What you need to know about Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) have been around for many years now, but for some reason, so many Google Ads practitioners still find them confusing. RSAs can be incredibly powerful if you know how to use them correctly.

What is a Responsive Search Ad?

A Responsive Search Ad, or RSA, is the default ad type for Google Search campaigns. When you create an RSA, you must provide three things:

• Final URL: The landing page where you want users to go after clicking on your ad.
• Headlines: The clickable part of your search text ad. Minimum 3, Maximum 15. 30-character limit each. I generally recommend having 8-10 headlines in your RSA. We previously covered ad headlines in this series.
• Descriptions: The black text that accompanies your headlines, to complete your RSA. Minimum 2, Maximum 4. 90-character limit each. I recommend having 2 or 3 descriptions in your RSA.

Your RSA can also have: 

• Display path: This is not your final URL, but instead, an optional piece of text that signals to the user what type of page they’ll land on. Minimum 0, Maximum 2. 15-character limit each.

Are assets part of a Responsive Search Ad?

Assets (formerly known as extensions) are an optional but helpful part of your Search ads.

While you can create/edit assets while creating an RSA, I don’t recommend doing this. Instead, create and save your ad, and then go to the Assets tab to add/edit assets at the account, campaign, or ad group level. 

To learn more about assets, check out previous articles in this series about Message assets, Image assets, Sitelink assets, or Structured snippet & callout assets.

Is Ad Strength important for Responsive Search Ads?

When you’re building your RSA, you’ll see a blue bar at the top with a score for “ad strength.” It will say “poor,” “average,” “good,” or “excellent.”

Good news: you can ignore this. Even Google has stated that this score does not directly affect your ad’s performance.

Think of Ad Strength as a checklist of Google’s best practices. It’s a helpful guide, but don’t let it be the only thing you focus on.

Your RSA Ad Strength score is based on three things:

• Are your keywords being used in your headlines and descriptions?
• Have you provided enough headlines and descriptions?
• Are your headlines and descriptions different enough from each other?

For example, if you were to create four headlines like “Search Engine Land,” “Read Search Engine Land,” “Search Engine Land News,” and “Search Engine Land Articles,” Google would consider those to be too similar and your ad strength would suffer. 

5 tips to improve your RSA performance

Now that we have the basics down, here are some of my favorite tips to get the most out of your responsive search ads.

1. How many RSAs per ad group?

You can have up to three RSAs per ad group, but it’s rare that you’ll need more than 15 headlines and four descriptions to get the job done. Consider using experiments for ad copy testing or landing page testing rather than creating multiple RSAs.

2. Should you pin headlines or descriptions?

Pinning a headline or description to a specific position (like Headline 1 or Description 1) will prevent Google from mixing and matching it with other headlines and descriptions, and force it to always show in this position.

Don’t just randomly pin your assets. But if you have a good reason, like legal compliance requirements or ambiguous queries, go ahead and pin.

3. Should you use ad customizers?

Ad customizers are one of my favorite features in Google Ads. You can use ad customizers, like Dynamic Keyword Insertion, Dynamic Location Insertion, and/or Dynamic Countdown Insertion to make your ads more relevant to users.

4. Can your headlines be shown in other placements? 

This is a common point of confusion for new advertisers: a headline is not always a headline. Sometimes, your headlines may show up as part of your description or even as sitelinks. It’s not a big deal, just something to be aware of.

5. Can you see the performance of individual headlines or descriptions? 

Yes! To see how your RSAs are performing, don’t just look at the overall ad metrics.

Go into the Assets details to see individual asset-level reporting. You may need to add more columns to your report to evaluate the performance of each headline and description.

However, remember to be patient. In my experience, a single asset needs at least 100 clicks to begin evaluating its click-through rate and at least 100 conversions to properly evaluate its conversion rate or cost per acquisition. Anything less than that simply isn’t enough data.

While Responsive Search Ads are not the only ad type for Google Search ads, Google has announced that Call ads are being deprecated. With the advent of AI Max and PMax, it’s my prediction that Dynamic Search Ads aren’t long for this world, either. So, the sooner you get the hang of creating and optimizing RSAs, the better off you’ll be.

This article is part of our ongoing bi-weekly Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. Every other Wednesday, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.