Ad assets, and what to do with disapproved ads

The minimum set of assets

Every campaign should carry at least:

• 4 sitelinks — links to specific pages, not repeats of the main one;
• 1 structured snippet;
• 2 callouts.

Assets are free real estate. They make the ad physically taller on the results page, which pushes competitors down the screen, and they give the reader a second reason to click that the headline did not have room for. On an account that has to hold a 5% click-through rate, this is one of the few changes that helps the rate without costing traffic.

Disapproved ads have to be paused

A disapproved ad does not serve, so the instinct is to ignore it. Do not: Google reads a pile of disapproved ads sitting in an account as a signal about how the account is run, and an ad group whose only ads are disapproved is also breaking the rule that every ad group needs at least one active ad.

The fix is a pattern, not a one-off. Read the disapproval reason, correct the ad if the reason is correctable, and pause what is left. Then check again next month — approvals change when policies change, and an ad that passed a year ago can be disapproved later without anyone touching it.

Fill all 15 headlines — but know why

Use all 15 headlines and 4 descriptions in every responsive search ad. The reason is not the one usually given.

We measured 61,669 ads, comparing pairs that ran in parallel in the same ad group — same keywords, same page, same bid, only the text different. The copy explains 2.7% of the variation in click-through rate; the other 97.3% comes from the keywords and the page the group has. In low-traffic pairs there is still a small edge (+1.7% CTR) for better phrase coverage, but in pairs above a thousand impressions, where the rate is measured precisely, the effect falls to zero.

Google's Ad Strength rating behaves the same way: ads it rates "poor" have a median of 11 headlines, everything rated higher has 15. At the same headline count, the click-through difference between a "poor" and an "excellent" ad is a coin flip. So fill in the 15 fields, which takes twenty minutes and gives the system more combinations to match queries with — and then stop looking at the rating.