Section 10.3. Ad Groups

10.3. Ad Groups

The most granular level within the AdWords programs is the Ad Group, which lets you create individual ads and target the ads against keywords.

10.3.1. Creating a New Ad Group

Each Ad Group must be created from within an Ad Campaign. To create an Ad Group, start from the Campaign Summary window that will contain it (such as the Campaign Summary window shown in Figure 10-21).

Next, click the Create New Ad Group link. The New Ad Group Set-up sequence of windows will open. These windows (the Create Ad window is shown in Figure 10-25) work the same way as entering your initial ad when you created your AdWords account to start with (see "Creating an Ad," earlier in this chapter).

Figure 10-25. The New Ad Group Set-up sequence of windows lets you write a new ad, provide keywords for targeting, and set the maximum CPC for your ad

10.3.2. Editing an Ad Group

To edit an existing Ad Group, from a Campaign Summary window (such as the one shown in Figure 10-21) click on an Ad Group link. A detailed Ad Group window, such as the one shown in Figure 10-26, will open.

Figure 10-26. The Ad Group window provides an opportunity to review, and edit if you desire, the text of an ad and the keywords it targets

The detailed Ad Group window lets you modify the text on an existing ad, as well as to delete, edit, or add keywords.

See Chapter 11 for information about how to make effective use of the keyword and CPC metrics shown in the detailed Ad Group window. In addition to keyword, click-through, and CPC metric data, the detailed Ad Group window gives you access to some functionality not available when you first create an Ad Group; most importantly, you can create an ad with graphics, called an image ad.

10.3.3. Creating an Image Ad

To create an image ad, from the detailed Ad Group window, click the Create New Image Ad link (shown just to the right of the text ad in Figure 10-26). The Image Ad creation window, shown in Figure 10-27, will open.

To create an image ad, click the Browse button to upload a .gif, .jpg, or .png graphics file from your computer that is one of the sizes shown in Table 10-3 and is less than 50k in file size.

Figure 10-27. It's easy to create image ads in a handful of acceptable sizes that will run with AdWords

Table 10-3. Sizes for image ads

Size (in pixels)	Adjusted size (in pixels)	Size called
468 x 60	468 x 49	Banner
728 x 90	728 x 79	Leaderboard
300 x 250	300 x 239	Inline
120 x 600	120 x 578	Skyscraper
160 x 600	160 x 578	Wide skyscraper

Next, give the image a name, and verify the display and destination URLs. Click Save New Image Ad to create the image ad.

The adjusted size column shown in Table 10-3 represents the actual size of the graphics that Google will run in ads it serves. The "missing" 11 or 22 horizontal pixels are taken up with your display URL and a Google feedback link.

It is best practice to resize your graphics yourself to the adjusted size. However, you can alternatively check the box that authorizes Google to adjust your graphics from the nominal size to the adjusted size.

If you authorize Google to make this adjustment, be aware that the resizing will probably not be proportional; watch the results carefully.

Google AdWords editorial guidelines are nothing very extraordinary and about what you'd expect. Google takes its role in preventing users from being bombarded with offensive content, or ads that blink and gyrate, quite seriously. You can see the full text of the editorial guidelines for image ads at https://adwords.google.com/select/imageguidelines.html.

Google AdWords is not known for primarily serving image ads, and the vast majority of AdWords ads served are text ads. For one thing, image ads do not appear on Google search results and in only some of the formats chosen by AdSense content participants. Still, it's an important facility to be able to serve targeted image ads via Google, and you should know about it for those advertising situations in which you feel a picture is worth manywell, 105words.