Today, we’re talking about how many ads you should have in your ad groups inside your Google ads campaigns.

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The question I get a lot is, how many ads should I have inside each ad group in a Google ads campaign?

One thing that we see a lot of when we’re hired to go and look inside Google ads campaigns is the fact that everybody will have all of their ad groups, all of their keywords and everything pointed towards just one or two ads.

And the reason that that doesn’t work is the ads are not relevant to the keywords that people are typing in.

So an example I like to use is if you have somebody looking for red cars, you want them to go to an app that talks about red cars.

It talks about red cars in the headline, talks about red cars in the description, and takes them to a page specifically with red cars.

Make Sure Your Keywords Are Broken Up Into Specific Ad Groups

So first thing you want to do is you want to make sure your keywords are broken up into specific ad groups. All of the red car keywords are in a red car ad group.

Same thing with blue trucks, and so on. Then we can get to the ads. So the number of ads will also depend on your budget, and I’m going to give you an idea how to figure that out.

But also, one of the most important things you need to understand is there is a setting inside your Google ads campaigns. And if that setting is not correct, testing ads is not going to make a difference whatsoever.

Now when I talk to people about building multiple ads per ad group, usually their shoulders sink and their head drops, and they get very disappointed because it’s more work for them.

I completely understand that. With that said, I actually have a free tool that we developed in our agency that I’ll give you opportunity to get for free.

This is a tool that we actually, to be completely honest, we use this every single day. This is the one tool that has saved me more time than any free or paid tool that I’ve ever used when it comes to dealing with Google ads campaigns.

So let’s take a look and dive inside a campaign. I want to show you what the campaign, what you should be testing, and that all important setting that you need to have set up correctly. Let’s go.

So here we are inside a campaign. The keywords inside these ad groups all deal with things like BLS. This is for a CPR training facility. So BLS is a type of a training that they do.

So we have phrase match keywords. We have exact match keywords, CPR classes in Minneapolis, those types of keywords. That’s the only types of keywords we have in these groups.

Let’s go into the BLS phrase group and I want to show you what’s going on. Inside this BLS ad group, in this instance, we’re only running two ads at a time.

This is really based on the budget. If we had a bigger budget for this company, we could split test more ads. However, based on the number of clicks that we get in any given month, we only run two ads at a time. Let’s show you why.

Here are the two ads. As you can see, let’s just say that both of these ads were exactly the same. In the second ad, we decided we wanted to change the headline, we wanted to change the description and we wanted to change this URL here, the path.

Now if we test these out, we are not going to be able to determine what basically made the ad better or worse. So let’s say the second ad that we changed all this stuff on takes off.

We don’t know if it was the headline that caught people’s eye. We don’t know if it was the description that described what we were selling better. We have absolutely no idea.

Only Change One Thing At A Time

So regardless of what you’re doing, you want to make sure that you are always only changing one thing at a time in an ad. That way you’re able to easily figure out was it the headline?

So if they both have the same headlines and different descriptions, you will have one ad that will be a winner no matter what.

So if we have two of the exact same ads, but maybe they have different headlines, we’re able to determine over time which one of those is going to come out the winner, which one people click more.

Once we figure that out, we take the losing ad out and we throw a new one in. Now sometimes we’ll get to a point where, you know what? We’ve got a really good headline. We haven’t been able to beat that one.

Let’s keep the same headlines, and let’s just change up the descriptions.

Make Sure Settings Are Correct

Now, there is a setting inside Google ads. You absolutely need to have this setting set correctly, otherwise testing ads is not going to work for you.

What you need to do is you need to go into your settings. Once you’re in your settings, click additional settings and you click on ad rotation. If you have not messed with this, chances are it says optimize, prefer best performing ads.

What we like to do is we do always, no matter what, we do do not optimize, rotate ads indefinitely. And here’s why.

Google says that you know what? They’re going to optimize for conversions for your particular ads. However, I don’t believe there’s an account manager in the country that will agree that Google does the best job of rotating ads.

A lot of the times we’ve gone in and seen the ads were so skewed in the favor of one of them that they never even gave the other one a chance.

This does not always fix it. Look at this one. These are actually set to rotate indefinitely. But as you can see, 921 impressions, 118 impressions.

So yes, this one has a much better click through rate, but these are not rotating evenly. But if you have this setting set to optimize preferred best performing ads, this might be 1,000 1,100 to one.

It will not even give this other one a chance even though this one has done rather well. However, it’s only put it out there about 10 to 15% of the time that this one has.

So sometimes you’ll see it’s a little more evenly split. Let’s check out another ad group.

This one is a little bit more evenly split, maybe 1/3, 2/3. This one has a better click through rate. This one has more conversions and much less per conversion, but they’re showing it fewer times.

So you at least need to make sure that you have that setting correct inside the campaign itself.

Now just real quick, do you have specific questions about anything about Google ads? We would love to help, but we also want to hear more from you guys about what kind of content you want to see.

So whatever questions you have, let us know in the comment section below. Now when it comes to budgets, you don’t want to run more than two ads for a smaller campaign.

The reason is is that if you’re trying to test out ads, and maybe you’re only getting 10 clicks, 15 clicks a month to that particular ad group, it’s going to take you quite some time to get to statistical significance or to get to a winner for that particular ad.

So what you might want to do is we like to look at between 150 and 200 clicks that go to those specific ads to determine a winner.

Once that happens, we’ll take the losing ad out and we’ll throw a new one in and either change up the headline or the description again, just like we showed you.

Now if you have a larger budget where maybe you’re getting 150 or 200 clicks a month to an ad group, or even half of that, we might run three ads.

But remember, when we run those ads, we are only testing headlines. We might test three headlines or we’re only testing descriptions.

Otherwise, you will never know what is causing one ad to win over another. But for most ads, most of you should only be running two ads per ad group.

Now the free tool I talked about is what we call our text ad generator.

This actual tool saves us hours when we are building out campaigns. This tool will allow you to go in and create multiple ads per ad group extremely quickly because you are doing it all on one spreadsheet and it will basically duplicate descriptions.

It could duplicate headlines. There’s a video that shows you exactly how to use it with the actual spreadsheet itself. I’ll put a link in the description below.

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And if you like more Google ads training, over to the right hand side, you’ll see some of our Google ads set up and optimization videos.

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How Many Ads Per Ad Group in Google Ads… and Why | Adwords

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