How To Create An Effective Ad Group: Best Practices

When you’re running ad groups, the search engine must recognise the messages your ads are trying to convey. It also needs to know which landing page your user will be directed to when they click on your ad, plus which keywords trigger your ad to pop up. But creating efficient ad groups is no walk in the park, yet, it’s incredibly cost-effective. 

In this blog, we’ll look at what ad groups are and how you can create one effectively.

What Is An Ad Group?

An ad group contains all the keywords you identified for your Google Ads campaign. They enable you to put together a complete marketing campaign that directs traffic to your company and causes leads in a budget-friendly manner. Ad groups are a must-have tool for any marketer with a Pay Per Click (PPC) account.

How To Create Effective Ad Groups

Don’t Waste Time Using Low-Volume Keywords

Let’s say you’ve created keywords as phrases and some as exact matches. For example, you may have inserted the keyword “physical therapy near me” as an ad group, as well as the area, location, and clinic. 

Most of the time, these keywords don’t generate impressions. They’re low search volume – you’re just bloating your account with more keywords. Google is a lot more intelligent now compared to three years back when we would have been able to do this. 

We’d suggest placing the “near me” or the area or the location as one or two keywords – and that’s about it. Google knows “near me” is the same as “near to me”. It also knows that “nearest to me” is the same as “nearby me”. 

Include Other Google Ad-Triggering Search Terms In Your Ad Group

Next, go into your search terms report. If you find Google has triggered your ad for other search terms, but you didn’t put them in your ad group, be sure to include them. It’s as simple as that. Why waste time using low-volume keywords? 

So, put all your keywords in one ad group because the algorithm needs more data. And you will start to get more data in each one of these one, two, three, or four keywords in the same ad group. 

And another thing. If you want to create another campaign and have one or two keywords per ad group, like “near me”, the area, location and clinic, test all of these to see which one performs the best. 

Written by Uzair Kharawala

Founder of SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.