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Ad Groups - Get More Out of a PPC Ad Group

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

  • What "Ad Group" means in reference to PPC advertising.
  • Why the term is important.
  • And, of course, how best to create an effective Ad Group.

so what's an ad group, anyway?

Basically an Ad Group is the container for your keyword list in either your search marketing or content network campaigns.

PPC advertising is structured such that you:

Ad Groups are located below ad campaigns in the PPC campaign structure, and contain keywords and ads.

You can see from the above representation of WordStream's PPC management dashboard that the hierarchy flows:

  • From Campaign
    • To Ad Group

the importance of ad groups

OK, so we now know that Ad Groups are basically a structural component within your PPC account. Fair enough. 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 generating and creating keyword groups, ad text, keywords, 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.

There are two central reasons these things are so important to you and to your business:

  • Lower Costs - Because of a system known as Quality Score, creating well-aligned Ad Groups means that you'll be paying less money for the same clicks.
  • More Conversions - If I search for "graphic design services" and your advertisement talks about your graphic design services, and then you send me to a page about those same graphic design services, I'm much more likely to convert than if your ad text or landing page have nothing to do with one another or aren't integrated with your keywords.

So how do you achieve this close integration in your PPC campaigns?

By turning to a PPC software solution.

WordStream and your ad groups

WordStream provides you with comprehensive tools that integrate your keyword lists, grouping process, ad text, and landing pages.

The software offers sophisticated grouping tools which allow you to create semantically similar keyword groups with the click of a button.

Here we see that our graphic design website has a series of grouping suggestions to help us better segment our core "graphic design" grouping:

Ad group creation is made simple and more effective with WordStream's suggested segmentations.

After segmentation, the groups can then be quickly and effectively made into ad groups and matched up with ad text:

Create Ad Groups that feature close integration between keywords, ad text, and landing pages with WordStream.

Finally, you'll be taken to the PPC campaigns tab where you'll be able to create Ad Group settings and where you'll be afforded the opportunity to sync your ad text with your keywords:

Ad Group text ads should be informed by your groups keywords, as pictured.

You see that the headline and description lines have been propagated by the software. These copy suggestions are provided by the keywords in the Ad Group you just created. You can then use these same textual suggestions to inform your landing page copy or for organic search optimization purposes.

Thus, you have an automated process which enables you to repeatedly generate highly effective Ad Groups.

More about ad groups

For more information about Ad Groups, you can review our:

And, of course, the best way to really learn about Ad Groups is to start creating them. To do that and learn more about WordStream, you can:

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