The RIGHT Way to Create Responsive Search Ads | Step-by-Step Tutorial

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I'm going to go step by step on how to create a responsive search ad. I'm going to give you a simple easy template on the responsive search ad creation so you create impactful ads that will get high click through rates. And I also am going to talk about ad strength and why I think it's bull. So let's dive in. So I am at an ad inside of an actual account for a company called Home Reserve. They sell sectional sofas. So I am going to be building a new ad for pet friendly keywords that we're targeting. So I'm in the ad group. I just simply go to this blue, create an ad button, hit responsive search ad. Now it is going to auto populate ad copy that has already been used. So I am going to clear this. So we have a blank canvas to work from. Okay, so you've got final URL display path headlines. You can add up to 15 and then four descriptions as well as add assets which I'll talk about a bit later. Then during this process you have a few things here. Add strength which I'll discuss and then you get a preview of the actual ad you're creating. So let's not worry too much about any of this right now, but let's just talk about these pieces to the ad creation process. So here we have display path. This will simply show right in the ad as if it's the URL display that you're going to. So this is not a real URL home reserve.com/pet/friendly. However, I'm adding in some keywords. So we do pet friendly sectional. So actually to make this better I should do this so it'd look like this. So this isn't a real URL on our website, but I've now baked in one of the keywords we're bidding on and this will actually show in the ad. So it just makes your ad pop a little more. Many times this will be bolded in the ad and so it's just an extra place to put in. Usually the key one of the keywords are part of the keyword themes that you're bidding on. Put them in this display path just for some extra pop to the ad because again it will bold it if it is a keyword you're targeting and it's relevant. Right. It's pet friendly sectionals that we're going after. So even if it doesn't bold it, some cases it won't. At least you've got that baked in there again. So it's eye catching to the person who's actually going and searching for your ad. Now you have 15 headlines. Okay, so this is where I see a lot of people make mistakes and they think I should go in and just add all 15 headlines. And the answer to that is yes, if you actually create unique headlines. 15 unique headlines. Most people do not. Most people are creating ads with the same headline over and over again, just in different phrasing. For example, a lot of times when doing audits, I will find people adding essentially the same phrase over and over again. So they'll do something like pet friendly sofas, sofa for pets. Shop online now. Shop online, order online, buy online. 20% off. Promo, promo, 20% off. So a lot of people get caught up in this idea. Well, I have to fill out all 15. That's what Google's telling me to do. And in reality they're just repeating the same thing over and over again. It's not unique. It does not do anything but add a bunch of fluff and garbage to your ads, which I will talk about because a lot of people get hung up on this ad strength. And I'll share what ad strength actually does, what it means. It's good, good little trick by Google in there. But I'll go through the whole process of, of the ad strength piece. But when you're creating an ad, I'm going to give you the formula or a formula of making sure you're actually creating an ad that's going to be impactful. Also, I have two YouTube videos that we have done on creating irresistible ads. Also using chat GPT to help with creating ads. Those will be in the description. So we're going to have, we have more videos on actual ad copy tips for now, this video is more about the creation process of a responsive search ad. But make sure to go check those videos out too. Okay, so easy ad copy template ideas that you should be thinking about when creating ads. That is message to intent. So simply in this ad, people are looking and searching for pet friendly sectionals. So just baking in those keywords as a headline such as pet friendly sectionals. Number two, you're going to be looking at features and benefits. So adding in any features or benefits to your product or service. It's very easy to create headlines. Do not add the same one over and over again in different phrasing. Try to be unique with each one of those features and benefits. Number three, price promotions, guarantees. So those all sort of fit in the same similar Category. If you have price that's very competitive, bake that into that. If you have a guarantee of some sort, 30 day money back, 10 year warranty, anything of that such, add that. And if you're running promotions, obviously promotions are huge, bake the promo into the ad that is likely to help increase with click through rate. Then social proof. If you've got a lot of reviews or awards, bake that in and then last call to action. Shop now, buy now, free quote, call us, whatever. Add in several call to actions. If you follow that simple template, you'll be able to create very impactful ads. Now I'm going to show you the ad that I have created for Home Reserve on this pet friendly ad group and I'm going to show why I have some of the headlines in here. And then we're also going to go through some of the further ad creation process. You've just heard the template that I like to use when creating ads. So here we have pet friendly sectional, dog and cat friendly sectional, pet friendly and kid proof. These are matching the search intent, right? And in fact this is literally a keyword that I'm bidding on right here which is pet friendly sectional. So I've got these in here. Those normally will do well. Then features and benefits. So this is machine washable. That is going to resonate with someone who owns a pet. And if you have a pet, you know they can make a mess on your sectionals, so or couch. And so machine washable. Huge, huge feature, stain resistant fabric. Again that kind of goes with the machine washable piece. But this is a copy that I know does well especially to that pet owner demographic changeable fabric covers again kind of lives with these features here with machine washable and stain resistant. But this is a big one. You can actually change out the fabric covers. You can wash them, they're stain resistant. And if you needed to, you can actually buy different fabric covers. So this is a big piece and big feature for pet owners. Then I've also baked in a few here made for action kids and pets. This is just a very impactful sort of headline I've tested in the past. So I made sure to put that in here. Social proof, loved by 80,000 plus families had that misspelled. So good thing for the little red squiggle line underneath there. So yeah, we got, you know, 80,000 families have purchased from Home Reserve. That is huge. So loved by 80,000 families. Great social proof right there. Pricing starting at 1138. I do like using exact numbers. It just pops more than if you were to use let's say 1000, so just all zeros. So like 1138 really stands out. Numbers stand out. You know this 8000 number stands out. If I wanted to be like real exact, I could. So like 8125 plus that pops. However, it's just a bit odd. In that case, I'm just going to leave it like that. And this is actually on the website itself. 10 year warranty. So that's part of the guarantee piece. 60 day no risk trial and then we've got our call to actions. Shop now, find your layout, build your sectional. Now where did I even get all of this? Well, very simply a lot of the copy on the website's already here. Right. Great with kids and pets. Here's change of changes fabrics. So there's the changeable fab fabric piece that I have. Now here's some things that are also feature and benefits that I did not use because it doesn't make sense for a pet owner. Like tight spaces, rearrange layout fits anywhere that works for the other ad groups and other keyword sets that I'm going after. But for pets I have to go after what, what resonates the most. What's going to be the most impactful for that pet owner who is actually searching for pet friendly sectional sofas. So here we go. I've got a lot of these features here again, changeable fabric covers, machine washable, stain resistant, 10 year warranty and 60 day no rest trial. Here's the 89,000 family piece. So now listen, Home Reserve has been a client of mine very closely for many, many years. So I know this client very well. You may be writing an ad for yourself or for your own business or maybe you're a freelancer agency and you're writing an ad for a client. Go on the website, just browse around. I like reading reviews to seeing what people are saying. That helps a lot of times of finding out what is going to be impactful to that person. And so this is a lot. I did not just randomly make this stuff up. This is some research that I went into and this is how we've been able to actually create this ad. Now with descriptions I like to basically call out features and benefits. Again, I like to have call to action. So you'll see like shop now and then brand messaging is huge too. And so usually I'll do two that are feature and benefits and then two that are more brand messaging pieces. So in this case I don't totally follow that formula, but I'VE got matre action with kids and pets. So again calling out the kids and pets piece. Easy, clean, washable, built in accident protection. This is going to resonate with that pet owner. Completely modular. Choose the best layout for your space and budget. Risk free trial. This is just a head or a description that I've used in the past so I have baked that in there. May or may not do well. I don't know. Get swatches Risk free trial flexible for giving pet friendly sectionals. There's that pet friendly sectionals piece again shop. Now there's my call to action. And then another just sectional couches that are pet friendly, kid proof, washable and stain resistance. Again just another call out on the features and benefits bits. Here you go. You can kind of see this in the preview section here. So this is always kind of nice to see how this actually potentially would look. Okay now after descriptions you have images and business name and business logo and site link, etc. These are ad assets. I have a full YouTube video that is going to be in the description of the of this video below. I have a full video on ad assets. I go through each and every ad asset, what it means, what it looks like and how to create them. Go check that video out in this video. I don't want to go through all of that. However, I will leave you with this. Make sure you add every ad asset that makes sense for your ad and ad group that you're actually building an ad for. So you'll have plenty to choose from. Just make sure you're adding them if they're relevant to the ad or ad group that you're creating the ad in. Okay, so one thing I want to talk about and this is huge. So ad strength. You see how this ad strength here, people will freak out about ad strength. Let me share something with you that most people have not seen. This is straight from Google's mouth. It is on their support page about ad strength for responsive search ads. It's this snippet right here that's super important. The ad strength rating of an ad doesn't directly influence your ads serving eligibility. Instead, the ad strength rating identifies opportunities during the ad creation or editing stage to improve your ad to optimize their performance. What does that mean? It means the ad strength is a made up of metric by Google to try to help you improve your ad creation process. It means absolutely nothing when it comes to the amount of impressions or how well your ad will actually do. Let me show you an example of that. This is for the same Brand home reserve. This is inside of their brand campaign. So we're targeting home reserve keywords only. We're going to. We have quality scores of 10, 10 out of 10 on all of those. Right now we have launched a new deep seat sectional. It's a, it's a new product type for us and our brand ad we wanted to make sure just spoke about the new deep seat sectional. It coexisted with our other marketing channels and messaging that we have going on, especially like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. So we don't want 15 different headlines where Google is going to create combinations out of those. Right, and I'll talk about that as well. So what we have done is we have penned home reserve at one, new deep sectionals at two, order online today number three. All right, so that means now Google can show two headlines if they want or they can show up to three. I wanted to control that though. Home reserve should always be number one in this. And then we wanted new deep sectionals to always show. And so that's at position two. And, and then order online today. If they were to show all three, I'm basically controlling the ad completely Google. So here it shows all three. Now Google can't do a bunch of weird combinations. This is the exact ad message that we wanted right now at this stage for our brand terms. Look at my ad strength. Poor. It's not poor. This is a brand campaign. My keywords have 10 out of 10 quality scores. We're absolutely getting an insanely high click through rate. And obviously this ad performs well given the fact that it's. It's brand keywords. So this ad strength means nothing. Did we see impression loss? Absolutely not. Did we see decreases in conversions and clicks? No, we did not. With that there's also, and I will link this too in the description. There's a great blog post by Ad Alice's which is a third party Google Ads tool for optimizing. They analyzed I think like a million ads within their group of accounts that they have that use their software so quickly in this wrap up they have here. This is really what I wanted to point out. This might seem controversial but having an excellent versus poor ad shrink does not seem to affect your account in any significant way. We conclude from our research. And then they've got a bunch of different points here again link in the description on that. I wanted to show that though because they tested millions of ads. Obviously in my video you're seeing me just talk about one particular brand. I have tested this with multiple clients. We See no difference. Now let's go back to our ad. Right. Should you use all 15 headlines? There's like, I've seen debates about this. I do not believe you have to. If you can use all 15 and be unique and your ad is impactful. Absolutely. You'll notice in the ad I created today, I only have 14 I didn't even use. Now I could easily probably find another one. Sure. The more headlines you give, the more opportunity you give Google to find a combination that's actually going to be impactful. Descriptions. I always, always include four. There's really no need not to. Google will usually show two, but it's just four unique descriptions. Go ahead and add four. But headlines. No, I do not believe you need to use all 15. However, I'm not saying don't use all 15. Only use 15 if you're creating relevant, unique headlines, not repeating yourself over and over again like I showed you as an example in the beginning of this video. Another thing to think about. If you have 15 headlines in four descriptions, think how many combinations that is. I'll share with you how many that actually is. Okay, so I fired up Claude AI tool that I like to use. I didn't want to do public math for you. So here we are. So you've got 15 headlines. Four. Four descriptions. Google's going to need about 100 impressions per ad combination to know the performance of that combination. So you've got 15 headlines, four descriptions. All right. And you need 100 impressions to determine its performance for each. Unique combinations. Okay, well, with 15 headlines and four descriptions, total number of possible combinations, 2, 730. Total number of impressions needed 273 combinations, thousand. To test all possible combinations of headlines and descriptions. That will never happen. And that's why, well, in most cases in big accounts, yes, it does happen. But for small spender and you don't get thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands of impressions, you're never actually going to even give Google a chance to optimize the combinations for all 15 headlines and those four descriptions. So let me show what that actually looks like. After you have an ad created, it will give you a performance label. So let me show you what that performance label looks like. All right, so I have an ad pulled up here. If you go under View Asset Details, this will take you to some reporting on it. This then shows you the performance labels that'll give your headlines and descriptions. So you can see here. Good, good, good. And then you see a bunch of these in learning. Right? Well, why are they in learning? Part of the reason responsive search ads usually need around 2,000 impressions in the Google search top. That means the top ad spots over 30 days to display a rating. So in most cases for for smaller accounts that don't have a lot of volume of impressions, you end up basically with just a bunch of of these performance ratings of learning. You can't really even do anything with that. You have no idea what that actually means in regards to the performance of the description and headlines. So on accounts that have lower search volume where I can't get hundreds of thousands of impressions for, I actually like to reduce headlines on purpose because now instead of going from 2700 different combinations, well if I only am using five headlines, I'm now reducing the amount of combinations that Google needs in order to test each unique combination. So I am not telling you not to use 15 headlines. I am just telling you if you have small volume of impressions at your ad group level, you're never even going to get performance labels because Google's never even going to be able to actually test all of the unique combinations if you're using 15 headlines with four descriptions. I have seen better ad testing results on smaller accounts just by reducing the amount of headlines I am testing. With all that said about ad strength, do not get caught on whether or not your ad strength is excellent or good or poor. It does not matter. Here's what you should be focused on. Are you writing solid ad copy that's impactful and resonates with the person who's actually searching for the keywords you're bidding on? Is the click through rate good? Is your conversion rate good and are you hitting your goal? Whether that's a cost per acquisition or return on ad spend, focus on that. Don't get caught up on this made up metric by Google called the Ad strength. There you go. You now know how to create a responsive search ad set step by step. I even give you an easy template to follow. That way you are not creating a bunch of fluff and repeating the same thing over and over again and instead you're writing impactful ad copy that will resonate with the searcher for the keywords you're bidding on. I hope you got great value from this. If you have any questions, put them in the comments below. I will gladly answer if I know the answer and I will see you on the next video.