GOA Marketing - Google Ads RSAs - To Pin or Not to Pin?
Does pinning affect how much of my message is seen and does that change my performance?
Of course, it does!
We analysed just under 9,000 ads to see how pinning affected how much of the message was shown.
For Brand:
- Pinning H1 was the most popular approach adopted by advertisers (makes sense, people want their brand to be the first thing seen
- Pinning just H1 though resulted in H2 being dropped along with H3 the most. Only 58% of the time did an asset appear in H2.
- An Unpinned ad also drops H2 but interestingly not as much as when just pinning H1! (Also acknowledging our sample here is smaller as not a lot of advertisers run unpinned brand ads).
- Pinning H1 and H2 obviously results in both being shown 100% of the time.
- Pinning H1 and H2 also resulted in the most impressions for an asset in H3, but even so it’s still only 14% of the time.
For Non-Brand:
- Unlike Brand, the most popular approach for generic is to pin H1 and H2, however the largest amount of impressions were served through Unpinned ads.(Perhaps the long tail is pinned for relevancy and head terms which tend to be more broad are Unpinned?)
- Non-brand ads were actually able to show all 3 assets the most, as much as ⅕ of the time when H1 and 2 were pinned.
- Hardly anyone pins to all 3 positions, or just H2. (The amount of data we had there was so small we omitted it from this post).
- There was a lot more similarity between H1 and Unpinned when it came to instances of H2 being dropped to the description line; roughly 27% of the time.
What is the impact on Performance?
You’ll need to test that one out for yourself...
As with all things Google ads you need to test to find the right set-up for your goals. Some trends we have observed though are…
- Pinning less generally results in better CTRs, pinning more results in better CVRs.
- Unpinned ads tend to have higher CPCs than ads with just H1 pinned.
- Ads with H1 and H2 tend have higher CPCs than both the above.
- They also tend to have the best conversion rates.