Ad Groups are an essential component of pay-per-click marketing. Creating effective Ad Groups can help you to drive more traffic and leads at lower costs, while increasing the number of conversions on your site.

What is an ad group?

Basically an Ad Group is the container for your keywords in your search marketing campaigns. PPC advertising is structured such that you first create an account, then create an ad campaign, which is home to Ad Groups.

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 to create ad groups that really work

“Really work” here means Ad Groups that cost less and convert more. Basically, in creating an Ad Group, you want to ensure that you’re offering integration and consistency:

• Integration – Create a system where you’re consistently creating keyword groups, ad text, and landing pages that are tightly integrated with one another.
• Consistency – This integration should lead to messaging consistency. Your ad text and landing pages should speak directly to the searches users are typing in to reach your site.

Ad group best practices

Start by clustering your desired keywords by themes. These should be as narrow as reasonably possible to avoid overlap in targeted searches.

Before transforming your keyword clusters into ad groups, consider Match types, audience targeting and messaging.

Match Types

For best efficiency and to simplify negative matching, it is recommended to create duplicate groups by match type. Known as match type mirroring, this best practice entails each group having only terms of one match type.

Audience Targeting

If you want to target different user groups based on their behavior, you will need to further clone your groups based on audience targeting.

As audience targeting can be also set at campaign level, this is recommended more for higher level campaigns.