We ran a Poor-pinned RSA against an Excellent-unpinned RSA on the same brand, same keywords, same landing page, for 30 days. Poor won on CTR, CPC, conversion rate, and CPA. The CPA gap was 31 percent in favor of the ad Google would rather you delete.
Ad Strength is a structural-completeness score. It measures how many headlines and descriptions you uploaded and how varied the words inside them are. It does not measure whether the ad makes money. Google's own help page says it in one line and then buries it: "The Ad Strength rating of an ad doesn't directly influence your ad's serving eligibility." The number is decorative.
This piece is the 2026 update to that conversation. We will show you our test, line up Optmyzr's 1M-ad study from 2024 next to it, explain what Google's famous "+15% Poor to Excellent" claim is actually counting, and hand back the three signals that do correlate with money in your Google Ads account.
The 30-day A/B, set up to remove every variable
We manage 14 active US Google Ads accounts. We picked one for the test: a B2B SaaS company on roughly $22,000 per month in Google Ads spend, optimized for demo bookings, mature account with stable Quality Score across the non-brand cluster.
Inside one ad group, two RSAs running on a 50/50 even split via Campaign Experiments. Same keywords, same landing page, same bid strategy (Maximize Conversions with a tCPA target), same negative list, same hours and geos.
- Ad A (Excellent). 15 headlines, 4 descriptions, zero pins. Google's preferred shape.
- Ad B (Poor). 4 unique headlines, 2 descriptions, top-2 pin positions enforced. Message hierarchy locked in: the offer hook in position 1, the proof point in position 2, brand and CTA rotating across the remaining slots.
Both ads inherited the same asset library. The only difference was structural completeness and pinning. After 30 days, on roughly 41,000 impressions per variant:
| Metric | Ad A (Excellent, unpinned) | Ad B (Poor, pinned) | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTR | 4.1% | 4.8% | Poor +18% |
| CPC | $3.42 | $3.02 | Poor -12% |
| Conversion rate | 5.6% | 7.1% | Poor +27% |
| CPA | $61.10 | $42.50 | Poor -31% |
The Excellent ad had three times the asset count. It ran in roughly the same auctions. It still got beaten on every column.
The pattern is not unique to our account. A Reddit operator running the same shape of test on r/PPC posted virtually identical directional results the week we were finalizing ours. That thread has 218 engagement and counting because the result is reproducible and people keep reproducing it.
Optmyzr's 1M-ad study said the same thing in 2024, and nobody operationalized it
Optmyzr pulled performance data from over a million ads across more than 22,000 Google Ads accounts. They sorted by Ad Strength rating. The output is the chart every agency lead should screenshot and tape to a wall:
- Average Ad Strength: $12.43 CPA, 12.65% conversion rate. Best in the set.
- Excellent Ad Strength: $28.68 CPA, 4.97% conversion rate. Worst in the set.
- Poor Ad Strength: 327.65% ROAS, the highest ROAS of any tier including Excellent.
Search Engine Land published the headline a few months later: "Why Average is better than Excellent." It got cited, never reversed, and the industry kept chasing Excellent anyway. The reason is contractual, not analytical. Agencies still get graded on screenshot-able Excellent ratings in client decks. The score is legible to the client. The CPA gap is invisible until someone runs the audit.
What Google's "+15% conversions Poor to Excellent" actually measures
Google's responsive search ads help page states: "Advertisers who improve Ad Strength for their Responsive Search Ads from Poor to Excellent see 15% more conversions on average." The claim is technically true and structurally misleading.
The lift is correlational, not causal. Accounts that move from Poor to Excellent typically do so by adding 8 to 12 unique headlines and 2 to 4 unique descriptions. The conversion lift comes from asset diversity, full stop. The score is the bystander. If you tested the same diversity increase without the Excellent badge (say, by adding the same 8 headlines and then pinning two of them), you would get the same lift and a Poor score in the UI.
The same Google support page admits, in a sentence buried below the headline number, that "Ad strength doesn't directly influence ad serving eligibility." The auction does not care about the colour next to your ad. Quality Score, CPC bid, ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience drive ad rank. Ad Strength does not appear in that equation.
This is not us being clever. This is reading Google's own documentation and noticing that the headline number on page one contradicts the operating note on page two.
Pinning is a feature, not a sin
Google's pinning guidance is consistent: pinning a headline can drop Excellent to Poor, and pinning one headline cuts available combinations by roughly 75 percent. Both statements are true. Neither one is a reason to stop pinning.
What pinning actually does is enforce offer hierarchy on every served combination. If your hook is "Cut your demo no-show rate by 40 percent" and your proof point is "Used by 12,000 SaaS sales teams," the combinations Google does not pin can serve a perfectly innocent but performance-killing variant where the CTA shows up in position 1 and the hook gets buried in position 3. The 75-percent reduction in combinations is real. The implicit assumption that fewer combinations means worse performance keeps getting disproved by the data.
The tactical pattern that survives every audit:
- Pin 2 to 3 unique assets to position 1 (your hooks).
- Pin 2 to 3 unique assets to position 2 (your proof points).
- Leave positions 3 and below free for diversity.
This is what produces our Ad B above. Ad Strength labels it Poor. The auction does not care. The conversion rate does not care.
A separate but related point: if you want to actually fight the audience for attention rather than fight the asset count, our work on ad creative frameworks is the other half of this conversation. Pinning enforces hierarchy. Creative decides whether the hierarchy is worth enforcing.
The real lever is Quality Score, and the math is brutal
Quality Score is the signal Ad Strength is impersonating, and the math is documented. Optmyzr's 2026 follow-up found that every 1-point Quality Score lift on non-brand keywords is worth roughly 18.5 percent more profit. Every 1-point drop costs you about 19.5 percent. The mechanism flows through click volume now (about 17 percent more clicks per point), not just CPC the way it used to.
Run that against a real account. A non-brand keyword burning $90,000 per year at Quality Score 7 is worth about $16,600 in recovered profit if you push it to 8. The lift is real because the inputs are real: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience are direct, ranked, audited components of ad rank. Ad Strength is none of those things.
In the same 30-day window, the copywriter time we spent chasing Excellent on the variant that lost was roughly 6 hours. That is six hours that did not go into a Quality Score audit, a landing page test, or a new offer variant. Multiply across a 4-account portfolio and the cost of optimizing the wrong signal lands around $1,200 per month in unbillable agency time. Anyone running paid media in 2026 has cheaper ways to spend a month.
For the broader operating playbook this fits inside, the Google Ads strategy for service businesses walkthrough is the same skeleton with more verticals. The Ad Strength fix in this post is one of the higher-velocity changes in that playbook.
The Ad Strength signal worth reading (and the one to ignore)
The Ad Strength UI has two outputs. The headline score is the one everybody sees and the one the metric is named after. Ignore it.
The per-asset performance rating is the one Google tucks behind View Asset Details. Each headline and description gets a Low, Good, or Best rating once it has accumulated enough impressions. That rating actually correlates with served performance because it is computed on served performance, not on count and diversity. Use it as a monthly pruning signal: remove Low-rated assets, write fresh variants in the slots that just freed up, and watch the rating distribution improve without ever touching the headline score.
This is also where the multi-channel Google Ads feedback loop fits: asset-level performance ratings inside Google often telegraph what is going to work on the same audience inside Meta within two weeks. The Low-rated asset is rarely a Meta winner either.
The 30-day fix order
If we walk into a stalled Google Ads account tomorrow and the conversation starts with "the agency keeps telling us to raise Ad Strength," this is the sequence:
- Stop optimizing the score. Tell the client, in writing, that Ad Strength colour is not coming off the report because the score is decorative. Replace it with Quality Score and per-asset performance ratings.
- Audit the asset library. Pull View Asset Details for every RSA. Remove Low-rated assets. Backfill the slots with fresh variants written against the offer hierarchy that the top-performing assets already show.
- Pin for hierarchy. Two to three unique headlines pinned to position 1, two to three to position 2, the rest free. The Ad Strength score will drop. That is fine.
- Move the budget conversation to Quality Score. Identify the three non-brand keywords carrying the most spend and the lowest Quality Score. Spend the next two weeks improving expected CTR and landing page experience on those three. The 18.5-percent-profit-per-point math is the boardroom slide that replaces the Ad Strength screenshot.
- Reallocate copywriter hours to offer testing. The six hours per account per month that used to go into chasing Excellent now go into writing two new offer variants and a fresh landing page hook. That is where the actual lift lives.
Give it 30 days. The Ad Strength column in your account will look worse. Every column that pays the invoice will look better.
If you want a Google ads agency to run this audit on your account before your next quarterly review, that is the work we do. Same checklist, same order, same 30-day window. Bring the screenshots that the last agency taped to their wall. We will replace them with the ones that match the bank statement.