When you decide to advertise on Google, you can be present in several ways, through:
- Search: all paid ads on the Google Search Network
- Display: banner format
- Shopping: product images that appear below the search bar or in the Shopping tab
- YouTube: video ads
When launching, paid search is the foundational channel. It allows you to cover all the keywords you want to appear on and protect your brand name from competitors. It's a highly effective complement to organic search, since the message you communicate is more precise and easy to adjust throughout the year, whether for sales events or your own promotions.
There are 3 ad formats:
- ETA: Expanded Text Ad
- RSA: Responsive Search Ad
- DSA: Dynamic Search Ad
Ads, except DSAs, are keyword-driven. You need to align your ads with the keywords you're bidding on in order to achieve a good Quality Score and therefore have a chance of showing up in user searches.
The ETA is Google's flagship format. It lets you build your ad from scratch and is structured as follows:
- 3 headlines (up to 30 characters each)
- 2 descriptions (up to 90 characters each)
- 1 URL determined by your domain name and the text you choose to add, known as the "path."
Note that depending on your ad's position on the results page, there's no guarantee that the third headline will appear, nor certain extensions. It's therefore important to prioritize your key messages and headlines to make sure the most important elements of your ad show up in every case.
The RSA is a partially automated ad format that lets you A/B test your headlines and descriptions. It consists of:
- 15 headlines
- 4 descriptions
- 1 URL
The purpose of the RSA is to test different combinations of headlines and descriptions. This helps you identify what performs best and potentially refine your ETAs based on those learnings. It's partially automated in that it surfaces combinations based on user searches. RSAs are often the ads that push your overall performance higher.
Finally, there's the DSA, which is particularly useful for e-commerce businesses with a large product catalog and a significant number of pages on their website. Unlike other ad formats, DSAs run without keywords. They crawl and analyze your website, then serve ads based on user search queries. The ad automatically generates headlines, but not descriptions. Its main strengths are covering terms you might not have thought of, handling product ranges too large to manage manually, and capturing higher-funnel searches.
As per Google's best practices, it's recommended to have at least 1 RSA and 2 ETAs within each ad group.
You can then complement your ads with extensions of any type. To learn more about available ad extensions, check out our article on the topic at this link.
It's important to build your ads as thoughtfully as possible, since Google will score them. This is known as the Quality Score. We invite you to read our article on the subject if you want to understand the scoring in detail.
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At datashake, we typically build our Search campaigns using the Google Ads Editor tool, which you can see screenshots of above. It's very useful for getting a clear view of the account, creating or editing campaigns in bulk, and previewing your work.
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Want help with Google Ads or your broader digital marketing strategy? Don't hesitate to reach out!
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By Ronan Lecointre
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