One ad text per search intent: separate copy for each ad group

A search intent is what the person wants to get done when they search. Someone searching rent coffee machine office wants something different from someone searching coffee machine servicing office, even though both searches are about the same machines. Even so, every ad group in an account sometimes ends up with the same headlines and descriptions. The ad then answers a general question nobody asked.

Google measures exactly this. Ad relevance is one of the three components of Quality Score and, according to Google, describes how closely your ad matches the intent behind a search. The other two components are expected clickthrough rate and landing page experience.

My recommendation is that every ad group gets its own headlines, descriptions and sitelinks, written for that particular search intent. What suits every group is collected in a fixed block that is the same everywhere.

What a search intent is

Searches are usually grouped by what the person wants. The grouping is simple, but it goes a long way when you decide what an ad should say. The table uses a made-up company that sells and rents out coffee machines to offices.

Intent	Example search	What the ad should answer
Wants to understand something	how much does an office coffee machine cost	A rough price level and what affects the price
Compares options	buy or rent coffee machine office	The difference and who each option suits
Wants to buy or book	rent coffee machine office london	That you offer it in that area and how it works
Looks for a particular company	yourcompany contact	That it is you and where the answer is on the website

Within a single category there are usually several intents, and that is where the ad groups should be split. An example: buying, renting and servicing coffee machines become three ad groups, each with its own landing page and its own texts.

Google gives the same advice. According to Google's help page on Quality Score, an ad group with many different keywords that cannot be answered by the same ad should be split into several groups.

Why shared texts go wrong

A responsive search ad can have up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Google combines them itself and shows at most three headlines and two descriptions at a time.

If you fill the 15 slots with lines written for other ad groups, Google may pick exactly those. The person who wanted to rent a machine then reads about servicing, and the person who needed servicing reads about the price of a new machine. The ad looks complete but answers the wrong question.

The same goes for generic lines such as "High quality" and "Best service". They fit in every group but say nothing about the search, and they take up a slot that a line about that particular search could have had.

How we build the texts in an ad group

We use the same template in every Search campaign. It makes new ad groups easy to write because part of the text is already finished and reviewed.

• Headlines 1 to 5 contain the keyword in different forms. All five are pinned to position 1 so that the ad always starts with what the person searched for.
• Headlines 6 to 10 are about the value for this particular search intent. They answer what the person wants to solve and what they get from you.
• Headlines 11 to 15 are a fixed block about why the customer should choose you and what the next step is. The block is the same in every ad group.
• Description 1 describes the problem and what you solve. It is pinned to the first position.
• Description 2 says what the customer gets.
• Descriptions 3 and 4 are fixed and cover how you work and what the customer should do next.

A new ad group then only needs ten new headlines and two new descriptions. The rest is already in place.

You are allowed to pin several headlines to the same position, and Google then rotates between them. Google's help page on responsive search ads advises most advertisers against pinning because it can lower Ad Strength. Ad Strength is Google's rating of how many and how varied your texts are. According to Google, it affects neither Quality Score nor the auction. My assessment is therefore that a weaker Ad Strength is worth it when the ad in return always starts with what the person searched for.

Write with details from the landing page

Every line in the ad should be something you can find on the page the ad leads to. That makes the text credible and protects you from promising something you do not offer.

1. Read the landing page before you write anything.
2. Choose concrete details over adjectives. A delivery time or a number of models says more than the word best.
3. Phrase things positively. A line about what is not included rarely makes anyone click.
4. Check every promise about price, delivery, warranty and lead time against the page.
5. Put the phone number in a call asset, because Google does not allow phone numbers in ad text.

I cover how a single headline becomes good in the post on good ad copy for Google Ads. If the landing page lacks the answer to the search, that is where the work needs to start. We help with that as part of our web and landing pages service.

Sitelinks that belong to the search

Sitelinks are the extra links that can appear below the ad. They can be added at account, campaign and ad group level. According to Google's help page on sitelinks, sitelinks from all levels can show together, and Google picks the ones it expects to perform best.

This means the sitelinks at the higher levels have to suit every ad group below them. We therefore put general links such as About us and Contact on the campaign, and links that only suit one search intent on the ad group. Someone searching for rental then gets links to the rental terms and common questions about renting. Someone searching for servicing gets links to the service agreement and fault reporting.

• The link text can be at most 25 characters and is written without a full stop.
• Each description line can be at most 35 characters. If the line is a sentence, we end it with a full stop.
• Google recommends descriptions because they do not reduce the number of links that can show.

Check that the search lands in the right group

Separate texts per search intent only help if the search actually lands in the right ad group. With broad match and phrase match, the same search can match keywords in several groups.

1. Open the search terms report and look at one ad group at a time.
2. Read through the searches and see whether they belong to the group's intent.
3. Move a misplaced search by adding it as an exact match keyword in the right group and as a negative keyword in the group where it ended up.

I describe how to manage negatives on an ongoing basis in the post on negative keywords as a daily routine.

Your next step

Pull up the ads in two of your largest ad groups and put them side by side. Then go through these questions.

1. How many of the headlines would fit just as well in the other group?
2. Does the ad start with what the person searched for?
3. Can every promise in the text be found on the landing page?
4. Do the sitelinks lead to pages that belong to that particular search?

We write ad texts and sitelinks per ad group using the template above and check every line against the landing page before the ad is published. It is part of how we work with Google Ads.

How many of your ad groups have texts written for their own searches?