A lot of people wonder “How many ads should be in a Google Adwords ad group?”
Like most Pay Per Click (PPC) operators, this is a personal preference, but this one is backed by statistics.
Unless a campaign is spending a few hundred dollars a day (minimum), you should only two ads per group. The reason is simple.
What Will Your Winning PPC Ad Be?
If you’re running too many ads in one ad group, it tends to get saturated. If you have 5 ads in one ad group with a budget of $100 day, there are too many things going on. It will take you an extended period of time to find out which ad is your “Winning” ad.
And while you may think that you have all the time in the world, during that time that you’re waiting to find an effective ad you may be wasting a lot of money on 4 other ads.
The sooner you find a “Winning” ad, the sooner your click through rates (CTR) start to rise, your cost per click (CPC) starts to fall and your conversions start to go up. Once all of this happens, your profits will tend to rise as well. 🙂
Look at it like this:
- Ad group with a budget of $100/day.
- Average cost per click (CPC) is running $1.00 per click
- 5 ads in that ad group being equally rotated to find out a winner.
I typically don’t make a change (or determine a winning ad) until it has 150-200 clicks. Not impressions, but clicks. If I need 200 clicks to determine a winner, it would take me a longer period of time to get 1 ad with 200 clicks (up to possibly 10 days) because the clicks would be so spread out.
You could have one ad with 55 clicks, one with 133, one with 34, one with 123, and one with 99. See what I mean? No definite winner.
If I’m only running 2 ads, it would take a maximum of 4 days to find a winner (assuming that I’m hitting my budget).
Not only can I find a winning ad quicker when running fewer ads, but it’s easier to figure out what changes drive your ads to perform better.
We’ve run ad tests where the description in the ad is the same from ad one to ad two. But just changing the headline can make a dramatic difference.
Once we find a winner, we simply pause the losing ad and make a new one. Now when we make the new ad, it may simply be the exact same description as the previous ad, with a change in the headline. It may be a new headline with the same description or it may be both a new headline and a new description.
You’ll Never Have The Perfect PPC Ad
That’s the part that never ends. You will NEVER have the perfect ad in your ad group. If you’re doing it correctly, you will simply keep improving upon old ads.
Therefore, we believe that in most cases, you should be running 2 ads in each Adwords ad group.
(Also read “How Many Keywords Should I Have Per Ad Group?“)
Keep Testing!