When we’re setting up MOST PPC campaigns, we’re usually starting out with 2 ads in each ad group.

Yep. We’re not spending days writing multiple ads (3 or 4) for each ad group. We’re literally only putting in 2 ads per group.

Now, as I stated, this is for MOST PPC campaigns. However, there are sometimes exceptions to the rule.

The reason that we’re only crafting two PPC ads is because we don’t know just how successful each of the ad groups will be (assuming that we have a large enough budget to warrant more than two ads… more on that below).

Sure, we may have an idea, but when you’ve been involved in the PPC world for awhile, you learn to listen to the statistics and keep your guessing to yourself.

A great example is a painting franchise that we work with. We have 7 franchisees all around the metro area of Minneapolis / St. Paul.

Now when we were setting up these accounts, we thought that we could literally copy and paste the campaigns and just change the areas out as we had been working with one of them for about 9 months and had a pretty good feel for what would work for the others. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

(NOTE: Want to Learn to Set Up & Manage a PPC Account? You can do that HERE.)

After setting each of them up, we realized that they were all performing much differently. We would have guessed that one particular ad group would have been more successful based on our experience with the first franchise. But literally ALL of them had a different top performing ad group.

It was because all of them were in a different part of the metro area. They all had different demographics. People with different education levels, different income levels, different religious backgrounds, everything. And they are all within 20 minutes of downtown Minneapolis.

They were all completely different in their background, therefore, they use different keywords when performing searches online. Hence, they all had a different top performing ad group.

Now when we set these ad groups up, we spent time adding 3 ads to the top performing ad group (we thought), because we knew how much they were going to spend and knew that we could test 3 ads in that group. However, that was wrong. We then added a third ad to the REAL top performing ad group.

If it’s a campaign only spending a few hundred dollars a month or less, we won’t ever add more than 2 ads per ad group. To try and test out more than 2 ads at a time, you’re spreading yourself pretty thin and don’t want to drag down the quality score of the ad group as a whole.

So How Many Ads Per Ad Group?

Our suggestion is to stick to 2 ads per ad group UNLESS you have a larger budget and are seeing hundreds of clicks a month in a particular ad group. We typically will let an ad group run for 200 clicks (assuming there are 2 ads in the group) before we will will determine the winning ad, throw out the loser, and add in a brand new ad to test against the winner.

But as always, if you’ve got a different feeling, just test it.

Have a comment about how many ads to put into each ad group? Leave it below.