We find more and more ecommerce merchants are getting confused about Google Ads poor ad strength warnings. What is ad strength? How do you improve the ad strength? In this post we’ll explore these ideas. But the quick answer is that Google’s ad strength is one of the least important metrics in your ad account.
Ad strength is not actually a measurement of any objective metric. It merely indicates whether your ad conforms to a checklist of things Google says are best practices. There are actually no real “best practices” in digital advertising (see: There Are No Best Practices in Digital Advertising). Best practices are formulaic lists of things that often work well, but that aren’t universal. You can consider them good advice much of the time, and good rules of thumb to generally follow. But if you know what you’re doing, you also know that rules of thumb sometimes need to be broken to get the best results.
Ad Strength vs. Quality Score
People confuse ad strength and quality score a lot. Quality score is a metric that actually impacts financial returns, because it is factored into the auction bidding algorithms. If you have a poor quality score, you’ll pay more per click. Ad strength has no such impact. The whole reason ad strength exists is to nudge you to flesh out your ads more in ways that Google has determined often work well to improve performance.
But again, ad strength is not a measure of performance. Ad strength levels do not actually, by themselves, affect ad performance. Taking action based on Google’s generic, big picture analysis of best practices may or may not be appropriate to your situation.
Avoiding The Pitfalls of Ad Strength Recommendations
So should you do anything about your Google Ads poor ad strength? Maybe. But maybe not.
Ad strength recommendations may nudge you to add some more images and videos so your ads can show in more contexts. Ad strength can nudge you to thinking more creatively about your creative. And while ad strength by itself won’t impact your performance, it can nudge you to take actions that might impact performance—for better or worse.
And that is the Achille’s heel of this non-metric. The ad strength warnings may actually lead you to make really bad decisions. Let’s consider some examples where you might be wondering how to improve Google ad strength.
You might have a very tight ad group for a small set of products in a highly regulated industry. Your legal team has given you some very carefully-crafted wording that you can use to promote these products. Google will tell you that your ad strength is poor. The recommendation for how to improve poor ad strength will tell you to add more variety to your headlines and descriptions. But you can’t. You have to say precisely what you can legally say.
Or you may have already tested a lot of ad copy. You’ve kicked out the low-performing messaging, and you’ve arrived at some highly performing ads. Google will unhelpfully tell you that your ad strength is now poor because you have less text to choose from in serving ads. If you actually follow the recommendations to increase variation in ad copy, you will be using lower-performing assets that drag down your results.
Google might be telling you that you need to include more videos of different formats in a Performance Max campaign asset group. But you don’t have any such videos. The production costs of making more videos might far exceed any potential gains you would get from having videos displayed in a few more contexts for campaigns that are primarily driving performance through shopping ads on a search engine results page.
These kinds of situations abound. But Google’s automated recommendation systems simply don’t understand the other tradeoffs involved.
Take Ad Strength Feedback in Context
The bottom line is that the ad strength system is useful, but only as a set of guidelines for how you can improve ads in default ways that generally work. Consider the context of the suggestion and consider whether it applies to your particular advertising case. And consider testing to determine whether suggested changes bring better results or not.
Don’t confuse ad strength for an objective metric, or fall into the trap of thinking it impacts performance directly. Ads with a poor ad strength might be the top performing ads in your account. What matters is your performance, not whether you’re living up to some best practice recommendations that don’t actually work in every situation.