Account structure: ad groups, keywords and ads
The policy asks for at least two ad groups in every campaign and one active ad in every group. Our data adds a harder limit: above 50 keywords, an ad group stops working.
Oskar SznajderCo-founder Webup!
October 19, 2026 · 5 min read
Two of these are policy requirements. The third is what we measured on 8,820 ad groups, and it matters more than either.
What the policy requires
- At least two ad groups in every campaign.
- At least one active ad in every ad group. An ad group with only paused or disapproved ads breaks the rule and serves nothing.
- Around 500 keywords on the account, with 15–30 in each ad group, is Google's own guidance.
What we measured
The 500-keyword figure holds up — in fact it understates the case. Median monthly spend rises across every portfolio band, twenty-five-fold between the smallest and largest, with no point at which it flattens. Doubling the phrase portfolio doubles account spend (+101%) and raises clicks by 85%. There is one hard threshold at the bottom: an account with fewer than 200 phrases barely exists in auctions, and that is the most common diagnosis in our whole portfolio.
The per-group guidance is where the industry rule and the data part ways:
| Keywords in the ad group | Groups | Share that start | Impressions per 100 keywords |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | 387 | 11.3% | 3,523 |
| 4–9 | 851 | 11.0% | 1,261 |
| 10–25 | 5,011 | 9.7% | 504 |
| 26–50 | 2,035 | 9.5% | 755 |
| Over 50 | 536 | 4.1% | 415 |
Up to 50 keywords, group size barely matters. Above 50 it halves the share of keywords that serve. The reason is the same as with pages: an ad group points at one address. Fifty keywords in a group is fifty keywords aimed at one page, and most of them then have little to do with it. The bottleneck is not the group — it is that the group outgrew the page it serves.
The proportions that hold at every scale
Across accounts that spend the grant, two ratios stay constant: 8–11 keywords per ad group and 2–3 ad groups per landing page. Accounts that stall have the second ratio completely different — five and a half groups per page, which means everything points at the same two pages.
So the operational target is: 16–40 landing pages, 400 keywords with real demand, 10–25 keywords per page, no group above 50. And a counter showing 400 keywords means roughly 320 working ones, because about a fifth of a typical portfolio has no measurable search demand.
What does not matter
The number of campaigns. The same 400 keywords split across three campaigns or twelve give the same result. Do not split an account "for tidiness" — ad group size is the thing that matters, and it is a different thing.
Find the overloaded groups in your account
PING.NGO lists campaigns with fewer than two ad groups, groups without an active ad and groups that have outgrown their page.
