Google Ads shows you a colored indicator on every responsive search ad that grades it from "Poor" to "Excellent" with a progress bar that fills up as you add more headlines, more descriptions, and more variety to your ad. It's called Ad Strength, and it looks exactly like a performance grade. When it's red, it feels like your ad is failing. When it turns green and says "Excellent," it feels like you've done the right thing. The problem is that Ad Strength has nothing to do with how well your ad actually performs, and chasing it can make your ads worse.
There’s a separate metric called Ad Relevance that lives inside your Quality Score and directly affects what you pay per click. It measures how closely your ad matches what someone actually searched for, and it influences your ad position and your CPC in every auction. This is the one that matters. But it doesn’t have a colored progress bar, it doesn’t pop up when you’re building an ad, and most people have never looked at it because Google doesn’t put it in front of you the way Ad Strength is presented.
This post is part of our 12-point Google Ads audit. We evaluate ad copy and extensions as step 7 because by this point we’ve already looked at what people are searching, what the keywords cost, and what the landing pages do. Now we’re looking at the ads themselves, and specifically whether they’re optimized for the right metric.
What Ad Strength Actually Measures
Ad Strength evaluates how diverse and complete your ad setup is. It looks at how many unique headlines you’ve provided (Google wants 10-15), how many descriptions you’ve included (up to 4), whether your headlines are varied enough from each other, whether you’ve included keywords in your headlines, and whether you’ve pinned any assets to specific positions. The more diverse and unpinned your ad is, the higher the Ad Strength score goes, because Google wants maximum flexibility to assemble combinations and test what works.
What Ad Strength explicitly does not measure is actual performance. Google confirms this in their own documentation: Ad Strength does not affect ad rank and does not factor into Quality Score. An ad with "Poor" Ad Strength can still serve, still win auctions, and still convert well. An ad with "Excellent" Ad Strength can have terrible click-through rates and an atrocious conversion rate. The indicator grades your setup diversity, not your results.
The reason Google pushes Ad Strength so aggressively in the interface (the colored bar appears every time you create or edit an ad, with suggestions on how to improve it) is that Google benefits from having more headline and description options to test. More options means more data for their machine learning, more combinations to try, and more flexibility to serve whatever Google’s algorithm thinks will get clicked. That’s good for Google’s system. Whether it’s good for your business depends entirely on whether those additional headlines are actually relevant to what people are searching.
What Ad Relevance Actually Measures
Ad Relevance is one of the three components of Quality Score, alongside Expected CTR and Landing Page Experience. It measures how closely your ad text matches the specific search query that triggered it. When someone searches "emergency furnace repair" and your ad headline says "Emergency Furnace Repair, Available 24/7," that’s a strong relevance match. When someone searches "emergency furnace repair" and your ad shows "Professional HVAC Services for Your Home," that’s a weaker match because it’s broader and less specific to what the person actually typed.
Ad Relevance carries slightly less weight in the Quality Score formula than Expected CTR or Landing Page Experience (roughly 3 points out of 10 versus 3.5 for the other two), but it still directly impacts what you pay per click. Below Average Ad Relevance contributes to a lower Quality Score, which means higher CPCs through the Quality Score multiplier effect we covered in step 4 of this series.
The critical difference between Ad Relevance and Ad Strength is that Ad Relevance is evaluated per search query in real time, while Ad Strength is a static grade on your ad setup that never changes based on actual performance. Ad Relevance asks "did this specific ad match what this specific person searched?" Ad Strength asks "did you give Google enough options to work with?"
One measures outcomes, the other measures inputs.
Why "Average" Ad Strength Often Outperforms "Excellent"
Search Engine Land’s analysis found that ads rated "Average" on Ad Strength actually produced higher ROAS than ads rated "Excellent." Optmyzr’s study of over 1 million ads found the same pattern. The explanation comes down to what you have to sacrifice to reach "Excellent" and what that sacrifice does to relevance.
To get Ad Strength to "Excellent," you typically need to add more headlines that are different enough from your existing ones to satisfy the diversity requirement. In practice, this means adding generic filler headlines like "Learn More Today," "Get Started Now," or "Professional Services You Can Trust" because you’ve already used all your specific, keyword-relevant headlines and need more that are different. Those filler headlines might get served by Google’s system because they test well on click-through rate in certain combinations, but they dilute the keyword-to-ad relevance that affects your Quality Score.
You also need to unpin headlines to get Excellent Ad Strength, because pinning reduces the "flexibility" score Google assigns. But pinning exists for a reason. If your ad group targets "emergency furnace repair" and you’ve written a headline that says "Emergency Furnace Repair, Call Now," pinning that to position 1 ensures it always shows for those searches. Unpinning it means Google might serve "Professional Services You Can Trust" in position 1 instead because it tested well on CTR somewhere else in the rotation. Your click-through rate might be the same, but your Ad Relevance to the actual search query just dropped, and your Quality Score feels it.
The practical takeaway is that an Ad Strength of "Good" or even "Average" with tightly relevant, intent-matched headlines will almost always outperform an "Excellent" Ad Strength rating achieved by adding generic filler and removing pins. Google’s own 15% conversion lift claim from improving Ad Strength refers to going from "Poor" to "Excellent," and most of that lift comes from the jump between "Poor" and "Average" (having enough headlines for the system to function at all). The incremental benefit from "Average" to "Excellent" is negligible to negative in most real accounts.
The Identical RSA Problem
The most common ad copy problem we find on audits isn’t bad headlines or missing descriptions, it’s the same RSA running across every ad group in a campaign with no differentiation whatsoever. An account with ad groups for "emergency repair," "annual maintenance," "system installation," and "free estimate" where all four ad groups contain the exact same 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, because someone wrote one RSA and copied it everywhere.
This is a relevance problem that Ad Strength completely misses. Each of those ad groups serves a different intent. The person searching "emergency furnace repair" needs to see urgency, availability, and speed in the ad. The person searching "furnace maintenance plan" needs to see pricing, scheduling convenience, and preventive benefits. The person searching "new furnace installation cost" needs to see financing, brands carried, and free estimates. If all three see the same pool of generic headlines ("Professional HVAC Services," "Trusted Local Company," "Call Us Today"), none of them see an ad that speaks directly to what they actually want.
Google measures Expected CTR by comparing your ad’s historical click-through rate against other advertisers competing for the same search. If your competitor’s ad says "24/7 Emergency Furnace Repair, We Come to You Tonight" and yours says "Professional HVAC Services, Trusted Local Company," their ad gets clicked more on emergency searches, their Expected CTR goes up, yours goes down, and you pay more per click because of it. The generic ad might have "Excellent" Ad Strength because it has 15 diverse headlines. The specific, intent-matched ad might only be "Average" because it has 8 headlines all focused on the same emergency theme. The "Average" ad will outperform the "Excellent" ad on that search every time.
What to Focus on Instead
Since June 2025, Google provides full per-asset performance metrics for every headline and description in your RSAs. You can now see impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost for each individual headline, which means you can calculate CPA and conversion rate per headline rather than relying on the old "Low/Good/Best" labels that told you almost nothing. This is the data that actually matters for ad optimization, and it makes Ad Strength even more irrelevant because you can see exactly which assets perform and which don’t.
The optimization process we follow on accounts we manage starts with pulling per-asset data and identifying which headlines drive conversions at an acceptable cost. Headlines with 1,000+ impressions and zero conversions get replaced. Headlines that received zero impressions after two weeks get removed because Google's algorithm already decided they're not competitive enough to serve. Headlines with strong conversion rates get kept regardless of what they do to Ad Strength. The goal is an RSA where every headline is relevant to the ad group's keyword theme and at least half of them have proven conversion data behind them.
We also write different RSAs for each ad group within a campaign, which is something most agencies skip because it’s more work. Each ad group serves a different intent, and the ad copy needs to reflect that intent specifically. The headlines in your "emergency repair" ad group should reference emergency language, availability, and speed. The headlines in your "maintenance plan" ad group should reference pricing, scheduling, and prevention. If you’re doing this correctly, some of your RSAs will show "Average" on Ad Strength because they’re focused on a single theme rather than being generic enough to cover everything. That’s fine. That focus is exactly what Ad Relevance rewards.
How to Check Yours
In your Google Ads account, go to Ads & Assets, then click into any RSA. You’ll see the Ad Strength indicator prominently displayed. Ignore it for this exercise and instead look at two other things.
First, go to your keyword view, add the "Ad relevance" column, and sort by cost descending. This shows you the Ad Relevance rating on your highest-spend keywords. If most of them show "Below Average," your ads aren’t matching the search intent well, regardless of what your Ad Strength indicator says. That Below Average rating is costing you money through the Quality Score multiplier on every click those keywords generate.
Second, look at whether your ad groups have differentiated ad copy. Click into two or three different ad groups within the same campaign and compare the RSA headlines. If they’re identical or nearly identical across ad groups that target different services or different intents, you have the generic-copy problem. The fix is writing intent-specific headlines for each ad group, which takes more time upfront but directly improves Ad Relevance and Expected CTR for every search that triggers those ad groups.
If you want to see the per-asset performance data, go to Ads & Assets, select an RSA, and click "View asset details." You’ll see performance metrics for each headline and description individually. Sort by conversions to identify your top-performing assets, and look for headlines with high impressions and zero conversions as replacement candidates.
The Agency Angle
The harder work, the work that actually affects performance, is writing intent-specific ad copy per ad group, testing assets based on conversion data, and maintaining tight relevance between keywords and headlines even when it means your Ad Strength stays at "Average." If your agency reports Ad Strength as a performance metric or uses it to justify their ad copy work, ask them what your Ad Relevance ratings look like across your top-spending keywords. That’s the metric connected to what you pay, and it’s the one that requires actual thought to improve.
This is one of the 12 steps in our full Google Ads audit process. If you want us to evaluate your ad copy relevance and show you what the per-asset data says about which headlines are working, request a free audit and we’ll run the analysis.
