How do I improve ad strength in Google Ads?

Ad strength is Google’s rating of a responsive search ad: Incomplete, Poor, Average, Good or Excellent, with action items saying what would raise it. Google calls it a feedback tool for the variety of an ad’s assets: it’s worked out from how well the ad’s headlines and descriptions match the ad group’s keywords, how many there are, and how many sitelinks the ad can show, and it changes whenever the keywords, the assets or the account’s structure do.

Google says it isn’t used to calculate Ad Rank, Quality Score or who wins the auction, and doesn’t decide whether an ad can serve. It doesn’t read your landing page either. Google reports that advertisers who raised their responsive search ads and sitelinks from Poor to Excellent saw 15% more conversions on average, and recommends at least two responsive search ads rated Good or Excellent in every ad group.

A responsive search ad takes up to 15 headlines of up to 30 characters and up to 4 descriptions of up to 90, and Google assembles them into combinations for each search. Ad strength asks whether it has enough of them, saying different things and holding your keywords, for those combinations to fit the searches your keywords match. Performance Max asset groups have a rating of their own, read differently.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Ads.
2. 02If there’s no Ad strength column, select the columns icon, open Attributes, check Ad strength and select Apply.
3. 03Add a filter for Ad type, under Attributes, and check Responsive search ad.
4. 04Read the ratings an ad group at a time. Where no ad in an ad group reads Good or Excellent, select the best one’s rating to read Google’s suggestions for it.

A suggestion to include more keywords asks for the ad group’s keywords whole: Google counts a keyword only where one headline holds all of it, never split across two. So read the ad’s headlines beside its keywords.

• Put your keywords in the headlines, whole. Use the ad group’s most relevant keywords; one too long for a 30-character headline goes in a description. Keyword insertion can add them too.
• Give it as many headlines and descriptions as you can, up to 15 and 4, each saying something the others don’t: what you sell, a selling point, a problem you solve, a call to action. Rewordings of one line add combinations without adding anything to choose between.
• Give it at least 6 sitelinks across the account, the campaign and the ad group, and turn on dynamic sitelinks. Google counts every sitelink in the ad’s branch of the account. The sitelinks guide covers adding them.
• Pin as little as you can. More on that below.

The rating recalculates each time you change an asset, so the editor shows straight away whether a change helped. Once it reads Good or better, Google says to keep watching it, since a change to the keywords can move it again.

Pinning a headline or description to a position makes it show only there, and stops any other line showing in its place. Because that leaves fewer lines to match a search, Google says pinning isn’t recommended for most advertisers and can lower ad strength. If every position is pinned, the unpinned lines don’t show at all.

• Where a line must show in every ad, such as a disclaimer, pin it to Headline position 1, Headline position 2 or Description position 1, which always show. A line pinned to Headline position 3 or Description position 2 isn’t guaranteed to.
• Where you pin, pin 2 or 3 different lines to the position, so Google can test them. Near-identical lines pinned together restrict it and can lower the rating.
• Final URL expansion overrides pins: where it’s on and Google sends a click to a more relevant page, it doesn’t use the pinned lines.

In Corner sofas, pinning a second version of the name, such as Cedar & Pine Sofas, to position 1 beside Cedar & Pine Interiors keeps the name first and gives Google two to test.

An asset group’s rating reads its breadth, whether it has every type of asset it needs to serve on every kind of inventory, and its depth, how much variety it has within each.

Google’s recommended assets for an asset group:

Google can make videos from the assets you give it when you have none of your own, but recommends uploading at least one, and Excellent needs yours. Where text customization is on, the text Google writes counts toward the rating as yours does. Google also says it may lower ratings as it finds new ways to guide your mix of assets, and that those updates don’t change your results.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Assets › Assets and open the Asset coverage tab.
2. 02Read each asset group’s Ad Strength beside its counts of headlines, descriptions, images, videos, sitelinks and logos.
3. 03Select View recommendations under a rating to see what Google would add to reach Excellent. Where the list and the group disagree, Google says the ad editor view has the most up-to-date rating.

Every day Goldbeater reads every enabled ad’s and asset group’s rating, with Google’s own suggestions, and the assets behind it:

• Responsive ads Google rates Poor or Average: an ad group whose best ad Google rates Poor or Average, judged by its best ad, since a weaker ad beside a Good one is a test. Only ad groups one of whose ads was seen in the last 8 weeks, in a campaign that can serve. Medium where the best is Poor and the ad group spent a thousandth of the account’s 30 days, else low. The advice is Google’s suggestions for the best ad, word for word, and where Google asks for keywords, the finding lists the ad group’s keywords and whether a headline holds each. An ad group for competitors’ names is never told to put them in its headlines.
• Asset groups too thin to serve everywhere: an asset group rated Poor (medium) or Average (low), with what Google’s ad strength asks it to add, and what Performance Max takes from the campaign, such as sitelinks, sent to the campaign. And an asset group with no video or no portrait image of its own, whatever its rating: the videos Google makes, paused assets and videos that no longer play don’t count.
• A headline pinned alone to one position: a position of a responsive search ad that one headline or description is pinned to alone, in an ad seen in the last 8 weeks. Low. It offers to unpin it without recommending it, since a line that has to show there, your name or wording you’re required to use, wants one or two others pinned beside it instead, which you choose in Google Ads.

None of them puts a dollar figure on a rating, since Google doesn’t use it in the auction, and none writes headlines or images for you: those are yours.

The ads in the table are the sample’s two, and the keywords below them are the ones no headline of the better ad holds whole, first. The same for a Performance Max asset group:

Repeated lines across an ad group’s ads have a guide of their own, and the audit checklist has every ad and asset line with where to find it in Google Ads.

Does ad strength affect Ad Rank or Quality Score?

No. Google says ad strength isn’t used to calculate Ad Rank, Quality Score or auction wins, and doesn’t decide whether an ad can serve. It’s feedback on the variety of the ad’s headlines and descriptions and how well they match your keywords.

What is a good ad strength in Google Ads?

Good or Excellent. Google recommends at least two responsive search ads rated Good or Excellent in each ad group.

Why is my ad strength Poor when the ad has 15 headlines?

Ad strength reads more than the count: whether your keywords are held whole in the headlines, whether the lines say different things, how many sitelinks the ad can show, and how much is pinned. Select the rating in the Ads table to read Google’s suggestions.

Does pinning headlines lower ad strength?

It can. Google says pinning leaves fewer lines to match each search and isn’t recommended for most advertisers. Where a line must show, pin 2 or 3 different lines to its position rather than one.

How many sitelinks does ad strength need?

At least 6, across the account, the campaign and the ad group, for a responsive search ad to reach Good or better, and dynamic sitelinks turned on. A Performance Max asset group needs 6 to reach Excellent.