Adgroups - how do multiple text ads work?

[plastic paddy]

I have set up a number of Adgroups under Adwords.

Within these adgroups I have upto 50 search terms and have also added numerous text ads to match the keywords. When I asked the Google University in the UK, they said that google will server the closest matching ad. But this isn't happening and its impacting my CTR and traffic volumes.

Do people run multiple text ads within groups and if so is my understanding right???

Cheers PP

[Mel66]

Hi PP,

We use multiple ad creatives all the time for testing purposes. It is the single best feature of AdWords IMHO. I'm not sure if the UK program is different from the US. That said, if you have chosen "optimize my ads automatically" in your Campaign Settings, theoretically AdWords will initially rotate your ads equally, and then start showing the ad with the best CTR more often. I didn't think it had anything to do with they keywords in your ad group, but maybe I'm wrong.

If you have deselected "optimize my ads automatically," they will continue to rotate your ads equally regardless of CTR. This is what we usually do because we don't want our tests to be skewed by a lopsided number of impressions for any given ad. However, as Andrew Goodman has written about in the past, sometimes this option will trigger even if you have it shut off, and you have to "jiggle the switch" by turning it on, saving, turning it back off, and saving it again. We've had to do that almost every time we start a test.

Also another caveat: if you have Content Targeting turned on, multiple creatives will get very lopsided impressions, even if you have turned off auto-optimization. Something to do with how fast the ads propagate through the AdSense sites, and the fact that AdSense publishers can choose which creative they want to show on their sites to a certain extent. (AWR, please correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is what our AdWords rep told us a while back.)

Hope this helps.

Melissa

[OptimizeOnline]

Do people run multiple text ads within groups and if so is my understanding right???
Cheers PP

Hello Plastic Paddy

I suspect that you may have created numerous ads within a few individual AdGroups - where each AdGroup contains up to 50 keywords - but these keywords are not ALL relevant to the ad creative for the AdGroup(s) in which they sit. Is that correct?

If, for example, you are bidding on two keywords within the SAME AdGroup for 'red widgets' and 'blue widgets' and you have created two seprate ad creatives - one for 'red widgets', another for 'blue widgets' - Google will rotate the ads according to their historic Max Bid * CTR index (assuming you have that feature enabled). So, in effect your 'blue widget' ad creative COULD appear for somebody typing in 'red widgets' into Google.

I suspect you may need to move your ads around and place all keywords related to 'red widgets' ('cheap red widgets' etc...) in their own AdGroup which has it's own 'red widget'-related ad creative(s).

I hope that helps.

[AdWordsRep]

...Within these adgroups I have upto 50 search terms and have also added numerous text ads to match the keywords. When I asked the Google University in the UK, they said that google will server the closest matching ad. But this isn't happening and its impacting my CTR and traffic volumes.
I think this has been pretty well covered in other posts above, but just to confirm a few things:

plastic paddy, either you were given incorrect information, or there was some sort of misunderstanding. When you have multiple ads in one Ad Group, the AdWords system does not match the keyword searched with the closest ad. Rather it rotates your ads in one of two ways, as detailed by Mel66.

So, if your intent is to match your ads to your keywords in a very targeted way (which, in my view, is the key to success with AdWords), then you'll want to use separate Ad Groups - as suggested by OptimizeOnline.

By way of clarification (and as a bit of plagiarizing myself), here is some info from a similar thread on another Forum:


Please be aware of the difference between using many ads in one Ad Group, and using many Ad Groups. These are decidedly not the same thing.

Typically, one would use multiple ads in one Ad Group to test one ad against another. Most often, I think, advertiser want to test one headline against another, but one can also test different 'calls to action', etc.

And, typically, one would use multiple Ad Groups to advertise different things in a very targeted way. To accomplish this, create a list of keywords, all about the same thing - and create an ad (or ads) also about that same thing. This gives you a targeted Ad Group. Then create as many Ad Groups as you need to advertise each thing you have to offer, in this targeted way.

AWR

[Mel66]

Just to add to AWR's post.... You can also use multiple ads to test landing pages, where the ad copy is exactly the same and just the destination URL (landing page) is different. We have used this with great success in the past. FYI

[AussieWebmaster]

The best thing to do when you have 50 adwords in the same ad group is to use keyword insertion for the title and try a combination of generic descriptions that can apply to the group as a whole.

One big tip is to make the grouped words similiar in area - say Cars versus Motorcycles, versus GoCarts etc....
Or travel... Italy versus Spain etc.

To do a keyword insertion in the title the first thing to remember is the keyword cannot be over 25 characters spaces included.
The code is {Keyword}... now if you have a few terms that are over the number you should use {Keyword: Alternate Text} where the alternate text is also 25 characters or less...
Now here is another tip... try the edit keywords button and set the destination page with tracking code to know which terms are going and converting (can use the Google tracking or get a third party one)
http://www.abc.com/landing-page.html?KEYWORD-is-(put the keyword here)