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Google Ads Strategy

Does writing ad copy per ad group still matter, or has RSA made it pointless?

M
Marta Silva Asked Sep 02, 2025
2 328
Client asked me why we charge for copywriting when Google assembles the ad itself, and I gave an answer I wasn't fully satisfied with. The steelman of their position: you supply headlines, the system picks combinations per auction, so the craft is in supplying enough variety rather than in writing any particular ad. Under that view, fifteen decent headlines beat five excellent ones, and per-ad-group tailoring is effort spent on something the machine overrides anyway. My position is that the assembly is only as good as the inputs and that specificity to the query still wins, but I notice I believe that partly because it's what I was taught. What are people seeing? Is tightly tailored copy still beating generic-but-plentiful, and if so where does the difference actually show up?

Replies (2)

A Aisha Noor · Sep 02, 2025
Tailored still wins, and the reason is that the system optimises within what you give it - it can't write a headline that mentions next-day delivery if you never told it there is next-day delivery. Where the difference shows up isn't click-through rate, which is where everyone looks. It is conversion rate. Generic copy gets clicks from people who then discover the page is not what the ad implied. That reads as a landing page problem and it is a copy problem. What I have stopped doing is writing fifteen variations of the same idea to fill the slots. Ten headlines expressing five genuinely different propositions beats fifteen rephrasings of one, because the pinning and the combination logic have something real to choose between.
S Sofia Brenner · Sep 03, 2025
On the client conversation specifically: I reframed this last year as paying for the propositions rather than the sentences. What they're buying is somebody deciding that free cancellation matters more than the spa - the writing down of it's the cheap part! Landed much better than defending copywriting as a craft, which sounds like special pleading even when it's true.

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