Ad Groups: How to Create More Effective Ad Groups for PPC

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. This page will teach you:

• What “Ad Group” means in reference to PPC advertising.
• Why Ad Groups are important.
• And, of course, how best to create an effective Ad Group for PPC.

So What’s an Ad Group, Anyway?

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.

Those Ad Groups then house:

• Keywords
• Text ads
• Landing pages

In other words, ad groups are one of the main tools you have for organizing your PPC account into a meaningful hierarchy.

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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.

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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.

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 well integrated with your keywords.

So what actually goes in your ad groups? Text ads, of course! In our next lesson, we’ll learn how PPC text ads work and how you can optimize your text ads for better PPC performance.