrics like CTR, CPC, and ROAS.

I expect you’ll find that ads with Poor and Excellent ratings tend to perform worse, while those rated Average or Good do better. 

Be careful of confounding variables like the balance of ad strength across brand and non-brand campaigns.

If you’re seeing a lot of spend flowing through Excellent ads and CPCs are climbing, try pinning a keyword-stuffed headline into Position 1 and see what happens.

Most likely, your CPCs will come down, even if your ad strength gets worse. 

That’s an outcome most advertisers would be happy to achieve.

Dig deeper: Google Ads best practices: The good, the bad and the balancing act

Recommendations

• Avoid Poor ad strength to ensure better performance.
• Don’t chase Excellent ad strength as it likely compromises ad relevance.
• Pin headlines when necessary to maintain ad relevance.
• Utilize dynamic keyword and location insertion to keep ads relevant to users.

Balance Google ad strength with real-world performance

While Google encourages advertisers to unpin their headlines and rely on machine learning to do the heavy lifting, the technology simply isn’t there yet.

The promise of personalized ad combinations is appealing, but in practice, completely unpinning headlines often produces spammy, inhuman ads that drive down CTRs and drive up CPCs.

The single most effective thing an advertiser can do is ensure a keyword-stuffed headline always appears to the user. 

The best Google Ads specialists don’t blindly follow Google’s recommendations.

They test, validate, and adapt those guidelines based on real-world results.

If that means your ads are only “average” in Google’s eyes, so be it.

#strength #Google #Ads #Average #Excellent