“How many ads should I create?” is a common question asked by business owners and marketers setting up Google Ads.
Testing your ads and optimizing them is a critical part of managing your Google Ads account and increasing its performance. Continuously improving your ads month after month will give you a huge competitive advantage if your competitors are not doing the same thing (and trust me, they probably don’t).
To find out how many ads you should have in your ad group you only need to know one thing. Does my ad group get more than 200 clicks every month? If you are already doing Google Ads this should be easy to figure out and if you are not up and running yet try to estimate based on your budget and estimated CPC.
Less than 200 clicks per ad group: You should have 2 ads. If you have more than 2 ads running at the same time it will take too long to hit statistical significance.
More than 200 clicks per ad group: You can consider having more than 2 ads. Just make sure that you don’t test too many different elements at once, so you will still be able to see what elements of the ad made it outperform the others.
How to determine a winning ad
To declare a winner among your ads you need two things: time and data. Depending on what your goals are for traffic from Google Ads you are probably either optimizing for CTR, Conversion Rate, or Cost per Acquisition.
For optimizing for CTR you need to make sure there is no doubt that one ad is going to get clicked on more than the other version. If one ad has 102 clicks and the other one has 109 you can’t really say if one is better than the other. However, if the difference is 102 click on ad one and 150 clicks on ad two there should be close to no doubt. If it is hard to say which ad is the best performer you should run the test for longer.
If you are optimizing for Conversion Rate or Cost per Acquisition you should have at least 8 conversions in your ad group more then 2 conversion differences between the ads.
What to do with your winning ad
When it is clear to you which one of the ads in the ad group is the winner it’s time to pause the losing ad and make a copy of the winner.
Now it’s time to try to improve your winning ad. Make a change to the headline or to the description. Remember to not change both, because if the new version ends up winning the next test you will not know if it was because of the new description or the new headline. Make sure you only test one thing at a time.
Never stop improving your ads
It’s very hard to write the perfect Google Ads ad – some might even say it is impossible and that is a good thing. That means that your ads can always be improved and give you a better business result.
So, to summarize: You should only have 2 ads and if you receive a larger volume of traffic should you consider having one or two more.