E-Commerce

Since 18 February 2021, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are now the default ad type when looking to create ads for a Search campaign.

Advertisers can still create new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) and edit existing ones but they’re being pushed aside nevertheless.

Introduced in 2016, ETA is an ad format that allows you to preview the complete ad. You not only have more control over the text and how it’s displayed – but you can also pick and choose which text assets to place in the headlines and descriptions. Moreover, the text assets don’t need to be combinable, which is the case with RSAs.

So what are RSAs and what does this mean for advertisers moving forward?

Traditionally, the advertiser would write a combination of headlines and body copy and multiple stand-alone versions of ads would be created.

Google’s algorithm would figure out which ad performs amongst them.

With RSAs, each piece of headline and description is considered an “asset” and Google dynamically combines these “assets” based on search intent.

In a single RSA, you can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions.

The more you enter, the more Google’s machine learning algorithm will match your ads and serve the most relevant dynamic ads to your potential customers.

The hard part?

As each headline and description asset can be mixed and matched automatically by Google, they need to make sense on their own.

This requires a little more thinking when writing the copy.

The key elements of Expanded Text Ads when compared to Responsive Search Ads :

Key Elements	Text Ads	Responsive Search Ads
Number of headlines (in setup)	Up to 3 (30 characters each)	Up to 15 (30 characters each)
Number of descriptions (in setup)	Up to 2 (90 characters each)	Up to 4 (90 characters each)
Number of headlines shown	3	Up to 3
Number of descriptions shown	2	Up to 2
Maximum length of ad shown	150 characters	300 characters
Arrangement of assets	Static (as written down)	Automatic
Control over text asset combination	Full	Little

Google’s rationale behind Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

As Google favors a shift towards machine learning and automation, many advertisers feel this will give them less control over their marketing campaigns. Google claims that machine learning can improve campaign performance in terms of relevancy, clicks and conversions.

Consumer needs and priorities are continuously changing, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. Google reasons that its push towards RSAs will allow advertisers a better way to adapt to changing customer demands and shifting market trends without creating individual static ads and testing them out manually.

Moreover, Google wants more advertisers to use RSAs (especially novice advertisers) so that it gives their machine learning algorithms more data to work with. This way Google can make more recommendations related to account performance.

How RSAs can help your business

You can tailor your headlines and description copy to your customers’ locations or locations of interest.

Multiple headlines and descriptions options allow your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more queries, thus reaching more potential customers.

You can increase ad group performance as you attract more clicks and conversions that your existing text ads aren’t capturing – this is because responsive search ads help you compete in more auctions.

Moda Furnishings, a British furniture designer and importer, wanted to increase sales from its e-commerce site. The brand reused content from its expanded text ads to create responsive search ads and added them across its ad groups.

The result?

Moda Furnishings has seen clickthrough rates increase 96% while sales have grown over 3,000%.

Jonathan Brierley, CEO of Moda Furnishings said, “We’ve seen significant improvement across all key metrics since adding responsive search ads. From site traffic to sales, responsive search ads have outperformed expanded text ads.”

How to make the most of this new development

Leverage RSAs to test out a diverse mix of messages regularly. This will not only help advertisers improve their ads, but it will also allow Google to better match a message to a particular search or user.

Continue creating and testing ETAs as they could outperform the machine learning-based RSAs. Ideally, like advertisers, you should supplement your ad groups with RSAs but continue to test two to three ETAs in each ad group. This will allow you to optimize your ad copy while also benefiting from Google’s machine learning-driven ad copy testing at the same time.

Use Google’s tools such as their Ad strength tool which takes relevance, quantity, and diversity of ad copy and provides a score (ranging from Poor to Excellent) for your RSAs. As per Google, “Advertisers who improve Ad strength for their Responsive Search Ads from ‘Poor’ to ‘Excellent’ see 9% more clicks and conversions on average”. Also, use location insertion to increase the relevancy of your ads. 

If you are interested in writing effective ad copy, check our article on – The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

Conclusion

Responsive search ads can bring in more leads and improve your conversion rates. Although it comes at the price of lesser control, its machine learning mechanism can make it easy to quickly test your message and offers at a large scale.

Do you test your E-commerce product before launch to make sure it will be profitable?

You may have dozens of ideas, done a lot of research, perhaps even launched a few stores – and seen poor results. Well, majority of E-commerce businesses end up like this.

They build massive funnels first, and then they try to figure out a way to sell their product just to find out that it doesn’t – after spending a ton of money.

The key to making sales is to offer a product that people are willing to buy!

Although, you do have to invest a little bit of time and money, it’s going to cost substantially lesser to test your E-commerce product first rather than taking the route most people take.

The following steps will help you find out whether there’s an actual demand for your product before you invest in it.

Build a landing page and write your sales copy

Assuming you already have your idea of what you’re going to sell, the first thing you need to do is to create a landing page. There are couple of options here, Leadpages is our favorite.

Then create a basic text-based sales copy for your landing page. If you don’t know how to write one, hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The right copywriter will craft sales copy which will help to increase your conversions (we will get to the conversion part in a bit.)

And if you end up deciding to go with a different E-commerce idea, the copywriter can help you edit the sales copy, so you won’t have to keep repay to create new copy all over again.

Create an opt-in form

From the landing page you will have an ‘Add to cart’ button which you can either link to a new page or a pop-up window. A pop-up is what I recommend unless you have a good reason to send them to another page.

Once you have this set up, the opt-in form copy will be something like “Please enter your name and email address.”

After filling out the form, re-directed the visitor to a page that says “Sorry we’re currently out of stock on this product, we’ll let you know once it becomes available.”

Opt-ins vs ad spend

So this way you’re not actually selling anything – you’re driving the traffic from the ads to the landing page and then measuring the opt-ins.

Basically, you’re considering every opt-in registration as sales in this scenario – hence the conversions. Let’s say your product was worth $100 and you spent $500 on your ads to get 20 opt-ins.

We know in a 2-step process not everyone is going to buy. Since there’s no way to figure out how many will drop-off, we need to assume every opt-in is a buyer.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend ($2000/$500.)

This means you have a profit potential with your E-commerce idea, which is a strong indicator that it makes sense for you to build or invest in the product.

If you didn’t get enough opt-ins to cover your ad spend, then you will need to test a new idea.

Create an email list

If you decide that you’re going to build the product, setup your e-store properly and then send an email to your opt-in list saying, “We got the product back in stock, visit the store to order”.

Majority of this list will buy – so you didn’t completely waste the initial ad spend.

If you end up going with a different E-commerce idea, you can promote that new product out to the same email list too, driving them through the top end of your funnel.

If you did 20 sales for $100 a piece you essentially earned $2000 in sales with $4 return on your $1 ad spend.

Either way, you can leverage the email list that you build.

Wrap up

The bulk of your efforts would be in getting the sales copy and landing page right, and running the ads properly.

Click here to download the funnel model to test your E-commerce product.