From what we have seen over the years, the question of ad group structure is something that many PPC advertisers struggle with as they are setting up new campaigns. The main question seems to be, which keywords should I put where? Some questions that stem from that are: How many keywords is too many for one ad group? If I break my keywords up into smaller groups, on what criteria do I base the groupings? We’d like to share our ad group philosophy and hope that it can help answer those questions.

Google’s learning center suggests that “ad groups should be organized by common theme, product, or goal”. What the themes are, and what groups you end up with, will be determined by your keywords. Ad groups should be comprised, as much as possible, by keywords that share a close resemblance to one another. That generally means that all of the keyword phrases in the group will share certain words. For example:

• Cleveland marketing agency
• Cleveland marketing company

In those phrases, two out of the three words are the same. In addition, the phrases mean essentially the same thing. That’s a good sign that they belong together. If you are not sure whether a keyword belongs with a certain group, a good question to ask is: Will the ad copy for this group address this keyword? If not, it probably belongs in another group. In the same way that your keyword phrases in the ad group should share words, your ad copy should too. For example:

• pay per click marketing agency
• pay per click advertising agency
• recruitment advertsing

There are a few ways to analyze this group, but generally speaking your ad copy for this group would be focused on the words ‘pay per click’, ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, and ‘agency’. While it might be possible to work the word ‘recruitment’ into your ad, it probably makes sense to put that in a separate group. The distinction would likely be clearer in a real campaign because you would probably have several other ‘recruitment’ keywords which would fit together.

Another guideline that will help you make grouping decisions is the number of keywords you have in the group. Google says, “If you find that the keywords or placements in one ad group become unwieldy, split the ad group into two to make them easier to manage.” Our interpretation of this guideline is that when it comes to ad groups, smaller and tightly focused is better than large and inclusive. That doesn’t mean that you should be creating hundreds of tiny ad groups with three keywords in each. However, if your group is getting into the hundreds of keywords, you should probably look for a way to break it up.

Once your campaign is live, a good way to see if you have created a strong ad group structure is to check your keywords’ quality scores. An ad group that has a lot of keywords with a low quality score may be an ad group that needs reorganization. In some cases, the keywords that relate well to each other and to your ad copy will have higher q-scores while the outliers will have lower scores. Moving the low scoring keywords into more relevant ad groups (or getting rid of them altogether) should help improve the performance of the core keywords in the group.

While ad group creation is a fuzzy science, we hope that answers some of the most common questions. As always, if you have questions about your ad group structure, or any other aspect of your PPC campaigns, we would love to help.