Google Ads RSA Guide: Headlines, Pinning, Insertion, And Testing

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated August 17, 2026

Responsive Search Ads are the only search ad format Google gives you now, so getting them right is not optional. You get 15 headlines and 4 descriptions per ad, and Google assembles them into combinations on the fly. Most advice on this topic tells you to fill every slot and let the machine sort it out. That is only half the job. The part that actually moves click-through rate is knowing what belongs in headline position one versus position two, and writing your copy so that whichever combination Google serves, it still matches what the person typed. Here is how I build them, using a live campaign of my own as the example.

1RSAs are the only search ad format now

When you build a Search campaign in Google Ads and get to the ad step, Google prompts you to create a Responsive Search Ad. That is the only option. Call-only ads and Expanded Text Ads have been phased out, though you will still find legacy versions of both running in older accounts.

The mental shift from ETAs is real. With an Expanded Text Ad you wrote three headlines and two descriptions and that is exactly what people saw. With an RSA you are building an asset pool, and Google assembles combinations from it, leaning toward the ones that perform.

That changes the job in one important way. Every headline has to work on its own, because any three of your fifteen can appear together. One weak headline drags down a lot of possible combinations.

You get three RSAs per ad group, which means up to 45 headlines running in a single ad group if you build all three out.

One more thing worth knowing: there is now an Ask Advisor chat built into the RSA editor that suggests headlines and descriptions. Between that and general AI tooling, generating ad copy at volume has gotten much easier. The bottleneck is no longer writing the assets. It is knowing which ones are worth using and where they should go.

Question to Answer:

How many of your ad groups have all 15 headlines filled, and how many are running on five or six?

2Watch the full tutorial

I walk through a live RSA in a campaign I am actually running, including the pinning decisions and the insertion features.

Google Ads Responsive Search Ads: Best Practices To Drive More Conversions

Question to Answer:

Do you currently pin any headlines, and do you know why you pinned them?

3Start with the landing page, not the headlines

The first field at the top of an RSA is the Final URL, and it is always step one. Not the headlines. The page.

Here is the example from my own account. I am targeting keywords like dentist advertising agency, dentist PPC agency, Google Ads for dentists, and Google Ads agency for dentists. So the Final URL goes to my Google Ads for dentists page. Not my homepage, not a general services page.

You do not want to send people to a random landing page that does not match what you are targeting. The closer your page matches the keyword, and the better that page converts, the better the whole campaign performs over time. Landing page relevance is also a component of Quality Score, so the mismatch costs you twice: worse conversion rate and higher cost per click.

The display path sits just below the URL field. That is the text that appears after your domain in the actual ad. Use it. It is free space to reinforce relevance.

Small thing that trips people up: if your business name has not been approved yet, your ad will show the URL where the business name would normally go. That is not a bug, it just means verification has not gone through.

Question to Answer:

For each ad group, does the Final URL point at a page built specifically for those keywords?

4How to write and pin headlines by position

This is the section that matters most, and it is the part most RSA advice skips entirely.

Headlines are the blue text. They are what people read and what they click. Everything else in the ad is supporting material.

The positions are not equal. Position 1 is the most important, position 2 is second, position 3 is third. So think about what each position needs to do:

How I actually build it. Whether or not I end up pinning, I write six or seven headlines specifically designed to work in position 1. They all name the service. Then the rest are calls to action and benefits meant for positions 2 and 3.

The logic is simple. If I am targeting "HVAC advertising agency," I do not want a headline that says "Best Advertising Agency." I want one that says "HVAC Advertising Agency," because it matches what the person typed. Over a month where I drive 200 or 300 clicks, that match is what turns clicks into contacts and eventually clients.

On pinning. You do not have to pin, and it is genuinely a matter of preference. Pinning locks an asset into a position, which gives you message control but reduces the combinations Google can test.

That is a much better use of your time than arguing about whether pinning is good or bad. It depends on the account, and this tells you.

If you do pin, pin multiple assets to the same slot. Pin three different service headlines to position 1 rather than one. You keep the control over what type of message appears there while still letting Google test which version of it works best.

Reserve single pins for things that genuinely must appear: a legal disclaimer, a required brand placement, a mandated offer.

Question to Answer:

Do you have six or seven headlines that each name your service, or are most of your headlines generic benefits?

5Descriptions should hit fast, not read like sentences

This is where I disagree with most ad copy advice, and I think the data backs me up.

Here is a description Google's suggestions gave me: "We manage Google Ads for dental practices that want more new patient calls. Tight keywords, real conversion tracking, no budget wasted on bad searches."

It is well written. It is also not what I would run, because most people are not sitting there reading a full description. They are scanning.

What I would use instead: "Dentist Google Ads. Contact Us. 5 Star Rated. 10+ Years In Business. Experienced Experts."

Quick hitting. Each phrase answers a question somebody has, fast. Who are you, what do you do, why should I trust you, what do I do next.

Fill all four descriptions and give each one a different job:

• One for your core value. What you do and for whom.
• One for what sets you apart. "You own your account data. No long-term contracts."
• One for proof. Ratings, years in business, certifications, client count.
• One for the call to action. Direct and specific.

And try to sell yourself somewhere in there. Something like "Number One Google Ads Agency For Dentists" does more work than a careful explanation of your process.

Check for disapproved assets after every edit. A disapproved headline or description shrinks your live combination pool, and Google does not always make it obvious that it happened.

Question to Answer:

Read your descriptions the way somebody scanning a results page would. Do they land in two seconds?

6Keyword, location, and countdown insertion

Type an opening curly brace in a headline field and Google gives you three insertion options. These are underused and they are genuinely useful.

Keyword insertion. This pulls in whichever of your keywords most closely matches what the person searched. So if somebody types "dental advertising agency near me," the headline can render as "Dental Advertising Agency." It helps expected click-through rate because the ad looks tied to their exact search.

Two details matter. Use title case, meaning capital K and capital W in the syntax, so every word capitalizes properly. And write a strong default text, because that is what shows when Google cannot insert a keyword. If your default reads badly on its own, you have a broken headline waiting to happen.

Location insertion. This puts the searcher's city, state, or country into the headline. If I am running "Dentist Ads Management" and add city insertion, somebody in Myrtle Beach sees their city in the ad.

Set a sensible default here too. If you are targeting a metro area, use the name of the largest city in that metro as your backup, since that is the one most people will recognize. This feature is most useful for genuinely geo-targeted campaigns. If you are targeting a whole country it matters less.

Countdown insertion. You set the end date and time, plus how many days before the end you want the countdown to start. The ad then renders as something like "Offer Ends In 4 Days." Use it for real deadlines: a sale that actually ends, an event that actually happens. It creates genuine urgency rather than manufactured urgency.

One caution. Dynamic features can pull your ads into searches you did not intend to target. Check your Search Terms report regularly after adding them and add negatives based on what you find.

Question to Answer:

If keyword insertion failed on your ad right now, would the default text still read like a real headline?

7Ad Strength: what it is and what it is not

Ad Strength rates each RSA as Poor, Average, Good, or Excellent based on how many assets you have and how varied they are. If required elements like the URL are missing, you will see Incomplete and the ad cannot serve at all.

Here is the part to internalize: Ad Strength is a diagnostic, not an auction factor. Google does not use it directly in the ad auction. What it tells you is whether you are following their recommendations on asset variety, which is useful feedback but not a score you need to max out.

Concretely, you can end up at Good instead of Excellent simply because you pinned headlines. Google would rather you let them test everything. If your pinning is deliberate and your ads perform, Good is fine. Do not unpin a working ad to chase a rating.

It is also not Quality Score. Ad Strength looks at asset variety. Quality Score looks at auction relevance and actual performance. Different things.

When a Poor rating is worth acting on, the causes are usually mundane:

• Too few headlines. Fill the slots.
• Repetitive wording. Several headlines saying the same thing in slightly different words gives Google nothing to test.
• No keyword in the headlines. Get your primary keyword into several of them.
• Over-pinning. If you pinned everything, unpin what does not need to be locked.
• Disapproved assets. These quietly reduce your live asset count.

Recheck the rating after keyword changes, since the same headlines become less relevant when your keyword set shifts.

Question to Answer:

If your Ad Strength is Good rather than Excellent, do you know which specific choice caused it?

8Fill out your assets

Assets, which used to be called ad extensions, make your ad take up more space on the results page. That alone helps click-through rate. Here is what to actually use:

On sitelinks specifically. Make them match the ad group. If the ad group is about dentists, the sitelinks should be dentist web design, dentist Google Ads management, dentist PPC agency. Relevant blog posts work too. The goal is being useful while still sending people to pages built to drive conversions.

Question to Answer:

Are your sitelinks specific to each ad group's theme, or the same generic set across the whole account?

9Read the labels and test one thing at a time

Once the ad has been running, open it and click View asset details. You get two views: the asset view listing each headline and description with its label and impressions, and the combinations view showing which groupings Google serves most.

The labels tell you what to do:

• Best. Leave it alone. Use its angle as the template for new assets.
• Good. Keep running, keep watching.
• Low. Replace it with a genuinely different angle. Not a reword.
• Learning. Wait. It does not have enough data yet.
• Unrated. Needs more volume or more time.

The rule is simple: Low means replace, Learning means wait, Best means keep.

Then test properly. Take your winning asset set as the control and change one thing. One headline, one description, or one CTA. It is tempting to swap five weak assets at once, but then you cannot attribute the result to anything.

Write a plain hypothesis before you launch: changing the CTA to "Book A Strategy Call" should increase form submissions because it names a specific next step. Then use Google Ads Experiments with a 50/50 split.

On timing. Give it 14 to 30 days after a meaningful change, and ignore the first week while the system settles. Early data bounces around and will point you the wrong way. Watch the Experiment Power indicator too. If power is low, the test needs more time or more volume before the result means anything.

Look at clicks and conversions together. A high click-through rate with no conversions usually means the ad promised something the landing page did not deliver. That is a page problem, not a headline problem.

Be honest about volume. On a small budget, meaningful RSA testing takes a while. I have a campaign running at $25 a day where the click-through rate looks strong and I am still waiting on conversion data. That is normal, and it is a reason to be patient rather than to keep changing things.

Question to Answer:

Are any of your assets still marked Learning that you were about to replace?

10Use RSA learnings across the account

Winning ad copy tells you things that apply well beyond the ad.

The message should carry through unbroken from the search, to the ad, to the page. If a headline is winning in the ad, using that same language on the landing page removes the small friction of arriving somewhere that sounds slightly different from what you clicked.

And keep the economics in view. On my own campaign, running $25 a day, landing two or three clients a month makes the whole thing pay for itself several times over. That is the frame that should govern how much you obsess over asset labels. Get the fundamentals right, be patient with the data, and judge it on leads.

Question to Answer:

Does your landing page headline use the same language as your best-performing ad headline?