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Is there any point to having themed ad groups any more? With loose phrase match, search queries go all over the place and I’m just managing negative kws all the time. Should I just put all closely-related kws in one ad group and be done with it?
I manage Google Ads for a clothing company and have themed ad groups (e.g. shirts, blue shirts, red shirts, formal shirts, party shirts, etc) going to relevant landing pages. In these ad groups, I use exact and phrase match only.
With the advent of looser keyword matching, I keep finding that search terms spill over into different ad groups. For example, formal shirts will show up in red shirts, blue shirts will show up in party shirts, etc.
I've been thinking about chucking all of my phrase and broad match kws into one ad group to see how it all goes. I feel like I'm constantly managing negatives and performance isn't getting any better.
What are you all doing and do you have any recommendations for my situation?
Is there any point to having themed ad groups in Google Ads any more? If I remember correctly, it used to be best practice to have someone looking for "red shirts" to go to a landing page of red shirts, but that doesn't seem to be the case any more. Did Google just do away with all that?
Thanks for reading!
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1 Reply
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I’d consider ad groups by intent (e.g. ‘buy’, ‘browse’, ‘learn’) instead of theme.
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I’ve found that themed ad groups still work, but you need to do more broad themes. For your example above, I would do all shirts together instead of trying to break them out.
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I would still break out your keywords into themes, you can simply be a lot more loose than before as we have RSAs and tend to run more broad match keywords.
There is still value, obviously, in matching keywords to ads and landing pages to increase relevance.
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I totally understand your frustration with loose phrase matching and the extra work of managing negative keywords. It sounds like you’re putting a lot of effort into keeping your ad groups organized and relevant. While themed ad groups used to be best practice, Google’s changes have made things more complicated.
You might want to try consolidating your keywords into fewer ad groups and see how it performs. This approach can reduce the time spent on managing negatives and might still deliver good results. Also, consider using responsive search ads to cover more variations of search terms. Keep testing different setups to find what works best for your account. Good luck! 😊
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