While SEO, email, and posting to social media can get your business off the ground and generate a steady stream of leads, businesses looking to scale need to get paid advertising on one or more platform to work. Even if you have a great product, market conditions in 2021 are making this increasingly difficult. One particularly strong headwind is the latest version of iPhone’s operation system, iOS, which defaults to “do not track” privacy settings. As one would expect, only a small percentage of people are opting back in to be tracked. As a result, the data advertisers used to rely on to understand prospect behavior and to target the right prospects is no longer available. Also missing is the ability to retarget prospects, a tactic that companies with longer sales cycles or higher price points have come to rely on to generate positive returns on their advertising investments.
These changes make it more important than ever to focus on optimizing what you can control as much as possible, like your ad copy and media assets.
The Evolution of Google Ads
Google ad formats have evolved throughout the years. In the recent past, you needed to provide Google with the exact ads you wanted to serve to prospects. You would set up multiple ads to test and Google would A/B test one against the other.
Responsive Ads
A couple of years ago Google introduced responsive ads. Unlike enhanced ads, you enter multiple ad parts, headlines, descriptions, or images, depending on the ad type, and the ad platform mixes and matches them together to form ads.
While the loss of control was hard for some marketers to get used to, the creation of responsive ads reduces the amount of work needed to create ads and improves results. This is especially true with regards to display ads. Instead of having to create several ad styles and reproduce them in many different sizes, now you simply feed Google multiple images and lines of ad copy. Google automatically creates ads that fit into one of the many different sizes supported, letting you take advantage of the entire inventory of ads. Further, as Google mixes and matches the ad assets, it looks at conversion data to determine what is working best. Over time, it will begin showing the assets that work best and you’ll get feedback to replace images and ad text blocks that are underperforming.
This sounds like it should make life a lot easier, and to some extent it does, but it also introduces the potential for Google to create ads that don’t make any sense. Google can take any headline and any image to create display ads. It’s important to make sure that every combination of images and texts you have provided will create an ad that makes sense to your prospects and provides enough information to inspire them to click through.
Search Ads
Search ads can suffer from a different problem. You need to make sure that you have enough variation in your search headlines and description to avoid repeating the same message multiple times in your ad.
Below, you’ll find a simple and extreme example designed to drive this point home.
Example Search Campaign
Let’s suppose you are a real estate developer and you hired someone to help you market 24 homes for sale in a new construction development in Edison, NJ. Your boss asked you to review all ad copy. You asked your marketing consultant to send the ad text she wrote, and she forwarded the following headlines for your search campaign’s Edison Homes AdGroup:
Edison NJ Homes for Sale
New Construction Homes Edison NJ
Homes for Sale in Edison NJ
Edison New Construction Homes
Edison NJ New Construction Homes
If you don’t know much about the Google search platform, these might look fine to you. Individually, they all describe your product. The problem is the Google Search ad format uses 3 headlines. This means your ad could start with:
Edison NJ Homes for Sale | New Construction Homes Edison NJ | Homes for Sale in Edison NJ
A much better approach would be to designate the following headlines as needing to appear in the first position of the ad (which you do by pinning the headline to the first position):
Edison NJ Homes for Sale
New Construction Homes Edison NJ
Homes for Sale in Edison NJ
Edison New Construction Homes
Edison NJ New Construction Homes
And then letting Google mix and match the following additional headlines:
4- and 5- Bedroom Homes
2-Car Garage Available
Waterfront Views from Select Lots
Blue Ribbon School District
5 Min Drive to Metropark Station
Select Homes Available Now
I’m sure you will agree the sample below is a much more informative headline:
Edison NJ Homes for Sale | 4- and 5- Bedroom Homes | Select Homes Available Now
Conclusion
Now that you know what to look for, ask your marketing consultant or agency to provide you with all the assets you are using for your Google Ads. Make sure any way they are mixed or matched will result in a message that will make sense to your prospect and avoid saying the same thing more than once. Also ask your consultant if any images or text assets are underperforming and if so, to replace them.
Advertising on Google is too expensive not to put your best foot forward. Your efforts to optimize your ads will be rewarded with a higher click through rate, lower average cost per clicks, and more conversions.
Have any questions about how to create winning responsive ads? Leave us a message in the comments below.
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