In Google AdWords, the central unit is the ad group. It consists of keywords (search terms) the advertiser bids on and the ads to be shown to searchers who enter those keywords in Google. When you master an ad group, your ads are tuned to your customers' searches such that you achieve a click through rate (or CTR, the ratio of number of times an ad is clicked to number of times it is shown) greater than 1% and sometimes much higher. Mastering the ad group depends on understanding what your customers want and crafting your offerings to suit them.

How then to learn to craft effective ad groups? The approach I'm going to adopt in this post is show a highly effective ad group and then decompose what makes it effective. The Energy Action Coalition's Global Warming ad group pictured above (presented previously here) is one such ad group.

What are the key features that make this ad group effective? In brief,

• the keywords are all tightly focused on one topic: information/facts/research on global warming;
• the ad text is clearly relevant to the key words searchers are using;
• the ads offer these searchers what they are looking for.

Let's break each of these down in turn. I'll show how you determine if they apply to your ad groups using Energy Action as an example.

On topic, tightly focused keywords

How do you determine if your keywords are tightly focused on one topic? One obvious approach is to read them and see if they are on the same topic. The following are key indicators to check as you read:

• Are the keywords using the same words with only slight variations? For instance, every keyword in the example above uses the phrase "global warming". There are no keywords about conceptually related topics like "green energy" or "clean energy" or "global cooling". These keywords are about one topic, global warming, and one topic only.
• If you use different words, do they have close to the same dictionary definition? For instance, "facts", "information", and "research" all point to the idea of information and are fairly neutral. A word like "causes" however brings in the notion of causality, which is different.

Relevant ad text

People engaged in search do not read in depth, they scan for things that are relevant. In its simplest form, scanning is based on recognition. The searcher asks herself, "Do I recognize what I typed in in the ad text?" Google facilitates this form of recognition by bolding the search terms that appear in the ad text. Thus, the following are key indicators to check in your ad text:

• Does the ad text contain the keywords you are bidding on? More specifically, does the first line or title of your ad contain keywords you are bidding on? It is obviously easier for your ad text to contain your keywords if your keywords are tightly focused on one topic. In the case of the Energy Action Coalition, the ad displayed used "Global Warming" combined with the word "Facts" in its title, in other words terms pulled directly from the keywords.
• Do any of your keywords have click through rates greater than 1%? This measure indicates that searchers are finding some subset of your ads relevant for that keyword. It often validates your attempts to include keywords in your ads.

Ads offer searchers what they are looking for

People search on the web to satisfy themselves. They click on things that they think will satisfy the urge that made them search in the first place. There are two indicators of whether an ad is providing searchers what they are seeking:

• The click through rate: Any ad with a click through rate greater than 1% is offering at least a small group of searchers something they want. The greater the click through rate, the more the ad is offering searchers what they are looking for. Of course, care must be taken that you are only offering searchers things you can actually deliver.
• The ad's rank: Is the ad in a high position on the first page of search results? Ad rank depends on both the maximum bid for the keyword and the keyword's quality score (largely determined by its CTR). Ultimately, in a competitive landscape, sustaining a given ad rank depends on achieving a competitive quality score. Ad rank is particularly useful when considering competitor ads where you do not have CTR information.

Next steps

This post provided a high level overview of what makes an effective Google AdWords ad group using The Energy Action Coalition's "Global Warming" ad group as an example. We reviewed three key features of effective ad groups and measures you can use to determine whether you are hitting the mark. There are a number of topics we have not covered that could be elaborated on in future posts, for instance:

• Examples showing the steps to turn an ineffective ad group into an effective one.
• Analyzing and using competitor position to create more effective ads.
• Redesigning web pages to better capitalize on the web traffic generated by ads.

Let me know in the comments if any of these interest you, or if you prefer, feel free to contact me directly:

• email: bud@biggerbuybutton.com
• phone: +1-734-926-9560