How to create your campaigns’ Ad groups

Welcome to Chapter 8 of Arete Blogs’ Complete PPC Guide : Noteworthy Ad Group Best Practices

An effective paid search campaign depends on a well-structured account. In order to successfully set up campaigns and ad groups, you should follow these best practices.

A competent structure is profoundly connected with your marketing strategy and business requirements

Thus, having the calculated elements right ensures having a structure that is as functional as possible.

Along with that, it will also help you to get benefit from the latest paid search innovations, specifically those which heavily rely on algorithm based automations.

Ad Group Best Practices

First of all, cluster your keywords into theme based groups. Try to make them as narrow as possible in order to avoid any chances of overlapping in targeted searches.

The copy you expect to run for each ad group should guide the ad group structure as each group supports different ads.

It is very common that most of the traffic is driven by some selected number of terms.

In fact, only a handful of keywords may command lots of traffic.

In these cases, it may be necessary to create a number of groups so that the “power keywords” live separately from other terms.

There are few single keyword groups, but they all follow the same principle. In order to optimize the performance, copy, test, and report of each keyword, they isolate it into its own group.

After you’ve developed an ad group strategy, before you create the ad group structure, take the time to think about match type and how audience needs will affect the ad text approach. Create a landing page that meets the needs of the ad group strategy and then finalize your ad group structure.

Match Types

This best practice, known as “Match Type Mirroring” , demands each group to have only terms of one match type. 

If unusual circumstances do not arise, exactly matched groups should perform the best.

Negative matching often targets phrase and broad match groups.

Thus, in Phrase and Broad groups, your Exact Match positives must be negatives to prevent group cannibalization.

Budgetary benefits are also associated with match type group mirroring.

If your budget is limited, it is most effective to pause the less performing match types if they are isolated in different groups.

In the case of very high-volume campaigns that require superior cost control, mirror match types within campaigns, so that each campaign only has one match type.

Audience Tailored Messaging

Separate groups are primarily motivated by the need to run different ads.

Nevertheless, before creating more groups, check out whether a feed or an ad customizer can solve the copy customization problem.

Elements like price, product features, or service elements can often be fed through the business data capability.

As needed, business data can be updated seamlessly rather than creating new ads and groups, trickling the changes to ad copy without affecting ads’ Quality Scores.

Rather than creating a new campaign or group when messaging needs to be tailored to a single audience, use ad customizers.

Using a customizer “if” statement, all users can see the default text and one audience can see a different version.

Landing Pages

A landing page should be used per ad group unless testing is being done to evaluate site conversion.

In an ad group with multiple topic themes, multiple landing pages are likely to be needed due to poorly grouped keywords.

Then a one-to-one relationship should exist between your group, landing page, and ad text approach.

It can be intriguing to create a very detailed structure.

If it starts to look complex, it probably is!

Consider starting a new account.

A single engine account may not cover everything, and multiple ones may be necessary for larger advertising campaigns, particularly when there are multiple sources of funding.

Engine Parity

It is very much in practice that campaigns are cloned for a number of search engines to be used.

Percontra, this can create an unnecessarily large number of campaigns and groups.

As secondary engines command a much lower share of traffic, many campaigns and groups will see limited traffic.

The optimization and reporting effort should be justified by replicating only those campaigns and groups that will provide meaningful results.

Naming Convention

Without a campaign and group naming convention in place, any consideration of structure will be incomplete.

It is best to use special characters to separate elements and be succinct, reflecting all targeting aspects.

Henceforth, robust naming conventions facilitate scaling efforts over time.

As a result, automating any solution will be simplified, keywords will be expanded, budgets will be managed, and so on.

But don’t get carried away by incorporating everything imaginable into the ad group or campaign name.

The naming convention should allow determining with a naked eye what the campaign or ad group contains.

Nonetheless, filters and labels should be leveraged alongside.

With them you can quickly report on different aspects of your account or campaign without relying on an overly complicated naming convention.

Conclusion

In conclusion, paid search strategy is not static, so neither is the structure. Therefore, if the website has been updated, make sure to review it periodically.

In order to evolve your structure, you should make changes to your content and landing pages.

As long as you follow these best practices, any future changes will be incremental, so performance will not be impacted by overhauls