Ad group

An ad group is the container inside a Google Ads campaign that holds a set of keywords together with the adverts written to answer them. It is the level where a search and a promise are matched to each other, and most of the faults that look like bidding problems in an account are grouping problems wearing a disguise.

In short

• A set of related keywords, plus the adverts written for them.
• Account, then campaign, then ad group, then keywords and adverts.
• Budget is set on the campaign, never on the ad group.
• One search intent per group is the working rule.

Words you will hear

• Campaign. The level above. Holds the budget, the locations, the schedule and the bidding strategy.
• Final URL. The page an advert sends people to, set per advert.
• Match type. How loosely a keyword is allowed to catch searches.
• Responsive search ad. The standard advert format, assembled from headlines and descriptions you supply.
• Ad Strength. A rating of how varied and well matched that advert content is. A diagnostic, not an auction input.
• Default bid. A starting bid applied to keywords in the group, used only under manual bidding.

Where the level actually sits

The hierarchy is four deep and each level owns different settings, which matters more than it sounds.

The account holds everything. The campaign holds the budget, the countries or cities you target, the days and hours, and the bidding strategy. The ad group holds keywords and adverts. Individual keywords sit below that, and can carry their own bids where the campaign is bid manually.

Read that list again with a question in mind, which is where the money is controlled. It is the campaign. Nothing at ad group level protects a share of spend, and nothing there stops one theme consuming what you hoped another would get.

This is why an account built with one campaign and eleven ad groups, one per service, behaves in a way its owner did not intend. The service with the cheapest clicks and the broadest keywords takes the budget, every morning, and the other ten share what is left. Separating them into groups felt like separating them. It separated the reporting and nothing else.

One intent per group

The rule that produces good groups is narrower than the rule most people apply.

A group should cover one thing somebody is trying to do, not one thing you sell. Those are different, and the gap between them is where relevance is lost. Somebody typing a term to find a supplier, somebody typing the same words to learn what the work involves, and somebody typing them with a city attached are three different intentions, and one advert cannot promise the right thing to all three. The wider point is covered under search intent, and it applies here more sharply than anywhere else in an account.

The practical test takes a minute. Write one headline. If it fits every keyword in the group without retreating into something vague, the group is tight enough. If the only headline that fits them all is the name of your business, the group needs splitting.

The reward for getting this right is not abstract. Relevance is one of the inputs to Ad Rank, so tighter groups tend to win more auctions at a lower cost per click, and the diagnostics under Quality Score will usually point at the loose group before you notice it yourself.

The opposite mistake

Having established that tighter is better, the account then gets split until nothing works, which is the failure that follows the advice instead of ignoring it.

Every ad group divides the same traffic. A business receiving a few hundred clicks a month across forty groups has almost no data in any of them, and automated bidding cannot learn from almost no data. The adverts rotate without ever accumulating enough evidence to declare one better. The reporting looks detailed and answers nothing.

Somewhere between one group holding forty unrelated terms and forty groups holding one term each is a structure that matches how your customers actually search. For most small businesses in the Philippines that is a handful of groups per campaign, built around the services people genuinely ask for by name, with the searches you never want caught by any of them handled through negative keywords rather than through another split.

Where the group meets the website

One last thing gets decided at this level and is regularly forgotten.

Each advert points at a page. When the group is tight, that page is obvious, and the person arriving finds the thing the advert promised. When the group is loose, there is no page that suits every keyword in it, so everything gets pointed at the homepage and the visitor is asked to go looking.

That handover is the part of the account that sits on your website rather than inside Google, which is why a landing page built for one group tends to outperform a general page serving all of them. Grouping decides what you promise. The page decides whether you kept it.