When Google released Responsive Search Ads, my first reaction was, “great! I finally have enough characters to write decent copy!”. That reaction was short-lived once I found myself staring at 15 blank headline columns in Excel. How many ways can I say “Buy These Jeans”? I began to begrudge RSAs, thinking them excessive and annoying. I knew this was the way of the future but Google did not have me sold yet.
Slowly I began to introduce them to my accounts, one campaign at a time. And I never aimed for 15 headlines. I told myself to get to 9 and call it “good enough”. Then I spoke to someone at Google who explained that the point is not to say “Buy These Jeans” 15 different ways, but instead to add depth and more information. I began to see headlines as similar to Callout Extensions; a chance to highlight features, benefits, and branding. So with that in mind, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.
Oh hey, quick trick: when you are in Google Ads Editor, do the following and make your ad copy-writing life easier:
Open Editor
Go to Ads and then Expanded Text Ads
Highlight all of your Ads in the Ad Groups you need to create ETAs for
Go to the top right corner and select “Export As”
Select Export As Responsive Search Ads
This action downloads your current ETAs in a spreadsheet that has all the columns needed for loading ads as Responsive Search Ads. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Now back to my story of RSA redemption.
I dropped 1 responsive ad in each ad group and let it run, optimizing bids and budgets over the course of 45 days. I went to check in on ad performance, not expecting much.
Boy oh boy was I surprised! RSAs were crushing it!
Now, this is just one account. But it gives me good hope. And it means I should probably stop rolling my eyes when Google pushes RSA coverage.
So, here are my best tips for writing exceptional RSAs:
Write the first 3 headlines and first 2 description lines as if you are writing a stand-alone ad. Better yet, see the download trick above and the work is done for you.
Take up all the real estate. This applies to all ad formats (for the most part). Short headlines are choppy and don’t look appealing in the results page.
Pin the headlines and description lines that are the most important
When you are stuck at “what else can I say in this headline?” try one of the following:
Treat them like longer Callout Extensions
Test out “fluffier” language–language you would use in print ads, language found on your About Us section on the website.
You may think you have the most robust, well-rounded RSAs out there. But what you think is irrelevant. It is what Google thinks. And Google will let you know how you are doing. Did you know this? You can see how Google is rating your ad strength.
After you have your ads running a bit, go into the UI and filter your view to look at RSAs. Modify your columns and select Attributes and select the two boxes I have highlighted below.
Now you can see how you did your first go round and make adjustments necessary! Brilliant!
So if you like to grumble a bit when Google changes the rules of the game ever so slightly, I can relate. But I am here to tell urge you not to fight it for too long and lean into the changes. You will get better and better at writing 15 headlines and hopefully, you too can reap the rewards of implementing these across your campaigns.
People don’t always “search” for what they are looking for.
When I buy shoes I typically just go directly to Nike because I am familiar with their brand and their products. I don’t think I have ever Googled for shoes.
The same goes with ads, yes, I have been shown ads for shoes on Facebook and Google, but it’s never led me to purchase a shoe.
Now that doesn’t mean marketing or SEO doesn’t work. All of that helps you build a brand, which is what causes the majority of purchases.
And when you look at Nike’s brand, they generate more searches on a monthly basis than people just typing in the word “shoes”.
It’s roughly 5 to 1… for everyone person typing in “shoes” into Google, 5 type in “Nike”.
That’s the power of building a brand.
Time solves all problems
Because you are here, you are probably somewhere familiar with marketing and you may even be an expert on it.
But let me ask you this question… have you heard of the following brands?
Isobar
Wunderman Thompson
Huge
Performics
Grey
Those are all ad agencies that have thousands of employees. But yet most of us, even though we are familiar with marketing have never heard of them.
And it doesn’t mean they don’t have a small brand, they more so have a large brand within a very specific audience segment.
And that audience is their ideal cliental”. If you are a large company that can spend $25,000,000 or more on marketing each year, you probably are familiar with those companies.
So the key isn’t to just build a big brand like Nike, it’s to build a big brand with your target audience.
Now if your product or service targets everyone, kind of like Nike does, then of course you’ll want to build something everyone knows.
What you’ll also find is your brand will naturally grow over time.
Even though you probably haven’t heard of the ad agencies above, their brands have grown to be large by just being in business for enough years.
I thought it would be fun to share with you some numbers on the power of time.
As I mentioned above, I am focused on growing my company NP Digital. It’s currently on its 4th year in business.
That’s not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but it is something.
But here is what’s cool when we first started out in year 1 all of our business was generated through SEO, content marketing and social media marketing.
Those were the channels we leveraged to generate sales.
Fast forward to today, we still leverage those channels, but now 27% of our sales are generated through word of mouth, referrals and brand recognition.
It’s not the biggest percentage, but just imagine what happens when you are in business for 20 years or even just 10. It’s a massive compounding effect, assuming you provide a good product or service.
So, if you really want to grow your revenue you just have to be patient and keep doing good work and of course do good marketing as that is what will kick start the natural growth.
So, what’s your plan Neil?
I already spend a lot of my time on marketing, but I am doubling down in ways you probably won’t have guessed.
More social media – I’m now producing content on a daily basis for social media (nothing revolutionary here, but it gets the brand out more).
Maintain SEO – even though I am big on SEO… you can only rank for so many keywords. I’ve been doing it long enough where it is mainly on maintenance mode.
Podcasting – been doing this for years now. Averaging over a million downloads a month. Podcasting hasn’t really kicked in yet as it hasn’t been widely adopted.
Speaking at conferences – towards the end of the year I will be back on the speaking circuit. You can’t touch as many people as you can through content marketing, but at conferences people pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a ticket, so they are the right audience.
But what else?
Those marketing tactics are just the standard ones that we all know about and use. I am now starting to go after channels that we take for granted…
TV ads – within 30 days I will have TV ads going on stock channels like Bloomberg and CNBC. A lot of the people viewing those channels are my ideal audience. It’s unconventional, my competition won’t touch it due to poor ROI, but I believe TV is one of the best channels if you want to build a massive brand. Plus it’s not much more expensive than Facebook.
Awards – we’ve already gotten a lot of awards for our work. We will keep applying for more. It hasn’t driven any business yet, but I do think it is great for brand building in the long run.
PR – we hired a PR agency last month. They recently got me interviewed on CNBC. It only drove 7 visitors, but it is a start. Eventually the goal is to be consistently interviewed on TV.
Research firms – there is an age old saying in the business world… “you don’t get fired for buying IBM”. In the marketing world, getting in Forrester and Gartner can create a similar effect. It takes a long time and costs a lot of money to get in, but in the long run you generate leads from large corporations. As they turn to Forrester and Gartner to figure out which marketing agencies to hire.
I’ll add more to the mix as we grow. For now, just adding the 4 new channels to the mix above is already a lot of work.
And compared to the digital channels I started with, I bet the new additions won’t have as high of a conversion rate or even return on investment.
But that’s alright. The goal is to build a big business and sometimes you have to invest even when no ROI can be made because you know in the long run building a brand with your ideal audience will pay off.
Conclusion
Most marketers that I know of focus on ROI. For every dollar they spend they want to make 2 or even 3.
I look at things differently. I focus on building a brand and a reputation. Even if it doesn’t produce an ROI directly, I believe it can help you become a leader within your industry.
And if you can become a leader, eventually the numbers will work out, but of course it is a gamble.
It’s the same reason I got into blogging back in 2005 when others weren’t willing to. I believed that if you educated and helped others out, eventually it would pay off. But for the first 8 years I was in the hole and couldn’t show a return.
I’m experience the same currently with producing videos for YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. But in the long run I believe it will pay off.
Now the real question is, are you willing to play the long game and invest where others aren’t willing to?
Our updated guide is designed to not only walk you through set up but ensure you have the necessary assets in place to run successful Google Ads campaigns.
We are always looking for more ways we can provide valuable info and insights to the digital marketing community. In our quest, we’ve been developing industry specific reports over the last few months that pull together paid media trends across a number of platforms – Google, Bing, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
In our newest report, we focus on ecommerce. The report covers trends and benchmarks, where dollars are being invested, our thoughts as an agency on what’s happening, and how big trends, like machine learning, are impacting the marketers in this industry.
Here’s a look at some of the stats you’ll find in this report:
– The Short Report: Paid Advertising Trends for Ecommerce Marketers
The report also goes through how budgets will change in the next 12 months, the things that ecommerce marketers want to be better at, and predictions from the Hanapin team for the industry, like this:
P.S. We’ve created short reports for the SaaS and Travel industries too! And in the not too distant future, we’ll also release short reports for Healthcare, Finance, and Education. Subscribe to our email newsletter if you would like to be the first to hear about those reports.
The 50 most profitable Internet companies in the world made billions of dollars in 2020, but how much website traffic do these companies actually get? Which of these companies has the most visited website? Using the Semrush Traffic Analytics tool, our insights team analyzed the number of unique visitors to each of the 50 Internet companies’ root domains for all 12 months of 2020 to find the total number of unique visits for the year.
Mike Grehan (@mikegrehan) is one of the first people I looked to for guidance, knowledge and education when I first began my journey in the SEO industry. His write ups on patents, how search works and his perspectives on SEO are legendary and at a different level and have been for as long as I’ve known him.
He started in the industry in 1995 and as a single parent at the time, he needed to find something to do where he could work from home. He started an internet marketing consulting company in 1995, it was visionary but back then, no one wanted it. He started in search so so early, and fully into search in 1997. We reminisced about the early days of search, even pre-Google, there were tons of search engines, mostly using text to rank pages. Those early days there were only a few people, literally a few people, in the space.
He shared some amazing stories about the early days and even how those early days, he was able to see where everything was headed today. We discussed some specific examples of machine learning, mobile, voice, structured data and schema, etc. Google’s reliance on structured data is not surprising to him because the web grows so fast that the task for Google is huge. He discussed the topic of depth first versus breadth first in search.
Mike said we shouldn’t worry too much about zero click because of how people search. He said for conversion related queries, you probably do not need to worry much – for the informational queries, you are getting branding out of it. Google will help you create that brand affinity early and then hopefully during the conversion stage, it makes that part easier. Mike’s advice, learn how to optimize for zero clicks just like we did when the snippet came out ages ago.
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic and Mike explained how Google and Bing use AI in search and search ads. He said using AI for optimizing around the dollar is easier. But when it comes to organic search, it is a different thing. The problem with organic search is that the users are subjective in their tastes and machines are not good at being subjective. We then talked about debugging machine learning in search.
Mike has been so instrumental in the creation of the SEO industry and the community in a massive way. I asked him the hard question about picking one experience, one company, he helped. He said that one thing was helping out with Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch and his newsletter. He loved to watch the community come together around then. It was 20 years since the first SEO conference, SES 1999. He was very involved in speaking and running the events in the early days and it was so nice. And then he took on a role later when Danny left Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies to lead those two properties, it was a dream he said. He loved that period and it was so exciting he said. But he said in his heart, in his blood, he is an agency guy and came back and works at Acronym.
It was an honor to interview Mike Grehan and meet the awesome team at Acronym.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Jeffery Jose, Google Product Manager, not only announced that the page experience update is coming to desktop at Google I/O but also announced that “Google Search will prefetch websites built using signed exchanges.” He said this was announced earlier this year but can make a huge difference with your core web vitals scores.
Google seems to be adding a setting to Google My Business to allow businesses to hide their phone numbers from showing up in Google Maps and Google Search’s local results. An updated Google help document says you can now “hide the phone number on your Business Profile.”
