What are the components of an ad group?

When it comes to optimizing your pay-per-click advertising campaigns there are many different tricks and tips that you can use in order to increase your relevancy to search terms and also improve your chances of profiting. However, these strategies can be quite daunting for a beginner to understand, so in this article, we’re going to touch on one of the basics of effective PPC advertising; ad groups. We’ll be explaining what ad groups are, their importance and also how you can make your ad groups more effective to improve your return on advertising investment.

An ad group contains one or more ads which target a shared set of keywords. You set a bid, or price, to be used when an ad group’s keywords trigger an ad to appear. This is called a cost-per-click (CPC) bid. You can also set prices for individual keywords within the ad group. Use ad groups to organise your ads by a common theme, such as the types of products or services that you want to advertise. To learn more about keywords, you can read our blog post Google Ads Keywords Guide

Table of Contents

Explaining What Ad Groups Are

Let’s first start by explaining what ad groups are. Ad groups are essentially groups of keywords that are used in your marketing campaigns. This is something that is set up by the advertising service that you use for your PPC marketing. When you first set up and account and register your details, you’ll typically be asked to create an ad group which stores things like keywords, text ads, landing pages and so on. It’s essentially a way for you to create a systematic structure for your PPC advertising so that it’s much more organized for when you need to make specific changes or monitor its effectiveness. 

For instance, you may set up a separate ad group for the many different services that your business offers. If you’re a contractor, then you may set up an ad group for services that you offer residential customers and another ad group for services you offer to business and commercial clients. In short, it’s a tool you can use offered by PPC advertising services that can help you structure your promotional materials.

The Importance of Ad Groups​

OK, so we now know that Ad Groups are basically a structural component within your PPC account. So why should you bother with them? What makes them important?

Ad Groups contain a lot of important stuff!

Most search engines look to your Ad Group organization to determine:

• Which keywords your ads will show in response to.
• What your ad will say when it runs.
• Where the visitor will be taken when they click on your ad.

You’re deciding:

• Who to advertise to.
• What to say to get their attention.
• And how you’ll make your final pitch when you set up an Ad Group.

How Are Ad Groups Structured?

We discussed briefly in the previous section that ad groups are used to help you structure your PPC advertising materials so that you can keep them organized, but we didn’t exactly explain how it worked. A simple way to put it would be to consider the following;

• Your advertising campaign consists of your different ad groups
• Your ad groups contain all of your keywords, web pages and types of advertisements

As an example, your overall advertising campaign could be for contractor services that you offer in addition to the spares and parts you sell. In this case, your advertising campaign is for the contractor side of your business. Next, we set up different ad groups which typically deal with each service you offer. So you may have a service that’s designed to repair furniture and another that is for repairing a roof. These different services you offer will then become the ad groups.

Inside those two ad groups, you’ll list keywords that are relevant to the service you’re offering and you’ll also store the different advertising materials and lists of keywords related to those exact services. With this in mind

Group ad groups by similar themes​

Many advertisers find it helpful to base their ad groups on the sections or categories that appear on their website. For example, let’s say you sell desserts, drinks and snacks on your website.

In the table below, each ad group contains a keyword list focusing on a product that you’d sell. The keyword list in each ad group tells our system to show ads for these products only on websites related to them.

Why Use Ad Groups and Why Are They Important?

Now that we understand what ad groups are and how they’re structured, we can start talking about why you should be using ad groups and why they’re so important to any business’s PPC campaign.

• More organisation for your PPC advertising materials – Advertising can be an extremely tricky task especially due to all the different keywords that you might need to use and all the different variations of your marketing materials which need to be kept separate. With so many considerations in mind and all the materials you’ll be using, organising your advertising materials with ad groups can help you drastically improve your efficiency and also help you reduce the amount of time you waste on trying to modify individual components of your advertising campaign.
• Improved relevancy for certain aspects of your PPC marketing campaign – Because your ad groups are heavily focused on certain aspects of your PPC marketing campaign, you’ll greatly improve the relevancy of your advertising to certain search terms. Ad groups allow you to focus on very specific audiences so that you don’t need to risk PPC advertising to customers that have a very low chance of actually making a purchase or investing further into your business.

• Easier to modify your individual ad groups and make changes depending on market conditions – A great advantage of ad groups is the ability to make immediate changes to specific elements of your advertising materials instead of waiting a long time to have something changed or spending far too much time searching for that specific resource in order to change it.

• Offers improved brand consistency due to the grouping of keywords and materials – Consistency is important when it comes to advertising and branding because it allows customers to identify your brand no matter what service or product of yours they’re looking at. Ad groups allow you to monitor several of your advertising campaigns in a single place to ensure that your materials are kept consistent across different aspects of your promotional campaign.
• Outperform your competition – Lastly, using ad groups effectively means that you’ll ultimately outperform your competition. There are lower costs associated with using ad groups because you’re being more effective with your PPC expenditure and you can also monitor and analyze how each of your ad groups are doing so that you know what to change and want to delete in order to improve your conversation rate and profits. 
• As you can see, ad groups come with many great advantages and they’re extremely important to use regardless of the industry that you’re in. If your business offers several products or wants to tap into multiple audiences, then ad groups are a great way to get started.

Summary

Ad groups are essentially used to help you organise and structure your campaign so that it’s cohesive, can easily be modified at will and ultimately more efficient. It seems like a very simple change on the surface to help you make quick modifications, but you’ll realize that the power of ad groups lies within its ability to help you monitor and manage several different complex advertising campaigns with minimal effort. It will allow to create a consistent branding image and it will make it easy for you to outperform your competition in terms of PPC advertising.

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