![Blog post thumbnail](https://www.digitalposition.com/resources/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Frame-760-1-300x157.jpg)
Google Merchant Center Classic Transitioning To Google Merchant Center Next
Joined Digital Position in
Bio
Skills
Fun Facts
In Mid-2018, Google Ads rolled out Responsive Search Ads (RSA’s) to advertisers. At the time, the general consensus was that RSA’s performed poorly in PPC. Now in 2021, RSA’s are a generally accepted format in rotation with the older Expanded Text Ads (ETA’s).
However, I’m going to challenge the argument that RSA’s aren’t performing well. They are, you’re just looking at them the wrong way.
Responsive Search Ads contain the following:
RSA’s are intended to give Google’s algorithm more options to choose from in order to help you improve your clickthrough rate, quality score, and ultimately performance.
It seems simple, you should add RSA’s into your ad groups and then compare the performance of the ETA’s vs. the RSA’s right?
Wrong.
Here’s a screenshot of some data, at first glance you’d think the ETA’s outperformed the RSA and we should pause the RSA!
This doesn’t tell the whole story though, now let’s look at the right way.
In 2019 I got the opportunity to speak with a higher up engineer at Google regarding this very topic. I asked him straight up why the RSA’s are performing so poorly. He got pretty antsy and said “they’re not, it’s such a common misconception!”.
The key sentence was this; the intention of an RSA isn’t to beat the ETA’s, it’s to improve the overall ad group performance.
He then went on to explain that the RSA’s, when introduced to an establish ad group, instead of stealing all the traffic and wrecking performance they’ll take the worst performing traffic and try to improve it.
This means that the right way to measure performance of introducing an RSA to an ad group isn’t to compare it to the ETA’s, but look at the performance of the ad group overall before vs. after.
Let’s go back to that ad group from earlier and look through this lens:
The RSA’s performed worse, but the overall ad group CTR increased including the ETA’s!
We believe in having a couple ETA’s and at least 1 RSA in every ad group. This gives you, the advertiser some control but also ensures Google has some “room to play”.
In 2021, we’re seeing RSA’s even outperform ETA’s more consistently as they’re being introduced on a level playing field vs. being thrown into an established ad group with refined copy. We’re also seeing nice quality score improvements as well.
Not to mention, we can imagine a scenario where RSA’s are eventually the only ad format. Get comfortable with them and learn how to use them properly now while you’ve still got the old ETA’s to use as backup!
You need someone in your corner willing to track, strategize, and, not just manage, but absolutely conquer your marketing. Luckily for you, that’s what we do best.
We’re ready when you are.
We eat, sleep, and breathe digital marketing and we love seeing others taking an interest in it too. Subscribe to our mailing list to get notifications about awesome new blog posts like this one (tastefully, we don't spam), or even just say hello in a comment on the post below!
no replies