Ever wrestled with the urge to micromanage every detail, even when you know it's best to step back and trust the process? That's exactly the dilemma we unpack in this conversation about the use of pinning in responsive search ads in Google Ads. In this discussion, we'll explain what pinning is, and we'll examine the allure of control versus how Google's machine learning and AI can fully optimize unpinned ads. If you've ever questioned the balance between firm control and algorithmic autonomy in your ad campaigns, specifically your ad copy and structure, this episode promises to provide clarity.
Join Jason for a journey into the heart of Google Ads' responsive search ads, where he'll explore the delicate dance between advertiser controlled headline and description placement versus the unpinned machine-tailored configurations (aka responsiveness). We'll cover the one time where it can make sense to use pinning and why most of the time it's so critical to let go, allowing machine learning to conjure up the most compelling ad combinations for the search user.
This deep dive isn't just about pinning—it's about understanding how to maximize the powerful tools at your disposal in Google Ads for the most effective ad performance. Stay tuned, and by the end of this episode, you'll understand how a PPC expert makes informed decisions about pinning and you'll be that much closer to wielding the full potential of responsive search ads to captivate and convert your audience.
To Pin, Or Not To Pin? - https://rothmanppc.substack.com/p/to-pin-or-not-to-pin
Follow Jason - https://twitter.com/rothmanppc
Contact Jason - https://rothmanppc.com/contact/
Ever wrestled with the urge to micromanage every detail, even when you know it's best to step back and trust the process? That's exactly the dilemma we unpack in this conversation about the use of pinning in responsive search ads in Google Ads. In this discussion, we'll explain what pinning is, and we'll examine the allure of control versus how Google's machine learning and AI can fully optimize unpinned ads. If you've ever questioned the balance between firm control and algorithmic autonomy in your ad campaigns, specifically your ad copy and structure, this episode promises to provide clarity.
Join Jason for a journey into the heart of Google Ads' responsive search ads, where he'll explore the delicate dance between advertiser controlled headline and description placement versus the unpinned machine-tailored configurations (aka responsiveness). We'll cover the one time where it can make sense to use pinning and why most of the time it's so critical to let go, allowing machine learning to conjure up the most compelling ad combinations for the search user.
This deep dive isn't just about pinning—it's about understanding how to maximize the powerful tools at your disposal in Google Ads for the most effective ad performance. Stay tuned, and by the end of this episode, you'll understand how a PPC expert makes informed decisions about pinning and you'll be that much closer to wielding the full potential of responsive search ads to captivate and convert your audience.
To Pin, Or Not To Pin? - https://rothmanppc.substack.com/p/to-pin-or-not-to-pin
Follow Jason - https://twitter.com/rothmanppc
Contact Jason - https://rothmanppc.com/contact/
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Rothman PPC podcast. Thanks for being here. I'm recording this in late February 2024. On today's episode we're going to talk about pinning pinning inside of responsive search ads. I was talking with an advertiser this week probably a guy like a lot of you small business owner wanted to improve his ad copy and we got to the topic of pinning and we got into an interesting conversation where the advertiser was very much wanting to pin his ads. They're his ads, he can pin. But he was asking my opinion and I was telling him I don't think it's a good idea. It's not a good idea. And we got to talking about it and we got to talking about why and I think he agreed with my reasoning. I really don't see how you can't, to be honest, because it's very, very cutting dry thing to me and we'll lay that out. But it's very interesting with some advertisers who want to pin. They do get something from it and it's got to do with the control of the ad copy and when someone's very much motivated to pin, what I found is it's often hard to get them to not pin their ads and kind of let that control go. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about why you would want to do that, but it was an interesting conversation and kind of led me to think about pinning and wanted to put my thoughts together and that's what we'll talk about today. So bit of a I wouldn't say controversial topic, but I would say a topic that there's differing opinions on, and people who really want to do it do it. People who don't like it really don't like it. I would fall in that camp. And then there's one exception to that, where sometimes it can make sense, and I'll lay all that out today. But again, thank you for being here. Rothman PPC podcast. And we talked about Google ads from the perspective of business owners and marketing managers out there trying to get as many leads as possible for the advertising budget. I also have a YouTube channel, so check that out as well. So let's talk about pinning.
Jason Rothman:So what is pinning? For those of you who are not familiar with it, if you open up a responsive search ad inside of a Google ad search campaign, what you'll see? There is 15 headlines that you can put in there and then four descriptions. And if you take your mouse and you hover over the box where you enter in your text for the headline and your text. For the descriptions, you will see a gray pin show up on the right side of that text box and when you click the pin you'll have options. You can leave the description or headline unpinned and let it show in any position, or you can click it to for headlines, pin in position one, two or three, or descriptions, pin in position one or two. So those are your options. And then when you click it and you do pin if you do pin, you will see that the pin then becomes blue, and that is how that works. So what does that do when you do that? Well, it forces that headline to show up only in that position. It says it right there Show only in position one, show only in position two or show only in position three. And then, for the description, show only in position one or show only in position two, and that's what it does.
Jason Rothman:The question is, why pin? Why do some advertisers want to pin? And the answer basically comes down to control. It's controlling how, it's controlling where your ad copy shows up. So, and in some cases, which we'll talk about, it's forcing ad copy to show up. So we'll get into all that.
Jason Rothman:But let's take a step back and just briefly talk about what responsive search ads are. So responsive search ads are when, basically, you have your keywords and you kind of instruct Google what searches you want to show up on by use of those keywords. You have broad match, phrase, exact match, and what you choose is your keywords will in a large, large way, determine where your ads show or to what searches they show up on. That's the keyword side of things. But what does it mean to show up? What does it mean to show? It means to show on search, your responsive search ad, and that is what the search user sees. That is their first interaction with your business when they do a Google search. They go to Google, they search for a roofing company and they see your ad there. And then what is an ad?
Jason Rothman:An ad, a responsive search ad, is made up of, for the most part, headlines and descriptions. There's other stuff, there's assets, there's the display URL, display path, but for the most part, the primary things you'll see are headlines and descriptions. And this is where the word responsive comes into the phrase responsive search ad. It used to be back in the day you had search ads and then you had expanded text ads where they gave us more character limits and just more ad copy. And then things really really, really got opened up with responsive search ads and basically what you do is you throw in up to 15 headlines, you throw in up to four descriptions and Google uses that ad copy to be responsive to the individual search from that person on that search at that exact moment in time. But basically, that auction, that individual search, and which ad copy do they choose to show, which headlines do they choose to show, which descriptions do they choose to show?
Jason Rothman:The way I view this is that is all based on the goals that you set up inside the campaign and they choose to show the ad copy, the headlines and the descriptions that best match your goals, that will most likely to be accomplishing your goals on that individual search at that exact moment in time. That's how I look at it. And you have 15 headlines, you have four descriptions, but a lot less of that shows up on any individual search. I've read that it could be just one headline, but usually I see two or three and then usually I see two, one or two descriptions. So that's one to three headlines out of 15 and one or two descriptions out of four. So you're putting in a lot more into the ad copy that can show, then does show up on any individual search. So the reason you're doing that is because you're throwing as much as you can at the machine to give you the best chance of the machine picking out the best part of what you threw at it to show to that individual search at that exact moment in time.
Jason Rothman:And it's pretty much all responsive ads. Now there are still expanded text ads that are still out there and running. You can't edit old expanded text ads but they are still out there in some cases. But when we were going through that transition from expanded text ads to responsive search ads, I looked at a lot of data and pretty much every time responsive search ads just crushed expanded text ads in terms of accomplishing your goals with click through rate, conversion rate and then also the big one was how often the ads got impressions. When you basically have like five or more whatever expanded text ad inside of a responsive search ad, just because there's so much copy for it to choose from and because it's so much more powerful, it has a better chance at choosing ad copy that passes that threshold to have a high enough ranking ad to show and that's why I think they showed up a lot more than expanded text ads during that transition. But that's basically what a responsive search ad is. You throw a lot at it, 15 headlines for descriptions and then Google chooses which specific headlines and descriptions show and the order they show in on any individual and every individual search. And that's how they work and I really really like them.
Jason Rothman:One, yeah, and then so let's talk about what effect this pinning have. And so the reason we said why someone would want to pin is because control you would get to control where the ad copy shows up like this headline has to show in this position, this description has to show in this position, and you can put a lot of control over the responsive search ad. That's why people want to pin. But the effect that that has is if you pin something in number one or number two, that's going to prevent other headlines from showing there, and if you pin something in number three, it's going to prevent other headlines from showing in position three. So let's take that position three example. Or, yeah, let's take position three. If you pin something in position three headline, the chances of other things or, excuse me, the chance of that, that headline showing in position one or two, that's never going to happen because you've pinned it to number three. So all those combinations and say you're a rougher and say that the headline is call us now or call us for a quote. If you pin that to number three, you're never, ever going to know what that headline will do if it's allowed to show in position one or two.
Jason Rothman:So you're preventing headlines and then descriptions the descriptions from showing in other places or like with position one or two. Those are kind of particular. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. You're preventing other things from showing there, you're just preventing. Prevent, that's the word. You're preventing a lot of combinations from showing up and what that does is it can hurt your ad strength because those combinations might be great. The other combinations that you're preventing. They might be really really good for some individual user doing a different search out there and when they do that search, that the great combination would do great on but you don't give it a chance to show on because you've pinned and you prevent all the combinations from being able to run. Then that user is going to get a poorer experience and your ad strength is going to potentially go down. So the big thing is it can affect ad strength and I think if you think about pinning logically and you think about what pinning is and you compare that to the idea of what responsive search ads are, then when Google says pinning can affect ad strength, to me I read that as it can affect it negatively, because what else can it do besides show less combinations and hurt the responsiveness of the responsive search ad and negatively impact that strength. That's how I read it. But the main takeaway is that it does or, excuse me, it can affect ad strength. And then the other thing is prevent. It prevents different combinations.
Jason Rothman:So why don't I like it? Why do I not like pinning and why do I think it's dumb? And I wrote why I don't like it, comma, or why it's dumb, and I really do think it's dumb. It's just to be honest with you. It's just dumb, and the reason why is because it tries to outsmart the machine.
Jason Rothman:Every individual search what's going on with what I call the machine, which is basically it's just a machine. It's the way the system works. It's constantly testing things and constantly gathering data and there's almost an infinite amount of data and scenarios and situations that you can't see sitting inside a Google ads account that the machine sees about the people, about the searches about the people and the searches outside of just searches for your keywords or your campaign history. There's so much data out there that the machine has seen and can see and can test that you can't that. It's just dumb to limit how many headlines and descriptions you had and, honestly, like if we had 30 descriptions and eight excuse me, 30 headlines and eight descriptions and things were doubled, I'd fill it up with 30 headlines and eight descriptions. Like to me it's only logical to throw as much as you can at the machine and give it, give yourself as much of a chance to have as many combinations and have your ad read and look as different as possible as many times to give yourself the best chance to have the right combination for that user on that search at that moment in time. And there's so many different searches and users and moments in time that if you just pick three headlines and two descriptions you're going to totally limit yourself in terms of how good the ads can do.
Jason Rothman:One other thing to keep in mind about pinning and allowing Google to control the order of your headlines and descriptions and which ones show to which users at which times and on which searches. It's all your ad copy anyway. So as long as you're controlling the ad copy the whole idea of control I say give up the positioning. I say give up the order, give up the which one shows where, because you do have an awesome level of control when it comes to the actual copy itself. And then if Google wants to throw a bunch of different combinations at a bunch of users on a bunch of different moments in time, that's going to make your ads better and it's all your ad copy anyway. So I just want to make the point it's all your ad copy anyway. And then the other reason I don't like it is it hurts ad strength, in my view, and limits the potential. We talked about that.
Jason Rothman:And of course the ironic thing is here is if for some reason you're right that this headline just has to be in position one and for 100% of users it's the best position for that headline to be in, if you're right and if that will help you most accomplish your goals, the machine's going to figure that out anyway. So you might as well give it a chance to see if you're wrong, because in almost every case the machine's going to be smarter. Because will something in headline one be better for every single user and help you accomplish your goal on every single search, every single user at every moment in time? Probably not. There's probably going to be other headlines that work better, and even if it's for just one percent of users and just one percent of the time, a different headline would be in position one would most help you accomplish your goal. The machine's going to figure that out, so why not let it figure it out if, basically, the machine has the same goal you do?
Jason Rothman:Now this brings me to the only time it makes sense to pin. There's one time where pinning actually makes sense and that's where you have to show something. And if you put something in, if you pin a headline in position one, if you pin a headline in position two or if you pin a description in position one, that headline in one or two or that description in one will always show. It's different in headline three and it's different in description two. This doesn't apply to those, but in headline position one, headline position two and description position one pinning things to those exact positions headline position one, headline position two, description position one they will always show.
Jason Rothman:So if you have a piece of ad copy that for some reason always has to show up, that's the way you can do it and that's a great tool. That's inside of responsive search ads. It's a great option to have because sometimes copy does need to show in some cases and that's the tool you have to use it. So that to me, that's the only time that pinning can make sense. So that's pretty much it.
Jason Rothman:That's the story on pinning. I don't think it's a gray area thing. I think it makes sense in that one time where, if you have to have ad copy always show, that's your the way you can do it. But outside of that, all I see with pinning are downsides and not using responsive search ads to the full extent that they can be used and not benefiting from all the power that you have inside of a responsive search ad. So we'll be talking a lot about these things in the coming weeks. Episodes will come out every Monday, and then I mentioned the YouTube channel as well. So thanks for listening, thanks for following along and thanks for sharing the show, and I'll see you next week. Peace.