Have you been running Google Ads but are still stuck with the same old copy you’ve been running since you launched? Or maybe you’ve spent ages optimising your Responsive Search Ads but still aren’t seeing them connect? You need to read this.
The Feature Google Doesn’t Want You To Use
I want to dive into how we can use pins to our advantage for our RSAs. They’re a useful feature that can often be overlooked as you set up a Responsive Search Ad and let you pin headlines to certain positions, meaning no matter what, if Google chooses to show one of your assets, it’ll only be in the position you’ve pinned it to. For example, if you pinned a headline with your brand name to position one, it would always be the first thing a user reads when they see your ad. Sounds minor? Stick with me.
Now the reason this is so overlooked is because Google actually recommends that you DON’T pin any of your headlines. The thinking behind this is that it gives the platform less restrictions when it comes to experimenting with how to switch up presenting your assets. If you’re only just getting started with RSAs, I’d actually agree with Google here but if your ads have been live for a few weeks or more and we have some data to look at, there are some options for us to strategically pin some elements as we start to optimise what we’re running.
Pins Make Your Ads Make SENSE!!
The first way to use the pin feature is pretty simple, to make sure what you’re running makes sense! Let’s say you have fifteen headlines in your RSA but three of them are CTAs - it’s very possible that Google will, occasionally, present all three of these at once. Imagine getting served an ad that reads: ‘Shop Now | Order Now | Browse the Sale’... Not a great look. Luckily, the pin feature more or less mitigates the risk here. If we pin all three of these CTAs to, let’s say, the second position, that’s the only place any of them can appear so they’ll never be in a situation where more than one is appearing at the same time.
Another Weapon In Your Test & Learn Arsenal
The second way to get the most out of the pin feature is when you want to get some more concrete learnings around how a particular copy line is performing. Reporting on RSAs is often pretty opaque so we have to get a bit creative to extract some learnings. Let’s say you want to learn if always having your brand name in the headline of your ad increases CTR. The way you’d do this is by creating one RSA where the brand name is always pinned at position one and run it at the same time as an RSA with the same copy but with nothing pinned. If we see stronger performance from the ad with the business’ name pinned as a headline, we can safely assume this is something we want to keep doing so can either keep it pinned or add more headlines and descriptions that feature the brand name in some way.
There’s not a whole lot of room for manual optimisation on Search copy any more since Google’s moved from ETAs to RSAs so any angle we can find to get a bit more granular with our changes is well worth looking into and, thankfully this is just the tip of the iceberg.