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There’s a small colored circle in Google Ads that convinces thousands of advertisers every day to rewrite ads that are already working. It doesn’t affect your auction position. Doesn’t change your cost per click. Doesn’t touch your Quality Score. But most people who see it rush to “fix” the situation anyway.
This article on the Advantrise blog is the story of one investigation: why a green ad strength circle might be costing you money, and a red one might be making it.
Ingredients
Before we dig into what went wrong — here’s what we’re working with. If you’re already familiar with these terms, skip ahead to the next section. If not, three minutes here will save you twenty later.
- Ad strength — a Google Ads metric that rates how “convenient” your ad is for the algorithm. Scale: Poor, Average, Good, Excellent. Note the word “convenient” — we’ll come back to it.
- Quality Score — a completely different metric. This one affects real things: auction position, CPC, impression volume. It’s based on expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page quality.
- RSA (Responsive Search Ads) — a format where you provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google mixes them as it sees fit. Mathematically, that’s up to 43,680 unique combinations. Yes, forty-three thousand.
- Pinning — locking a specific headline to a specific position. Lowers ad strength. Increases control. Remember this pair — it’ll keep coming up.
- Adalysis data — research by Brad Geddes (co-founder of Adalysis, PPC practitioner since 1998) across thousands of ad accounts. Published in Search Engine Land, January 2026.
- One dry cleaner case study from New York City that did everything “wrong” — and got a 357% lift in conversions.
The crime
Now that we know the players — let’s get to what happened.
An advertiser launches an ad. Google shows an orange circle: “Average.” The suggestion says: add more headlines, make them more varied, remove the pins. The advertiser listens — no one wants to argue with Google. Writes new headlines. Removes pinning. Reaches the green “Excellent.”
Leans back in the chair. Job done.
Checks the report a week later. Conversions didn’t go up. Another week — they dropped.
Someone’s responsible. But who?
First suspect
The first thought that comes to mind: “Quality Score must have taken a hit too.” It seems logical — if Google says the ad is “poor,” it probably shows it less often and charges more for it, right?
Sounds reasonable. But it’s a false lead.
Ad strength and Quality Score are different metrics. They’re even calculated differently, based on different signals. Quality Score looks at expected CTR, relevance, and landing page quality. Ad strength looks at how many headlines you have and whether you let Google shuffle them around.
Brad Geddes confirms this in Search Engine Land (January 2026): ad strength does not affect Quality Score. It’s a common misconception.
Adalysis also checked the connection between ad strength and CPC. The result: there is none. Google doesn’t raise your click cost for a low score. Doesn’t reduce your impressions.
First suspect — innocent. Moving on.
Second suspect
Maybe it’s not about the metrics — maybe it’s the people? Maybe advertisers with low ad strength simply write bad ads, and the score is just a symptom of a deeper problem?
Adalysis checked this version too. Across thousands of accounts, not three.
What they found was the opposite of what you’d expect. Ads with lower ad strength have, on average, higher conversion rates. CTR is often higher too. In other words, ads that Google labels “poor” bring in more clicks and more conversions.
How? The answer is simpler than you’d think: low ad strength usually means one thing — the advertiser pinned their headlines. And pinned headlines aren’t laziness or a mistake. They’re a deliberate choice: “I know what I want to say to my customer, and I’m going to say exactly that.”
Second suspect — also innocent. In fact, they seem to have been doing the right thing all along.
The key evidence
Up to this point, we know that ad strength doesn’t affect the auction, doesn’t correlate with CPC, and that lower scores often come with higher conversions. But statistics across thousands of accounts are one thing. A single case where everything converges in one point — that’s another.
A dry cleaner in New York City. Free pickup and delivery — an obvious competitive advantage. When they launched ads without pinning, Google mixed the headlines however it wanted: sometimes leading with the location, sometimes the service type, sometimes something else entirely. The algorithm did its best. Conversions were average.
Then they pinned two headlines: “Free pickup & delivery” and “New York City.” Ad strength dropped. But those two messages were exactly why people chose this dry cleaner over the competition.
Conversion rate went up 357%.
Three and a half times. With a lower score. Somewhere in Google’s headquarters, a small colored circle quietly sighed.
The motive
We know that ad strength doesn’t measure effectiveness. The question remains: what does it measure, then? And why does Google push so hard to raise it?
No conspiracy here — the logic is transparent if you look at it from Google’s side.
RSA allows up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Up to 43,680 combinations. The more headlines and the fewer pins — the more options the algorithm has. More options means broader testing, which — in theory — means better matching for each individual user.
High ad strength is Google saying: “thanks, you gave us plenty of room to work with.” Low ad strength is: “you’ve limited what we can do.” But limited algorithmic freedom is just another name for your control over what the customer sees.
When you don’t pin anything, Google can put any headline in any position. Your copy about free delivery might appear next to a description about premium quality — and together, it might sound like a completely different business. The customer sees a combination that no one on your team ever wrote or approved.
For Google, that’s fine — the algorithm tests and learns. For you, it can mean weeks where your main selling point simply isn’t shown to part of your audience, because Google decided to try something else.
If you’ve read our breakdown of AI Overviews and the problems they create for marketers, the pattern will feel familiar: Google optimizes for its own efficiency, and advertisers adapt.
Google, by the way, does include two useful suggestions in its ad strength prompts: “add more unique headlines” and “make headlines more relevant to keywords.” Those two pieces of advice are the only helpful part of the whole scoring system. The rest is a polite request to give Google more material for its own experiments with your copy. A bit like when someone asks for “creative freedom” — sounds great until you see the output.
Mitigating circumstances
In any investigation, there’s a moment where you have to admit: the suspect isn’t pure evil. Ad strength has situations where it’s worth paying attention to.
If you have three headlines instead of eight — that’s not strategic minimalism, it’s just not enough material. More headlines give more data for testing, even if you pin the key positions. Three options are too few to draw any conclusions from.
If you’re launching a brand new campaign with no history — the algorithm does need flexibility at the start. Until there’s data on what converts, a wider set of options helps gather information faster. At this stage, high ad strength works for you, not just for Google.
If you’re running PMax or AI Max — those campaigns depend entirely on the quantity and quality of your assets. Google controls everything: placement, copy, targeting. In that context, ad strength is more relevant, because you’ve already agreed to hand over the wheel.
A simple split: for new campaigns and fully automated formats, ad strength is a useful guide. For mature Search campaigns where you know your audience and your message, control through pinning delivers better results — even if the circle turns red.
The finished dish
Investigation complete. All leads checked, all data collected. Here’s what’s left on the plate.
Stop judging ads by the color of a circle. Ad strength “Excellent” is not a goal. Conversions are. If your “Poor” ad converts better than your “Excellent” one — keep the “Poor.” The green circle doesn’t pay your hosting bill.
Pin what works. If you know your main selling point — free consultation, fastest delivery, 20 years of experience — pin it to Headline 1. Ad strength will drop. Conversion rate won’t. Adalysis recommends: pin your proven messages to H1 and H2, and leave H3 flexible. Google sometimes turns H3 into a sitelink extension, and flexibility there does help.
Filter the suggestions. “Add more unique headlines” — useful if you really do have three identical headlines with different exclamation marks. “More relevant to keywords” — also worth listening to. Everything else is a recommendation for Google’s convenience, not for your ROI.
Test, don’t trust. Two ads in the same ad group. First: high ad strength, no pinning, maximum headlines. Second: low ad strength, key messages pinned, fewer headlines. Two to four weeks. Compare CTR and conversion rate. Data from your own account always outweighs any general advice — including this article.
Turn off auto-apply for ad suggestions. Google can automatically add headlines or remove pinning if auto-apply is enabled. This isn’t hypothetical — it happens in accounts where no one checked the settings. Go to Settings → Recommendations → Auto-apply. Find “Ad suggestions” and turn it off. Otherwise you’ll pin the perfect headline in the evening, and Google will quietly unpin it by morning. Surprise.
Need help auditing your ads or optimizing your RSA strategy? The Advantrise team can walk through your account and show you where ad strength is helping and where it’s getting in the way — get in touch.
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