17th June 2022

Why You Should Never Pin Assets in Your Responsive Search Ads

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Ed Parker
Senior Paid Media Operations Executive
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As Google Ads continues to shift towards automated campaigns previous best practices are starting to become…well…not so best practice.

To pin or not to pin, that is the question

One of these outdated best practices is the pinning of headlines and descriptions in Responsive Search Ads. In short, pinning just one headline in your RSA’s eliminates Googles testing options by 93%.

“93%!” I hear you say, well let me explain the maths to make it clearer.

When you create a responsive search ad, you typically fill out the full 15 available slots, this means:

  • Headline one has 15 options
  • Headline two has 14 options
  • Headline three has 13 options

Which is a total of 2,730 combinations.

But if you pin a headline to slot one, the following will occur:

  • Headline one has one option
  • Headline two has 14 options
  • Headline three has 13 options

That reduces the combinations to just 182!

This then means that the Ad Strength will decrease as Google has significantly less to work with and optimise towards.

We recently ran an A/B test between pinned & unpinned RSAs. The pinned RSAs had 5x headlines pinned at each position, and 2x descriptions pinned at each position.

Not only did we find that Ad Strength was significantly higher in the unpinned RSAs, but the CTR also increased; in one instance there was an increase of 32% between the two variations over the test period.

Next time you are setting up Responsive Search Ads consider how pinning assets could be limiting Google’s capabilities to show best performing combination and ultimately limiting your performance.

At equimedia we know how fast the Pay Per Click landscape can change, so if you need support or guidance with your PPC activity, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to help!

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Author Ed Parker