What Is an Ad Group?
An ad group is a collection of one or more ads organized according to a certain criterion. And each paid advertising campaign contains at least one ad group.
For instance, you might want to structure your ads into groups according to the different products or services you offer. Those would be the themes of your ad groups.
When Do You Create Ad Groups?
The flow goes as follows:
- You create an account on a PPC (pay per click) campaign platform.
- Create the campaign itself, which holds one or more ad groups.
- Lastly, you define, for each ad group, a set of target keywords and ads.
Part of the ad itself are
- The creative; ad text and imagery designed to draw attention to your product or service
- Landing page or the webpage your ad leads to when someone clicks on it
How an Ad Group Works
Google displays ads in available places based on the keywords listed for ad groups.
To clarify, Google shows ads from an ad group in webpages related to the keywords you listed for that group.
Benefits of Ad Groups
If you define your ad groups effectively, you'll:
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Lower your customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Get more conversions
You want the highest quality score for your ads, and the way you define your ad groups heavily contributes to achieving that goal.
Some Best Practices for Structuring Ad Groups
1. To keep ad groups easily manageable, you should have a maximum of;7-10 groups per PPC campaign
- 20 keywords per group
- 2-3 ads per group
2. A pair composed of ad text and landing page should intimately relate to each other.
3. Likewise, the keywords you list for the ad group should intimately relate to the ad text and the landing page.
4. Similarly, the keywords you use in ad groups should directly relate to the searches that drive traffic to your website.
5. The themes according to which you define your ad groups should not overlap in target searches.
6. Duplicate ad groups by match type, which means creating ad groups for exact matching and duplicate those groups for phrase and broad matching.
7. In the same vein as keyword cannibalization, you might adopt an ad group cannibalization strategy. It consists of using negative keywords to define a phrase- and broad-match group for the positive keywords in a corresponding exact-match group.
8. You might target different audiences by cloning ad groups and changing keywords lists, ad texts, or both.
9. On a final note, review your ad groups from time to time as your website and search behaviors change.
How Can We Help?
If you're looking for someone to give you a hand with defining your ad groups, contact us today.
We can take care of matching your business with the right PPC provider.
