Ad Groups are the fundamental marketing units that propel your AdWords campaign. If keywords are the sparks of AdWords success, Ad Groups are the flames. And, one hopes, your campaign is a roaring bonfire. But forget the heated analogy. The point is that success in AdWords depends largely on the effective creation and manipulation of Ad Groups. Why is the Ad Group the most powerful element of your campaign? Because it contains the four motors of your advertising and conversion strategy: ads, keywords, bid prices, and destination pages. As such, the Ad Group defines what your advertising campaign looks like, who it is shown to, how much it costs, and the location where your business meets your customers. Although it might seem excessive to devote an entire article to Ad Groups, the truth is that I could probably write an entire book about them. (Such a book would also include pictures of my editor’s dog and my personal ruminations on Leno versus Letterman.) So be happy that I’m limiting this examination of Ad Groups to one article. Here you find strategies and mechanics that are not covered elsewhere. The mechanical aspects include creating Ad Groups in the Control Center and editing their parameters (keywords, ads, and bid prices). The strategic issues include the competitive struggle for placement on the page (effective bidding) and putting your ads on productive search pages (researching and selecting keywords). Creating New Ad Groups You create Ad Groups in AdWords Campaigns. You can’t open an account without creating an Ad Group, even if you never deploy that initial effort. Assuming that you own an AdWords account, then, you have some experience with the mechanics of creating an Ad Group. Busy advertisers open new Ad Groups frequently. Here’s how it happens:

1. In the Control Center, click the Campaign Management tab.

2. In the Campaign Name column, click any campaign. Naturally, you should click the target campaign of the new Ad Group. If you don’t want the new Ad Group to be influenced by that campaign’s global Campaign settings, click the Create New Campaign link instead of an existing campaign. Do not hesitate to begin new campaigns, and lots of them. When you do open a new campaign, Google walks you through the Campaign settings, and then returns you to this point and marches you through the creation of a new Ad Group.

3. Click the Create New Ad Group link.

4. Enter the name of the Ad Group. I used to include the campaign name in my Ad Group titles, but I lost that habit after experiencing screen clutter when running AdWords reports. There’s no need to duplicate the campaign name in the Ad Group title, because the campaign name is always visible somewhere on the screen when you drill into its Ad Groups.

5. Scroll down and compose your ad, and then click the Create Ad & Continue button. If this Ad Group is not the first Ad Group of the campaign, Google supplies the most recently created ad of the campaign to work with. So you’re not necessarily creating the ad from scratch. Even if the ad copy differs substantially from the previous ad, chances are good that you won’t change the display URL and the destination URL. This convenience saves time when mass-producing Ad Groups with ads that are nearly identical.

6. Enter your keyword(s), and then click the Save Keywords button.

7. Enter your bid in the Traffic Estimator, and then click the Calculate Estimates button.

8. Adjust your bid and recalculate the traffic and placement estimates until you reach a good balance of cost versus position. knowing your return on investment (ROI) needs. For now, try for an average position of four or higher (which means 4.0 or lower in the Average Position column), without committing to paying more than you think a clickthrough is worth.

9. Click the Save & Continue button. Your Ad Group is created, and begins running immediately. That immediacy always takes me a bit by surprise. For some reason I expect a confirmation and review of my selections, like you see in an online shopping cart, before the Ad Group is launched to the public. The Save & Continue button sounds like a mid-process button, not the final launch button that it is. Editing Elements of an Ad Group After you set up your Ad Group, the work begins. Rarely does an Ad Group run for long without issuing a call for maintenance. That call might derive from your examination of your Ad Group’s performance. You might be pressed into action by Google’s clamping down on an underperforming keyword. You might discover that a lower-than-expected conversion rate at your site is resulting in a negative ROI for your campaign, and you need to revise your bids in several Ad Groups. Whatever the reason for tweaking, you will eventually find yourself needing to know (quickly, sometimes) how to edit your ads, keywords, and maximum bids. Editing ads You use the same screen to edit, delete, and create ads in an existing Ad Group. Editing and creating ads are essentially the same process. In this section, I concentrate on editing as a way of modifying an ongoing Ad Group. If you choose to create a new ad, which can also be an effective way to try out a different wording or a new landing page, Google runs both ads concurrently against the same keywords and shows you each ad’s distribution percentage. Running two ads in one Ad Group might seem like a less precise type of marketing, and it would be if there were no way to determine individual statistics for each ad. But you can easily break apart the data of concurrent ads in the Reports section (see Article 8). At any rate, in this section I walk you through the mechanics of editing an existing ad. Follow these steps:

1. In the Control Center, click the Campaign Management tab.

2. In the Campaign Name column, click the campaign that contains the Ad Group running the individual ad you want to edit. 3. Click the Ad Group containing the ad you want to edit.

4. Click the Edit link next to the display of the ad you want to edit. When the Ad Group has only one ad, the Edit link is positioned above the statistics table, next to the display of your ad. If multiple ads exist, the Edit links appear with the display of your multiple ads.

5. On the edit screen, make changes to your ad. As you no doubt recognize, this screen is the same as the ad-creation screen. Type your edits, and watch the display lines change when you click out of the edit box.

6. Click the Save changes button. Your ad begins appearing in its new version immediately. Of course, you may delete ads instead of editing them. Doing so is a one-click process, and that click should be directed at the Delete link below any displayed ad on your Ad Group page. Deleting the only ad of an Ad Group does not make the Ad Group implode and vanish. (You must select an Ad Group and click the Delete button to obliterate that Ad Group.) If you delete the sole ad of your Ad Group, you are no longer marketing to keywords of that Ad Group. But the Ad Group structure remains in your campaign, waiting for you to create a new ad for it. Adding and editing keywords Most advertisers adjust keywords more frequently than they adjust ads. This phenomenon is partly due to most advertisers using more keywords than ads. (In other words, common practice is to associate one ad with many keywords.) Advertisers and their marketing agents spend alarming amounts of time brainstorming and researching keywords, so they naturally spend more time tweaking keywords than tweaking ads. Then there’s the fact that when Google slows or disables keywords, ads are slowed or disabled on search pages for those faltering keywords. The natural impulse, rightly or wrongly, is to correct the keyword. (It’s the right impulse most of the time.)

Finally, the overwhelming emphasis on keywords throughout the SEM (search engine marketing) universe leads to the popular belief that successful keyword selection is the key to AdWords success. True enough, creating successful keywords is crucial. Without a keyword, an ad can’t run. And without a relevant keyword, the ad won’t run for long. Campaigns of any respectable duration endure many ups and downs with their keywords. I don’t believe there’s an AdWords advertiser on the planet who hasn’t had a keyword disabled or a campaign slowed. And even if Google doesn’t lower the boom, ROI considerations force resourceful advertisers to continually refine their keyword selections. Almost certainly, you will need to modify your keywords at some point (and probably often). The following steps walk you through the mechanical part of editing and adding keywords. I get into strategic considerations later.

1. In the Control Center, click the Campaign Management tab.

2. In the Campaign Name column, click the campaign containing the keywords you want to edit. You can’t edit shared keywords across campaigns.

3. Click the Ad Group containing the keywords you want to edit.

You can’t edit shared keywords across Ad Groups in a campaign. However, you can make one specific campaign-wide keyword edit: adding negative keywords that apply to every Ad Group in the campaign. Negative keywords represent one of four keyword-matching options that I describe later in the article. For now, assume that adding negative matching is not the kind of keyword edit you’re after.

4. Click the Edit Keywords link. Note the Add Keywords link right next to it. The two resulting screens one for editing keywords, the other for adding keywords are nearly identical. The Edit Keywords page includes a box showing your CPC bid, giving you the chance to adjust it as you edit your keywords. Furthermore, on that screen, nothing stops you from adding keywords while you’re editing existing keywords. So there’s never any reason to use the Add Keywords link.

5. Edit your keywords, add new keywords, and adjust your CPC bid, as necessary.

6. Click the Estimate Traffic button for further adjustments of your bid, or click the Save button to finish.