Auto-sized box under your text. How to control the width and height of that box?

Im doing a motion graphic template in after effect to use in premiere. The goal is to make text with an autoscaling box under it.

While I founda couple of tutorials on how do do this I wish to be able to control the height and width of the backround box separately.

But all my attempts have failed.

I was hoping the offset path in the shape layer would do the trick but it only scales uniformly on x and y.

Seams a little pity to do all text plates manually in illustrator when I was this close. So I'm reaching out for some knowledge here.