Google — who earns more every time someone clicks — has a very different definition of a "good ad" than you do. Here's what a properly written Search ad actually looks like, and why most advertisers get it wrong.
Every headline has a job. Assign it one.
Google gives you up to 15 headlines. They'd love you to fill all 15 and let them mix and match freely. Don't.
When Google assembles your ad, it's optimising for CTR — click-through rate. That's its revenue model. More clicks means more money for Google, regardless of whether those clicks convert. So if you hand over 15 loose headlines and let Google do whatever it wants, you'll get an ad that's great at attracting clicks and mediocre at attracting customers.
The fix is simple: give each headline a specific function, and pin it in place.
Pinning. The step almost everyone skips.
Without pinning, Google will serve your headlines in any order, in any combination. Your service name might end up in position 3 (which often doesn't show at all on mobile). Your CTA might disappear entirely. You end up with whatever combination Google decided was most likely to get a click that day.
Same problem, different industry:
Pinning is how you enforce the structure. Google will push back — it'll flag your ad as having a lower "ad strength" rating. Ignore it. Ad strength is Google's measure of how much freedom you've given them to optimise for clicks. It is not a measure of how well your ad converts.
Descriptions: lead with something useful
Description lines get skimmed. Most people won't read them in full, so the first few words carry most of the weight.
One thing to check before you publish: read all your description line combinations together. A USP mentioned in description 1 shouldn't reappear in description 2. And none of the combinations should contradict each other.
Split test properly
One well-structured ad is better than three lazy ones. But two well-structured ads testing different angles is better than one.
The point of split testing isn't to throw everything at the wall. It's to test a specific hypothesis. Does "fixed pricing" outperform "same-day response" as the headline USP? Does a quote-based CTA outperform a call-based one? Each ad should have a clear focus, and the variations within that ad should just be different phrasings of the same idea — letting Google optimise the wording, not the strategy.
Google can find the best-performing version of your headline. It can't decide what the headline should be about. That's your job.
The short version
Google will rate your ads poorly for doing this. They'll warn you about "limited ad strength." They'll suggest adding more headlines and removing your pins. That's fine. They're optimising for their conversion rate, not yours.
For a deeper look at how Google's recommendations are designed to maximise their revenue — and what to do instead — read our piece on the mass delusion around Google's default settings →
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