Google calls my best ad "Poor." It has the highest CTR in the account.
One of my highest-CTR ads carries a big red “Poor” label, the kind Google nudges you to fix every time you open the account. I left it running. It is still running. And it is still beating the ads sitting next to it with a friendly green “Good” badge, which tells you most of what you need to know about that badge.
What Ad Strength measures
I have been doing this since 2005, and Ad Strength is one of the more confident-looking signals Google has shipped in years. Poor, Average, Good, Excellent, a little progress bar, a tidy list of “ways to improve.” It feels like a verdict on whether your ad is any good. It isn’t. What it actually measures is how well your ad feeds Google’s own variation engine, how many headlines and descriptions you’ve handed over for the machine to recombine on its own. That is a measure of how much control you gave away, dressed up as a quality score.
Here is the part that should settle the argument. Google has said publicly that Ad Strength does not affect ad rank or quality score (Optmyzr documented this back in 2022, via Frederick Vallaeys). So the label scolding you for a “Poor” ad has, by Google’s own admission, no bearing on whether that ad wins the auction. An Excellent ad with zero conversions is still an Excellent ad with zero conversions. An Average ad that converts is the winner. I’d rather have the second one every time.
Why I keep pinning
This is why I keep pinning my headlines, which is the other thing the strength meter punishes you for. When you pin, you tell Google “this headline goes in position one, that one goes in two,” and you recreate the message control that the old expanded text ads used to give us. The meter hates it, because pinning is the opposite of handing the machine a pile of parts. But an unpinned fifteen-headline ad has thousands of possible combinations, and Google almost never serves enough impressions for any single one to prove itself. You end up averaging a fog. A pinned ad says one clear thing to the searcher, over and over.
In our accounts those pinned, “Poor”-labelled ads beat the unpinned ones on click-through by two to three times.
(Yes, with the red label still glowing. I’ve stopped finding it funny and started finding it useful, because it scares competitors off a format that works.)
What I rank an ad on instead
So what do I actually rank an ad on, if not the badge? In order: impressions first, because an ad nobody sees can’t be judged at all. Then click-through, because that tells me whether the copy resonates with the query the person typed. Then conversion rate and the raw number of conversions, because a click that goes nowhere is just an expensive visit. Then cost per conversion against the goal we agreed on. Ad Strength comes in dead last, and only as a footnote, because a very low-strength ad does sometimes get rotated a little less often, so it’s worth knowing. That is the entire role of the label in my process. A reason Google might show an ad less, never a reason for me to kill it.
If you take one thing from this: when you open an account and see a wall of “Poor” and “Average,” don’t reach for the fix-it button. Pull the numbers instead. Look at what’s getting impressions, what’s earning the click, what’s turning into a lead or a sale. Then decide. The ad Google is embarrassed by might be the one quietly paying the bills.
I’ll keep my red labels, thanks. They’ve earned their place.