To Pin, Or Not To Pin?

Pinning and Responsive Search Ads

I had an eye-opening conversation with an advertiser this week. We were walking through their ad copy, looking for improvement areas, and the discussion found its way to the topic of pinning.

They very much wanted to pin, and I was recommending against it. What’s interesting and eye-opening here is how firm both of our stances were. They were just dead-set on pinning, and I am firmly against it except for one use case. They acknowledged my reasoning and even seemed to agree with it, but they still had to pin.

Below I’ll lay out why they were wanting to pin, why I didn’t think it was a good idea, and the one exception when pinning makes sense.

What is pinning? Pinning is when you force Google Ads to show specific ad copy in specific headline positions (position 1, 2, or 3) or in specific description positions (position 1 or 2). There’s further nuances with pinning, which I’ll cover in an upcoming podcast and on YouTube as well. But for now, the main thing to understand is that pinning helps the advertiser take some control over the order of how their headlines and descriptions show to search users when they see them in the ads. The question though, is should you even want that control?

The advertiser I was talking to loved the control that pinning offers. He was convinced his ads needed to say something specific in position one, then something else specific in position two, and not many other things besides that (he was only using 4 of the 15 available headlines, big mistake!). But I think the use of pinning was a mistake.

All advertisers want the ad copy to say the things they want. And that’s great. Advertisers do that every day. You punch in your 15 headlines and your 4 descriptions and you come up with the ad copy. And that’s great, no one knows your customers like you do. But trying to control the positioning of headlines and descriptions through pinning? I think that’s where the advertiser becomes too controlling and ends up limiting the potential of their ads.

Why? Because the machine is better than you (in some areas). What’s the machine? The computer, the AI, the whatever. I like calling it the machine. The machine serves up different combinations of your headlines and descriptions to different users on different searches, and finds the best combo for that user on that search. In short, it’s an incredibly powerful tool that we have access to, and if you pin your headlines and descriptions, you’re losing access to a large percentage of the power that the tool offers.

And on top of losing access to being able to offer tons of different ad combinations to tons of different users on different searches, pinning can affect ad strength. So not only are you limiting the power of responsive search ads when you pin, you’re also risking your ad strength.

And the ironic thing about all of this is that if your ordering of the headlines and descriptions is the best ordering, that’s what the machine will figure out anyway and end up running most often. But what you’re missing if you pin is that you don’t allow the machine to test other orders of headlines and descriptions and find something potentially better for a certain amount of the users and searches

So what’s the one exception when pinning does make sense? Pinning can make sense when you have to have certain ad copy always show up in the ad. For example, if you pin a headline in position 1 or 2, that headline will always show in your ad. So if you have to always show certain ad copy in an ad for whatever reason, pinning is a good solution for that.

The debate around pinning is interesting because it says a lot about how an advertiser is approaching Google Ads, the level of control they want to have, and the respect or knowledge they have for the power of the machine. I come down on the side of never pinning (unless you have to show some specific ad copy every time), and of course one can always test this and see the results for themselves.

Thanks for reading. Here’s a recent podcast episode I did where I have an extended discussion on pinning.