Most successful ad campaigns are creating multiple ads in one group. This allows the connection of keywords, landing pages, text, etc., and ultimately enables you to reach a larger audience with specific targeting. 

What’s a Benefit of Having Multiple Ads in an Ad Group?

The point of an ad campaign is to increase leads and conversions, drive traffic, and boost brand awareness. In other words, if you’re not making the most of Google ads, you risk losing audiences while increasing your PPC advertising cost.

When it comes to Google ads and pay-per-click marketing, it might be obvious that making your ad groups more efficient is a critical factor of any successful campaign, but it raises questions: Should you include a solo ad or multiple ads in an ad group? What’s a benefit of having multiple ads in an ad group? Here, we address how ad groups work and why having multiple ads in an ad group can significantly improve your campaign. 

What Are Ad Groups and Why Do They Matter?

First, a little background. An ad group includes all ads that focus on a set of targets or keywords in an ad campaign. Every ad campaign you make contains one or more ad groups and your ad groups are a way of organizing and connecting your ad's keywords, text ads, and landing pages to optimize your campaign's performance. 

Ad groups are a vital part of PPC marketing campaign and search engines use them to determine important details, such as: 

• The keywords your ads will appear in response to 
• The landing pages your ads will take visitors to when they click 
• Your ad's text and content when it runs to your audience 
• Who you'll advertise to 
• How you'll be grabbing attention and introducing customers to your business 

So, What’s a Benefit of Having Multiple Ads in an Ad Group?

Running a solo ad isn’t always a smart idea. Why? A single ad makes it difficult to gauge your campaign's performance because the data it generates cannot be measured or compared to another similar ad. That’s why having multiple ads delivers extra context to your campaign's metrics in addition to a host of other benefits: 

Benefit #1: Improved Ad Performance

When you have multiple ads working in your ad group, Google Ads automatically rotates them based on your ad rotation settings. Ad rotation settings enable you to set a preference for how your ads are shown to your audience, giving you the chance to maximize your ad campaign's performance. For example, you can choose to have your better-performing ads be shown more frequently which increases your click rate. 

Benefit #2: Varied Ads

Repetitiveness is not ideal in advertising. Having customers see the same ads over and over again leads to ad fatigue. With time, people can even become irritated by your ads. No marketer wants that. Including a variety of ads in rotation is good marketing strategy, since a new ad is far more likely to convert a lead than being shown the same ad for a second or third time. 

Google Ads also allows for ads in various formats to be included in the same ad group. Some popular formats include: 

Text Ads 

Text ads are the most basic form of PPC advertising. A standard text ad consists of a headline text, display URL, and a description text. They are the cheapest format and the easiest to get started with for new marketers. 

Image Ads 

Image ads are exactly what they sound like: ads based on images and pictures. These can be static graphics, interactive gifs, or pictures in a variety of sizes. Image ads are displayed by Google on the Google Display Network. Thanks to their visual format, which strikes users immediately, image ads are more likely to catch a user's attention and convert than text ads.

Call-only Ads 

Call-only ads are very similar to text ads. The major difference is that call-only ads put a focus on your business phone number as opposed to fully selling a product. When people click on your ad, it directs a call to your business which is a way of generating leads and introducing customers into your funnel.

Video Ads 

Video ads are also a go-to format for PPC marketers. Video ads can be shown as standalone ads when your keywords are searched or can be inserted into streaming video content as part of Google's Display Campaign. This puts your video ads in the beginning, middle, or end of content on services like YouTube, Twitch, and other social media platforms. 

Benefit #3: More Qualified Leads

Ad groups contain very specific information such as keywords and ad text. As a result, they are tailored to a specific audience. Having several ad groups with different keywords and text increases your scope and helps tailor messages to a wider audience pool, capturing multiple demographics at once. The end result is that you get more qualified leads with a higher chance of conversion. 

Benefit #4: Keyword Variations

Your ad group will often contain lots of related keywords intended to educate, inform, or sell a particular product. However, each keyword has semantic variations, which means that you will never have an ad group that encapsulates all variations of that keyword. For example, if you have a single ad for cat pajamas but users search for “kitty pajamas,” the result is missing leads due to the semantic difference.

A simple solution: multiple ads with keyword variation, which increases your ad's chances of appearing in more searches. 

Benefit #5: Increase Testing Options 

Testing different ad types and formats for your ad campaign helps you detect and eliminate the underperforming aspects, leaving you with high-performance variables and ads that convert. With just one campaign ad, there is no way for you to test it against other ad types and judge its effectiveness. That’s why having multiple ad groups is the best way to maximize your campaign as it allows Google to show your different ads and identify the best ones. 

How Many Ads Should Your Ad Group Have?

It's advisable to have multiple ads in an ad group for optimal results. Exactly how many you should have depends on the number of keywords you want to rank for. A good way to moderate the number of keywords and ads necessary is by using keywords with intent or "long-tail" keywords. 

Long-tail keywords are specific keywords that help you rank better in searches when your market is competitive. For example, if you sell kid's shoes, "shoes" is a head keyword, and including it in your ad puts you in direct competition with thousands of other businesses. It creates a need to also include "kid's shoes" as a keyword in your ad. 

However, using "Nike shoes for kids" or "shoes for kids aged 8-10" is a lot more specific and less searched by customers, giving you the chance to rank high in search results. These are long-tail keywords and including several of them in your ad helps drive extra traffic to your page. 

There is no set formula for the number of ads that should be in an ad group, but marketers should generally aim for: 

• 20 key keywords per group 
• 6-10 ad groups per campaign 
• 2-3 ads per ad group

Create Ads That Get Results

Having imaginative, well-made ad groups is a basic part of running a successful PPC ad campaign. With multiple ads in your ad group, marketers can better organize their keywords, landing pages, and ad content to cover the different facets of their business. 

However, there is no one size fits all formula for PPC marketing. The exact number of ads you need in your ad group largely varies between businesses and a misjudgment can negatively affect your final ROI. That's why seeking the help of experts is a smart choice, particularly for start-up businesses. 

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