Pay Per Click Advertising

Does Using Smaller Ad Groups Increase Impressions?

(Image courtesy of The Marmot)

Are you struggling to get enough ad impressions in your Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns? We have a magic bullet for you. Okay, it is not REALLY a magic bullet. It is more like a Nerf football but this tip might help you.

Create a bunch of small ad groups instead of a single giant one.

Why? Test this yourself as your mileage may vary but here is a real-world example.

One of our campaigns on the content network originally had 1092 keywords all in a single ad group. I decided to start splitting the keywords up into smaller groups and here is what happened:

• With 1 ad group it got 14,085 impressions in the thirteen days from December 1 through December 13.
• With 14 ad groups it got 73,632 impressions in the thirteen days from December 14 through December 26.

Using the same keywords, ads, and bids, we got a 400% increase in impressions. All I did was cut keywords out of the original ad group and paste them into several smaller, new ad groups. The group sizes ranged from 7 keywords at the smallest to 672 at the largest (because I am still not finished splitting up the original group).

We thought it was a fluke at first but even the individual keywords consistently show more impressions now. It does not make sense to me why this should matter but it did for this campaign. I did a small bit of research but did not find much supporting or refuting these results. Has anyone else seen this?

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