Is Having Too Many Adgroups A Bad Thing?

[Nail Yener]

I am trying some PPC lately, with Adwords. I want to ask that is having too many, I mean about 50-100, adgroups a bad thing? How do you professionals, create successful campaigns in terms of adgroups and grouping keywords?

Thanks.

[omrid1]

No, It is a great thing!

You should have one ad group for each keyword and bid on broad,phrase and exact. Also you should have two ads for each ad group.

This is how you will get high QS by Adwords.

You should have different landing pages for the different themes:
I give each ad group a theme name. All ad groups that belong to the same theme will be directed to the same landing page.

I hope this helps

[yuyuan]

Having many ad groups can help you achieve good CTR for your campaign, which in turn help you save cost.

However, having too many ad groups means you will have many keywords and you will be getting lots of clicks from due to good CTR. You got to make sure that your budget is enough in this case... if not your campaign will be too diversified and you may miss out on the more profitable keywords.

[Nail Yener]

Originally Posted by omrid1

You should have one ad group for each keyword and bid on broad,phrase and exact.

You mean that I should create an adgroup for each keyword? What if I want to target more than 1000 keywords for a campaign?

[Lucid]

Here we go into the one keyword per group debate once again.

If you want to create groups with only one keyword, go ahead. I'm not going to stop you. But it is not necessary to do so. Create groups around themes. The example I usually use is this:

Selling pajamas for babies. People can use different words and spellings for pajamas: pajamas, pjs, pyjamas, sleepwear, sleep wear. I don't recommend to throw all related keywords into one group. But you can group them by the keywords use so you'd have:

Baby Pajamas
Baby PJs
Baby Sleepwear

and if you want to split the "sleep wear" keywords into their own group, not a bad idea. Note these are general, broad categories. The Baby Pajamas group would have keywords such as (showing only the phrase matches here, exact matches will double the count):

"baby pajamas"
"pajamas for baby"
"pajamas for babies"

and since they come in two sizes, add:

"pajamas for baby 6 months"
"pajamas for baby 12 months"

and whatever variations you can think of. You can see there can be a few keywords in this group. But that Baby Pajamas group should have keywords that have both those words: baby and pajamas. Not baby and sleepwear which goes into another group.

Most babies come in one of two sexes, boy or girl. Another more targeted group would be Baby Boy Pajamas:

"baby boy pajamas"
"pajamas for baby boy"
"pajamas for baby boys"
etc

Good idea too to make the clicks land on a page with nothing but baby boy pajamas, and not girls pajamas. Your conversion rate will thank you for it and it will help your QS too.

omrid1 is right, create a couple of ads. Create a third which will replace the lesser performing one. Repeat.

Having many groups will NOT get you higher click rates. Your ads are the ones triggering clicks. An bad ad that does not compel people to click will never do so. What Yuyuan may have meant is that ads tailored for the group MAY get higher click rates. Having the keywords in the ad can bring about better click rates but the ad must be good too. Which one would you click on?

Baby Boy Pajamas
Buy baby boy pajamas here.
We have baby boy pajamas.
www.babyboypajamas.com

Baby Boy Pajamas
Many styles, newborn to 18 months.
He'll sleep tight so you can too.
Allthingsbabies.com

While the first will stand out by blinding you with bolded text, I'll bet the second gets much higher click rates.

[metafever]

Buddy . . . build like 1,000 ad groups and then prune the bad ones daily.

This is the EASIEST low tech way to spot winning keywords.

Imagine having 1 keyword per ad group.

[Nail Yener]

@Lucid: Thanks a lot. It was a really informative post. I would choose the second one too

@metafever: Can I build 1000 adgroups? I thought it was 100 max for a campaign, is it wrong?

[Lucid]

Technically, it is 100 groups per campaign, that's what Google advertises. But you can ask for more and the system may automatically give you more without asking.

[kimothy777]

That's a good thing. Have one ad group for one keyword and one landing page for one keyword also. That will improve your quality score tremendously. While you are testing, try using only exact match with a low daily budget. Then when you really know what you are doing you can expand it. Hope this helps.

[Dave Ward]

Nothing wrong with 50 - 100 or more ad groups at all. As Lucid says, you don't have to create an ad group for every keyword, just so long as the ad group is tight. He has given you a perfect example so I am not going to repeat it.

There is no hard and fast rule to this, it depends on the market and what you want as a result.

I tend to use single keyword ad groups for keywords that I have established are premium for the account or campaign. so let us say I am doing a campaign for personal injury lawyers, I would put [ personal injury lawyer ] in an ad group on its own. I would do the same for the phrase match etc, again this is just my preference.

I tend to use it in this way because it is easier to manage in terms of A/B testing the ads that are showing for the word.
Also certain keywords may seem that they are the same and should be grouped together, but to the person searching they tend to have a very different meaning, think headache and headaches. I would separate those. Think about the meaning of the search term to the person who entered it into the search engine.

My general rule of thumb is to use 200 impressions to determine if an ad is effective. below a 1% ctr and the ad will be stopped and a new one tested to get above the 1% minimum. On a high traffic keyword you would get the impressions quickly. If you have a keyword that is only getting 10 impressions a day, in most cases I would not be putting this in an ad group of its own.

The same rule for impressions can apply for clicks, so 200 clicks to the landing page will give you your conversion metrics. For me it just an easy way to determine at a glance how that keyword is performing. In most cases if the conversion rate is less than 1% the keyword should be stopped.

[cmdsonline]

Hi ademmeda,

Yup, you want as many ad groups as possible generally speaking. It IS possible thought to go overboard at least in an organizational sense where you would have 90% of your ad groups producing no traffic.

You want to break your ad groups into themes, with no more than maybe 20-50 keywords in each ad group. The fewer keywords the better.

It's just that if you are selling a BROWN WIDGET your ad group might look like this in terms of keywords:

brown widget
"brown widget"
[brown widget]
brownwidget
really brown widget
super brown widget
nice brown widget

with negatives added such as (just examples!)

-free
-ugly
-cheap
-review
-price
-job

I'm not sure if 1 keyword in an ad group is REALISTIC I feel that that spreads results a little tooooooo thin, although if you have just a few keywords in each ad group, then you still will get a strong quality score as long as your keywords match your AD text and your landing page in terms of theme.

Everyone has their own technique, but this is my 2 cents.

Hope that helps!

[Adbeat]

the limit is actually 2000 ad groups per campaign.

[dburk]

Hi ppclabs,

Technically, I don't think there is a limit on the number of ad groups, however there is a limit on the number of keywords (2000 - unless you get an exception), so if you cannot add more than 2000 keywords you will not be able to test the possibility of more ad groups.

[NetworxNZ]

I understand that google removes the limit to accts once you've produced x amount of impressions for them..... not sue what x is and they probably have a few more parameters but it can be changed upon request.

[Adbeat]

Guys, there are very clear limits on all of these things which you can find by checking google help.

Your default limits on new accounts:
25 campaigns
2000 ad groups per campaign
50,000 total keywords across all campaigns

These can be extended depending on your account history.

Here is one reference...
How many ad groups and campaigns can I have? - AdWords Help

[Adbeat]

Originally Posted by NetworxNZ

I understand that google removes the limit to accts once you've produced x amount of impressions for them..... not sue what x is and they probably have a few more parameters but it can be changed upon request.

Right, there is never an automatic removal of any initial limits. You can however, make a request and depending on account history they may extend any of the account limits.