As Responsive Search Ads become more popular, we’ve seen a decline in properly structured ad groups. With Google’s promise of putting the correct ad assets together based upon the search query, creating well-themed ad groups has started to decline.
However, even with RSAs, a single ad cannot describe everything. You still need well-themed ad groups and ads that properly describe those keywords in order for your accounts to get both good CTRs and conversion rates.
In this video, we’ll look at how to take unstructured keywords (search query data, keyword research, etc) and turn them into well-themed ad groups.
Additional Resources:
Here’s the full transcript of the video:
0:00:00.2 Speaker 1: Hello. In this video, we’re going to look at how to properly create ad groups. Now, we’re going to look at this from unstructured data. It could come from keyword research, search query data or just lists that you make yourself of keywords. Now, a good ad group has a small set of keywords that is related to the ad. The ad must describe all the keywords in the ad group. Even with a responsive search ad, this is an important concept. Because if you put an RSA together, responsive search ad that just has generic words in it, then your ad is not going to be related to the keywords in that ad group, and when a user searches, it won’t look like you actually do that particular thing or sell that product or fix whatnot. So, it’s important that you have ad groups where the keywords and ads are highly related regardless of the ad type you use. So, for instance, this is an old account that does fire and water restoration. So, we’ve got water removal, basement water, water clean-up, fire and water clean-up, flooding, water removal, carpet water extraction, and so forth. Every one of these is a different concept.
0:01:15.9 S1: So, while you have your keywords, and based on match types, Google can show you two various search terms. If we go to our search term data, then we can make filters such as “Added, Excluded, Is None,” and then maybe conversions are more than two. And we could add those keywords directly to those particular ad groups. Now, in some cases though, Google shows you for a large variety of search terms, so you might want to just make new ad groups from this data, then we can download our search terms that hit those criteria. And then once we have those search terms, we can open this up, then we’ll see we have a list of over 6800 keywords. So doing this manual grouping would take a very long time.
0:02:02.5 S1: So instead, what we can do is we can just copy all these keywords, and we’re just going to copy a few hundred here, and then we can use keyword grouper tools. We say, “Here are all these queries I want to group into better ad groups.” We can choose our match types, we can say “Encrypt this for me.” So, this tool will take these 11512 keywords and put them into 416 ad groups. Now, if we look and say, “We want less ad groups than that,” we can lower our sensitivity level and say, “Group them a little broader.” And now after running it, we would have only 174. If we’re like, “We want them really specific,” we could raise it, and now we have 516 ad groups. Then we can download this data into a Google Ads Editor format, write ads and then create all these new ad groups.
0:03:00.4 S1: Now, the second time, you might want to use a grouper tool like this, is let’s say we’re in our account, we go to our tools, and we’re under the keyword planner. And so, we say, “Discover new keywords about plumbing.” So, we get our results, and we have a couple of options here of how we want to look at this. Now, the keyword view is just a large list of keywords, so we could just add all the ones we want to our keyword plan, download that data, and run the same group structure. Or we could say, “Put them in a grouped view,” and then you can see how Google is putting these together. In some cases, these will be pretty nice, and you don’t have to go through groupers, and other times you want to be careful because “Commercial Plumbing” and “Plumbing Companies” are not the same thing. And so, in cases like that, you may add all the grouped ones together and then go through the list and say, “These need to be their own ad groups, make a list of those,” and then go back to a grouper tool.
0:04:05.3 S1: And so with tools like grouper tools, it’s important to make sure that the ads and the keywords are highly related regardless of the ad type because that’s what shows the user who is searching your ad is relevant, you can offer what they want, it increases your click-through rate and your conversion rate when those match the landing page. So next time you’re working with unstructured queries, which could be from Google’s keyword tool, a different keyword tool, your search query data, then look at keyword grouper tools. This one happens to be under Adalysis website, where you can easily get to it under Free Resources/Keyword Tools and see the various keyword tools that exist. This will make your life a lot easier in dealing with these large numbers of keywords, to make sure you have good ad group structure, so that when users search, they see an ad related to what they searched for, they want to do business with someone who actually understands them, they click on the ad, and can become your next customer.
Manish Gupta
Thanks for Such a detailed and well researched post for Google Keywords.
Cheers
Manish Gupta
CEO
edsfze .com
John Cammidge
Great article, Brad. Question. If you were bulk creating adgroups using grouper tools, would you also bulk create adverts for these adgroups? So, for example, would you create one template RSA advert and then alter headline 1 (pinned), to match the keyword theme of that particular adgroup? Or possibly use keyword insertion in headline 1? I’m just thinking in a scenario where you might have 200+ ad groups, writing ads could become a daunting task
Brad
Yes, bulk creation in some aspect is often the starting place for when you’re creating a lot of new ad groups and you can’t handwrite everything.
I’ll often separate out the ad groups into areas where they can share a h2 or h3, such as calls to action, benefits, etc. Then I’ll make templates for each set of ad groups where the first headline is related to the ad group (or pinned), and then add some additional lines that are appropriate for all the ad groups.
I’ll use multi-ad group testing to see how these other lines are performing.
In the top few ad groups by impressions and/or conversions (once I have some data), then I’ll circle back and add more specific lines and descriptions to ensure they are nice and personalized for those keywords.
John Cammidge
Hi Brad,
I’m curious about your thoughts now. Do you feel this ad group structure is still a valid strategy in 2024 and beyond, especially as Google is becoming increasingly automated and showing many more close variants? I have always been in favour of segmentation of ad groups to best match keywords, but I don’t find a lot more cross-negatives are needed between ad groups than ever before. What do you think?
Brad
Hi John,
Well themed ad groups have been evergreen in Google. RSAs do not serve assets based on the search term matching a specific keyword.
Having tightly themed ad groups is as important today as it was in 2004.
If you don’t have nicely themed ad groups, I still see the same issues that arise in this article: https://adalysis.com/blog/the-biggest-mistake-with-rsas-is-your-ad-group-organization/
You don’t always need a tool to organize your ad groups, but all of your RSA assets should work with all the keywords/search terms in that ad group.
Hope that helps.
John Cammidge
Thanks, Brad,
Another question when it comes to ad group structure. What are your thoughts on intent vs keyword-themed ad groups?
For example. Let’s say I have the following keywords, all in phrase and exact match, targeting people in Yorkshire (UK) looking to rent office space.
office space near me
office rental near me
office space york
office rental york
office space in york
Let’s assume all these keywords go to the same landing page. With an intent structure, these 5 keywords could be put into a single ad group. However, with a keyword-themed structure, you could have two or more ad groups, perhaps one for “near me” keywords, one for “York” keywords etc etc.
Are both approaches worthwhile, or do you see better performance with the intent ad group structure?
Brad
Hi John,
Let’s ignore “near me” terms as those are just troublesome. It’s hard to get good QS on them, the keywords seem to have a higher chance of being marked low relevance, etc.
If you go to an intent structure, does the ad change? In your example, the options are so close, you could test it, but I doubt there would be a difference.
However, if you were to take:
Office space york
Office space with windows york
Cheap office space
Office space with reception desk
etc
Those could all be different ad groups as the user wants something slightly different.
If the ad or landing page needs to change – different ad group. If they are the same, then it doesn’t matter.
