Paid advertising has been awaited for quite some time since the announcement of Google’s end of Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) has finally arrived! Google will officially stop launching new ETAs on June 30, and advertisers will have just the remaining days to plan. We at Power Digital Marketing, we’re here to give you details of how this change affects the client and you, as well as how we would recommend organizing your campaigns in light of the new rules and the results we’ve observed after leveraging the new ad type that is default Receptive Search Ads (RSAs).
What Does This Sunset Mean For Advertisers?
From June 30, 2022, you will no longer be able to introduce new ETAs. Therefore, we advise making any last adjustments to existing ETA ads as necessary (creative refresh, for instance?). When you have time, attempt to improve the evergreen ad as best as possible. Now, focus only on RSAs in the future.
It’s not a surprise to learn that Google Analytics continues to speed through the automation highway toward a world of machine learning that runs the show. We’ve seen this happen through various modifications to marketing for search engines, including “smart” bid strategies, variants of keyword match types, RSAs, and, finally, Performance Max. As the engine changes and we adapt, so do we! At Power, we’ve been leaning towards these changes with all our might ahead and are trying out the newer versions of Google Ads as they happen.
It’s frustrating to feel as if you’re losing some degree of control when we go toward becoming more automated in our bidding, keyword, creativity, and more. But in the majority of cases, we’ve seen good results from this shift and are now able to appreciate the advantages that come with the RSA:
Ease to Management
Without a better description, RSAs permit you to collect an assortment of relevant ad text, mix the whole thing and let Google perform its work. Google relies on hundreds of data signals and is constantly improving its algorithms with time, allowing us to trust it in providing the correct ad to the valid user at the right moment and more straightforward management on your part.
Instant creative testing
If you use an instrument like Optmyzr, you can see what each headline or description performs within a certain period, allowing you to determine which text to keep and which to eliminate. It also helps you understand all CTAs or UVPs you might want to expand to other campaigns with positive results!
What We Recommend for Structuring your campaigns using the RSA and ETAs
In the past, the Power Paid Media team has followed the below-responsive search ad format to ensure adequate coverage between ETAs and RSAs. The standard practice is to run a couple of ETAs for each ad group, and through our tests, we have often seen that we could run 2 RSAs per ad group, both with and without a pinned copy.
In the future, we believe running those 3-4 ETAs per ad group is worthwhile but focus more on RSAs during the days that lead up to sunset. In any case, this is the best time to revise your ETAs to ensure the text is as current as possible, as you won’t be able to edit the text of your ETA advertisement after June 30!
What We’ve Seen So Far With This Change
In the past, if you were to run ETAs along with RSAs, you’ll likely see that RSAs had the most impressions and, thus, revenues. In the case of some accounts on accounts we manage at Google Ads accounts that we handle here at Power, RSAs accounted for 88% of the impressions and generated 64% of the total paid search revenues.
An eCommerce clothing brand we manage has previously operated both ETAs and RSAs but has recently switched to running RSAs exclusively. While we observed a consistent rate of clicks (CTRs) across both strategies, we noticed the most significant improvement in CVR (CVR). CVR increased 215% since switching to an RSA-only approach to select their ads.
As we are experiencing, RSAs are hands down the most preferred type of ad. This shift is an evolution toward an automated future. We change ads to be suited to the specific ad type but allow Google the chance to present the most effective ad copy for every individual. We’re happy with this change and hope you’re too! There’s still time to get things right, and don’t worry, even if you ca unable roll things out in the way you’d like. Please let us know if you have any questions regarding the most effective methods! We’re always eager to collaborate on strategies and assist our fellow PPC geeks.