Great ad copy is critical for Google Ads success. However, it can be tough to understand which rules of engagement work best in today’s PPC landscape.
While there are many perspectives on the best way to optimize ads (and each method has its own place), few are backed by statistically significant data.
At Optmyzr, we have access to that data, so we asked our analysts to look for trends in ad optimization strategies that drive meaningful performance improvements.
We believe it’s important to share this data—not to amplify or discourage any specific strategy, but to inform you about what each creative choice can mean for your account. Ultimately there is no right or wrong answer, just higher or lower probability for success.
Let’s take a look at the data so that you can better contextualize which ad optimizations might yield the best ROI for your campaigns.
Methodology: Data Framework and Key Questions
Keep in mind the context below as you review our study and takeaways.
About the data:
- We reviewed over 22K accounts that had been running at least 90 days with a monthly spend of at least $1500.
- We reviewed over one million ads across responsive search ads (RSAs), expanded text ads (ETAs), and Demand Gen. However, API limitations prevented us from pulling asset-level data for Performance Max campaigns.
- For monetary stats, we converted currencies to USD and used those to find the average CPAs and CPCs.
Here are the questions we aimed to answer:
- Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
- How does pinning impact performance?
- Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
- How does the length of the creative (character count) affect performance?
- Do ETA tactics translate to RSAs and Demand Gen ads?
When evaluating our results, it’s important to remember that Optmyzr customers (the data set) represent advanced marketers. As such, there may be a selection bias that could result in more data on successful strategies. It’s possible that results could vary when evaluating a wider advertiser pool with a more varied range of experience.
Ad Creative Choices Data & Analysis
In the sections below, we’ve included raw figures, observations, and takeaways to help you better understand the degree to which various ad optimizations influence performance.
Is there a correlation between Ad Strength and performance?
While Google has made it very clear that Ad Strength is not a ranking factor and meant to be a helpful guide, practitioners tend to have mixed to negative sentiment towards it because it gets conflicting attention from Google and doesn’t seem to be useful in managing creative.
Our own Fred Vallaeys offers his perspective on Ad Strength:
“A higher Ad Strength doesn’t mean a better CTR or a better conversion rate or a better Quality Score. If you’re new to advertising or don’t know what’s going to work, consider this a piece of advice.
But if you’re an experienced advertiser, go ahead and do what you do best. Create the ad that resonates well with your target audience and keep the focus on performance. Don’t just be blinded by the Ad Strength.”
Does the data back him up? Below (and for all the tables in this study), we’ve listed the rows of data in order of descending performance (i.e., the first row is the highest-performing group, while the last row is the lowest-performing):
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs):
Demand Gen Ads:
Observations:
- RSAs with an ‘average’ Ad Strength have the best CPA, conversion rate, and ROAS.
- Other than ROAS, Demand Gen ads with an ‘average’ Ad Strength performed the best.
- There is no meaningful difference in CTR for ads with different Ad Strength labels, which indicates that Ad Strength either doesn’t factor it in, or likely could never be a ranking factor. This is of note because Quality Score (which is a factor in the auction/Ad Rank) does have a clear relationship with CTR. We include this point because many were suspicious of Google using Ad Strength as a ranking factor.
- For RSAs, ROAS appears to decline sharply when going from ‘average’ to ‘good’ Ad Strength. While the transition from ‘good’ to ‘excellent’ shows a slight increase, it doesn’t come close to the disparity between ‘poor’ or ‘average’. This may be influenced by the ‘human’ factor (the majority of advertisers favor max conversions and simple conversion values, according to our bidding strategy study [10,635 use Max Conversions vs 7916 Max Conversion Value]).
- Demand Gen’s metrics make a stronger case for paying attention to Ad Strength due to clear ROAS win in the ‘good’ category, however the decline associated with ‘excellent’ Ad Strength still makes it a dubious optimization guide at best.
- The conversion rates for Demand Gen ads are very similar to those of RSAs. This is surprising, considering Demand Gen ads drive awareness whereas RSAs are traditionally focus on driving transactions.
Takeaways:
There is no clear correlation between ad performance and Ad Strength. Ad Strength is not a metric to sweat over.
- The majority of ads have an Ad Strength label of ‘poor’ or ‘average’, but perform well on typical advertising KPIs.
- Ads with ad strength labels of ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ have mixed performance on typical advertising KPIs.
How does pinning impact performance?
Pinning refers to designating an asset to a particular position in the ad (Headline 1, Headline 2, or Headline 3). Pinning came about with the rise of Responsive Search Ads.
Some preach pinning everything to force ETAs (meaning there would only be three headlines and each would be pinned to their respective spot), while others prefer to abstain from pinning. Those who abstain from pinning lean into RSA’s built in testing. Check out the “Experts React” section for specific reasons why some pin or don’t.
Here’s the data on pinning (including the performance from ETAs for easy comparison—note that ETAs are a retired ad type and cannot be edited):
RSAs:
ETAs:
(We’ll revisit this table when we discuss creative length.)
Observations:
- Some pinning continues to be the winning strategy based on CPA (though no pinning is a close second), ROAS, and CPC. Conversion rates suffer when you pin.
- Ads where every element is pinned have the best performance for the relevance metric: CTR.
- Ads with some or no elements pinned have the best performance for conversion or cost-based metrics, like CPA, ROAS, CPC, and conversion rate.
- While CTR is technically a win for pinning, the CTRs are very close, so it’s hard to say pinning is truly responsible.
- In most cases, RSAs outperform ETAs (even in ads with all pinned assets). However ETAs with 31+ characters (indicating DKI/ad customizer usage) performed so well that it comes across as outlier data.
Takeaways:
Advertisers who attempt to recapture the ETAs days are setting themselves up for worse conversion-based performance.
- Pinning some assets has a positive impact on ad performance, but it’s essentially flat compared to pinning no assets (ROAS is the only exception). As such, pinning should be a creative/brand choice—not a concrete Google Ads tactic.
- Most advertisers would benefit from fully migrating to RSAs (which allow for pinning).
Do ads written in title case or sentence case perform better?
The ‘title case vs. sentence case’ debate is probably one of the firecest debates, so we were curious how this stylistic choice impacted ad performance.
For your reference, here’s a text example with each respective formatting:
- Title case: This Is a Title Case Sentence
- Sentence case: This is a sentence case sentence
We’ve grouped the accounts based on the percentage of an account’s ad text elements that use title case. So for example, accounts in the row marked ‘0%’ use no title casing at all. 0% should be understood as pure sentence case structure, while 75-100% should be understood as pure title case.
RSAs:
ETAs:
Demand Gen:
Observations:
- The biggest observation is the number of advertisers who mix title and sentence case in the same ads and accounts. This runs counter to the historical norm that advertisers tend to pick one and stick with it.
- ROAS seems to favor sentence case, but most advertisers tend to use title case.
- There is no hard-and-fast rule for all ad types. RSAs and Demand Gen ads appear to do better with sentence case, while ETAs seem to do better with title case.
Takeaways:
As RSA and Demand Gen ads using sentence case performed best on all primary advertising KPIs, we recommend all advertisers include ads with sentence case in their testing.
- One possible reason why ads using sentence case perform well is that they are the same format typically found in organic results, which are usually perceived as higher quality by users.
- Do not turn off ETAs that perform well, as they have the potential to outperform RSAs (though most won’t) and you won’t be able to re-enable them again later.
- Title case seems to be a habit from ETAs, but in most cases, advertisers do better with sentence case.
How does the length of the creative (i.e., character count) affect performance?
Ad copy is a kind of haiku—you need to convey clear and enticing meaning in very few characters. Yet there’s more nuance to consider: is bigger better?
(Example SERP with three RSAs—each with some creative cut off or moved to a different spot.)
Google has made a habit of truncating creative for years, and it’s no surprise that headline creative gets more viewership and impacts performance to a larger degree than the description. However, since underperforming headlines can appear in descriptions (instead of being in position #2), there’s an even greater pressure to get the balance right.
Many advertisers believe taking up more screen real estate is the better strategy for ad copy, so we wanted to see if the data agrees. For this analysis, we grouped accounts by character count.
RSA headlines:
RSA descriptions:
ETA headlines:
ETA descriptions:
Demand Gen headlines:
Demand Gen Descriptions:
Observations:
- Headlines appear to benefit from concision, while descriptions appear to benefit from some length (but not too long).
- In most cases, DKI/ad customizers don’t dramatically improve or hurt performance. We should assume that all ads in a “+” category are using DKI or customizers as that’s the only way they’d be able to exceed the character count.
- RSA and ETA performance trends do not line up perfectly, and those trying to apply ETA tactics to RSAs see declines in almost all metrics (potentially due to how Google combines lines of ad text to render long headlines).
- CPC fluctuation implies that asset length isn’t as important as other factors, like the Quality Score and Ad Rank of the ads. If there was a clear correlation, one could infer Google’s character count preferences.
Takeaways:
The historical trend of longer ads being better isn’t playing out in today’s ad types. Quality over quantity seems to be the path to better CTR, conversion rates, and ROAS. Focus on including a strong and compelling message in your ad, rather than attempting to max out the character count.
Ad Optimizations That Boost Performance
Now that we’ve reviewed the data, let’s talk about the tactics you should adopt and the ones that no longer make sense.
For me, the biggest insight related to our findings about mixing sentence and title case: I didn’t expect the CTRs and conversion rates would be so similar. While sentence case ‘won’ for RSAs, performance was close. As such, only test sentence case in ads that are underperforming (as opposed to changing existing successful ads to sentence case).
Another big takeaway is that pinning should not be done for complete control. Instead, marketers should focus on securing creative in intended spots (i.e., not having a headline drop to the description). Leave some room for Google to decide where to place the creative.
Regarding Ad Strength as an indicator, seeing as how it does not correlate with performance, it doesn’t make sense to build Ad Strength into audits or sales tools. However, it is a useful filter to find ads whose creative may not be high enough quality to generate a meaningful number of impressions. We did see a strong correlation between shorter and brand-agnostic creative and higher ad strength.
Experts React
“A couple things stood out to me right away. The first is how little the CTR was impacted across the variety of ad types and strategies. Most of the changes studied saw no more than a 0.5-1% change across the CTR. Secondly, it appears that many marketers, myself included, haven’t completely adjusted to RSAs despite them being the primary ad type for over a year now. RSAs perform in a completely different way than ETAs regardless of how you format them. Rather than trying to replicate ETAs or using old best practices, advertisers need to lean into RSAs and determine how to make them work best for their accounts.
I think all of this highlights the case that many of us who have been practicing Google Ads for a long time need to revisit our habits. Google Ads continues to change at an accelerating pace and we need to lean into making it work for us now and not hold onto old tactics.”
Harrison Jack Hepp, Google Ads Consultant, Industrious Marketing
“As the “Chief Strategist” of a digital marketing agency, I’ve always prioritized strategies that maximize performance, often relying on data-driven decisions over Google’s recommendations. This study reinforces that approach, especially regarding Ad Strength and pinning. The data confirms that Ad Strength doesn’t reliably predict ad performance, so experienced advertisers should focus on crafting ads that resonate with their audience rather than chasing high Ad Strength ratings. While Google offers pinning as a tool, the findings suggest that allowing some flexibility for Google’s AI can yield better results than over-pinning and that using pinning selectively is not as harmful as I may have previously thought. However, the most surprising insight is the impact of creative length. Contrary to my belief in maximizing ad real estate (which I also push when it comes to Meta Data on the SEO side of things), the data suggests that concise, impactful messaging can outperform longer ads. This challenges the notion that more is always better and highlights the importance of quality over quantity in ad copy. Based on this study, I will push our teams to test creative length more rigorously.”
Danny Gavin, Chief Strategist and Founder, Optidge
“This study highlights the importance of humans using Google Ads. As experts, we analyze Google’s documentation, PR statements, and real-world advertiser performance to offer guidance.
While ‘Excellent’ ads have higher click-through rates (CTRs), this study confirms that ad strength can mislead advertisers into prioritizing clicks over conversions. ‘Average’ ads actually have higher return on ad spend (ROAS), suggesting that aligning ads closely with keywords (to get an ‘Excellent’) can lead to more clicks but not necessarily more sales.
I was also intrigued by the impact of pinning. Historically, I’ve avoided using pinning and relied on RSA automation. This data demonstrates that human intervention and knowledge can produce better results. In light of this, I’ll consider incorporating pinning into my strategies.
Lastly, as a proponent of title case, the study’s findings on title case versus sentence case were surprising. While many ad experts stick to one format, the study suggests that staying updated with case studies is crucial. In today’s environment, where individual accounts may lack sufficient volume for testing, tools like Optmyzr are more essential for providing data-driven insights and challenging the status quo.” -
Sarah Stemen, Owner and Coach, Sarah Stemen, LLC
“This is a good reminder of how dynamic best practices really are. Just a few years ago, filling up all the character space in an ad was a great way to give your ad more real estate. With RSAs, using every available character can actually backfire, since it can keep H3 from serving.
Writing Google Ads can be really overwhelming. Knowing what correlates with better performance and what doesn’t (ahem…Ad Strength) offers valuable benchmarks. These insights allow you to move past internal tests for things like capitalization and pinning, and instead focus on the qualitative aspect—developing stronger, more substantive messaging that attracts buyers.”
Amy Hebdon, Founder, Paid Search Magic
“This study is FASCINATING!
The things that stood out to me were pinning, sentence case and length of assets.
First, pinning - I am happy to see that pinning is not completely penalized. There are very legitimate reasons an advertiser might want or need to pin assets. Could be compliance or could be that their brand standard demand certain things must appear in advertising. I am glad that is not an automatic performance killer. It makes sense that selective pinning does well and full pinning does less well.
The title versus sentence case data was also really interesting! For those of us who have been doing this for a long time, title case is really ingrained in our heads for headlines. It almost feels blasphemous to use sentence case for headline assets. But the data, I think, is starting to show us that Google is viewing ad components/assets differently.
Which leads me to my thoughts on the length of assets. Again, those practitioners who have been doing Google Ads for 10+ years, our mantra has always been use all the characters! We strove to have long descriptions and use all those title characters pretty much every time. But the data is showing us that the system prefers shorter (not maxed out) assets. And I can’t help but wonder if this is hinting on Google Ads not distinguishing so much between title and description assets in the future. They have already started by sometime using titles in description areas. I think this is where it is eventually going.
All that to say, we probably need to adjust our thinking about today’s ad assets and test different lengths and case structures if you don’t have variety in your current ads. Look forward to more studies illuminating other aspects of Google Ads!”
Julie Friedman Bacchini, Founder of PPC Chat/President and Founder of Neptune Moon
“What I found most compelling from Optmyzr’s latest study is that ads resembling organic content outperform those that employ typical best practices for Responsive Search Ads. For example, Google’s own research from a few years ago found that Title Case outperforms Sentence case for RSA headlines and descriptions, but Optmyzr’s new study shows that the more “natural” Sentence case text is associated with better ROAS, CPA and CTR in 2024.
Similarly, practitioners have typically tried to maximize real estate by using all available characters, but this study shows that shorter headlines and descriptions generally have better CPA and CTR than longer ones.
I look forward to testing these new findings with my clients. As organic-feeling social media ads have taken over platforms like TikTok and Meta, it’s interesting to see a potentially similar shift coming to Google Ads.”
Jyll Saskin Gales, Founder and Coach, Jyll.ca
“This was a great read.
I’ve long said that focusing on ad strength too much is detrimental for performance and I’m glad to have this confirmed.
What’s really important is understanding the restrictions you have in your account (available impressions per ad group) and tailoring your RSA to that, plus the ability to communicate the message effectively and speak to the user in a way that resonates with them.
Best practices are but that - the average of things that typically work."
Boris Beceric, Founder and Coach, BorisBeceric.com
“Referring back to Fred’s advice, the single most important tip is to write ad copy that addresses your user’s or buyer’s concerns—it’s basic marketing 101. That said, the more you can customize each input, the better the performance will be. With increased AI search integration, expect Google to improve its ability to create a personalized search experience based on a multitude of signals.
Additionally, don’t forget the basics: dynamic countdown clocks for promotions, ad customizers that mention names of stores or service locations, dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), and using ad-level UTM parameters to trigger landing page content aligned with the keyword or ad theme will all contribute to better CTR and CVR.”
Andrea Cruz, Sr Director, Client Partner at Tiniuti
Final Takeaways
Ad Strength is not a major metric, nor has it proven to be a reliable predictor of ad copy performance. The most useful signals seem to be the formatting of the ad (title vs. sentence case), as well as length of the copy. Don’t fall into old creative habits—honor the new rules of engagement and, if you need help managing profitable ad tests, Optmyzr has a free trial with your name on it.
