Since paid search advertising began, one of the longstanding best practices has always been to include at least three to five ads in each ad group. The rationale behind this is that the more ads you give to the search engine, the more chances it will find one that performs very well and will more often serve that to users.
So, ideally, 3-5 is just the starting point. To truly maximize performance, search marketers should be rotating in more ads for the search engines to test.
But building and managing this many ads can be time-consuming and complex! For example, if you have 50 campaigns with ten ad groups each, 500 ads need to be created just for 1 ad per group. To reach the best practice of 3 to 5 per group means 1500 to 2500 ads need to be written! And that doesn’t include all of the uploading, launching, and updating that occurs throughout the year to manage all of these ads.
So, yes, handling paid search creative is one of the significant challenges of this channel. But, because paid search is such an essential part of every company’s advertising strategy, search marketers have spent countless hours over the last two decades writing new ads as a way to improve their campaign performance.
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) offer power, time savings, and performance
To help search marketers with ad creation, in September 2019, Microsoft Search Advertising released a new, creative ad format called responsive search ads—or just RSAs. With these ads, marketers don’t manually craft compelling search text ads but rather provide 15 headlines and four lines of descriptions. Using these, Microsoft Search Advertising optimizes the ad copy to create the most effective ads for potential customers.
If 3-5 ads per ad group is a best practice, then it’s no wonder why search marketers have been rapidly adopting RSAs as a single set of headlines & descriptions that offer 43,680 unique ads!
That’s a lot of options for Microsoft Search Advertising, and the chances of finding a truly valuable combination are very high. The best-performing ad combinations are automatically identified and reported to you, while the ineffective ads aren’t shown again. Adapting your ad’s content to match what potential customers are searching for can help to improve your campaign’s performance.
If you’re not sold yet, here are the advantages of RSAs over manual text ads (ETAs):
Increase efficiency. Providing multiple headlines and description options allows Microsoft ads to present the most relevant combinations to your users.
Expand your reach. Multiple headlines and descriptions options enable your ads to compete in more auctions and match more queries.
Optimized ads. Microsoft Search Advertising’s’ algorithms constantly test which combinations work best to drive clicks and conversions and optimize your ads in real-time.
Increase ad group performance. Attracting more clicks and conversions allows competing in more auctions and enhancing your ads’ performance.
Based on Microsoft Search Advertising’s internal research across multiple verticals, RSAs perform better than standard text ads (ETAs):
- 11% higher conversion rate, 7% more conversions
- 17% more clicks, 16% more impressions
- 4% lower cost per acquisition (CPA)
Skai’s Responsive Search Ads support
Skai’s Paid Search solution can help you to drive performance, increase productivity, and stay sharp with campaign insights that enable data-driven decision-making:
Scale your activity with Campaign mirroring. For example, create the RSAs just once in Google and mirror RSAs onto Microsoft Search Advertising with the click of a button.
Gain full transparency with Auditing. See where RSAs are missing in your account so you can fill in the gaps.
Save time with Bulk creation and editing of RSAs. Create or edit hundreds of RSAs in bulk for Microsoft.
Explore and learn with Experiments. Test and measure your RSAs performance vs. your ETAs to ensure the best transition.
Make better decisions via Skai’s Reporting. View and analyze all your ads creatives in the analysis grid.
Make your MSA for RSA program successful with these tips
Microsoft Search Advertising provides these best practices for using responsive search ads:
- Create responsive search ads in existing ad groups. We recommend having 2-3 text ads and one responsive text ad in an ad group for optimal performance. Please note that there is a limit of 3 enabled responsive search ads per ad group.
- Provide as many assets as possible. Aim to provide at least 8-10 distinct headlines that don’t contain similar phrases. Use a combination of short and long headlines to maximize space on any device. Create titles related to your keywords and use at least one brand title. Use a single dynamic keyword insertion.
- Make content distinct. Avoid repetitive language and create distinct descriptions. Include additional product or service benefits and features, a clear call-to-action, and shipping and return information.
- Avoid pinning headlines or descriptions, if possible. Pinning restricts the number of header or descriptions combinations to match a customer’s search.
- Combine auto-bidding to optimize your target metrics. Leverage even more automation and computing power with RSA + auto-bidding.
Microsoft Search Advertising + Skai search marketing solutions
Automation, performance, and efficiency once represented the entire advantage of premium search marketing software. Today, they’re the table stakes. Search marketers looking for true competitive advantage need the tools to achieve an unbiased, holistic optimization strategy. And that’s where Skai comes in.
A history of innovation in data, bidding, and measurement, combined with an independent, media-agnostic, and omnichannel position, sets search marketers up to stay in control while driving true business growth—at scale.
To learn more about Skai’s unique Microsoft Search Advertising options regarding managing Responsive Search Ads, reach out today to schedule a quick demo to see all of our cutting-edge features for yourself.
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