Google Ad Groups: How To Setup Effective Ones

Google ad groups are a key part of advertising in Google Ads. That is where you add your keywords and text ads to advertise your business, products or services.

These ad groups are available in different campaign types in Google Ads including Search, Display, Shopping and Video campaigns. In this article I’ll be focusing on Search ad groups which are the most frequently used.

Each campaign you setup should have between five to 15 ad groups. This helps to manage the campaigns effectively and ensures that your account is structured properly.

There are two primary Google ad group types in your Search campaigns: standard and dynamic. You can create either or both of these types when you first setup your campaign and add some later as you manage your campaign.

Standard Google Ad Groups

Standard Ad groups are keyword-based groups that allow you to bid on keywords and target people with your ads as they search on Google.

1. Keywords – in each ad group add between five and 15 keywords. This ensures that your ad groups are tightly-themed and helps to achieve good click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates.
2. Responsive search ads – have at least one responsive search ad within each ad group. Responsive search ads give you a lot more text space than previous ad types like Expanded and Standard text ads, so you have a lot more benefits and features to include. And the system then creates ad combinations automatically, based on the context of the searches you’re eligible to appear in.

Dynamic Google Ad Groups

These are known as Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and are automatically generated to target searchers based on the context. They are designed to bring the most relevant traffic to your defined web pages.

1. Final URLs – your final URLs or landing pages are dynamically generated for your ads based on whether the content matches the search phrase that caused your ad to show. So, this is different from responsive search ads which I’ve described above that require you to choose the landing pages to send visitors to.
2. Headline – each dynamic search ad has one dynamically generated headline, which the system takes from the content on your website  and the search phrase that triggered your ad to show. Again, this differs from responsive search ads which allow you to choose the text to use in your headlines and you have up to 15 headlines to use.
3. Description lines – this is the only part of the ad that is not dynamically generated and requires that you provide the text yourself. There are two description lines and each has a 90 character limit. So, you should use as much of this text space as possible and include your most important benefits, features, calls to action and unique selling point (USP).

Usually, you will create one dynamic ad group in your campaign, after having run some standard ad groups for some weeks or months. And you’ll usually see a recommendation to add one in your Recommendations page with some potential searches that could trigger the ads.

And this will only appear when the system has found good searches that your keyword-based ad groups are not targeting. So, this is why dynamic ad groups are added later, after running standard ad groups for some time.

Conclusion

Setting up Google ad groups is one of the most important stages of advertising in the Google Ads PPC platform. There are two main ad group types as detailed above and following a few best practices will help you to create effective ones that will be profitable for your business.

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