Amazon glossary

What is an ad group?

Ad group — A set of products + targets inside a campaign.

By AIAdKing Editorial Team · Reviewed September 3, 2026

Ad group — A set of products + targets inside a campaign: An ad group sits inside an Amazon campaign and holds a set of products together with the keywords or product targets and bids that apply to them. Grouping closely related products and keywords keeps bids relevant and performance easy to read.

In depth

Ad groups let you apply one set of keywords or product targets and a shared default bid to a group of products inside a campaign. That shared bid is exactly why discipline matters: a bid that is profitable for a $35 product overspends wildly on a $13 one, and keywords relevant to half the group buy irrelevant clicks for the other half. Tight ad groups — similar products, similar prices, genuinely shared search language — mean the group-level bid and keyword list can be right for everything inside, which keeps ACoS readable and fixable at the level you actually manage. Messy ad groups are one of the most common structural causes of quiet wasted spend, and splitting them is usually an early win in an ACoS clean-up.

Worked example

An ad group holds five kitchen products — a $12.99 peeler, a $19.99 knife, a $34.99 board set and two others — sharing one $0.60 default bid and the keyword "kitchen gifts". At an 8% conversion rate, cost per order is $0.60 ÷ 0.08 = $7.50 for every product in the group: that is a ruinous 58% ACoS on the peeler but a workable 21% on the board set. One bid cannot serve both. Splitting into ad groups of like-priced, like-keyword products lets each default bid make sense for everything it governs.

When to use it

Create a new ad group whenever products stop sharing the same natural search terms or sit at meaningfully different price points. During audits, any ad group whose products span a wide price range or mixed intent is a standing candidate for a split.

Common mistakes

Dumping the whole catalogue into one ad group — the default bid is simultaneously too high for cheap items and too low for premium ones.
Mixing unrelated products to save setup time — every keyword then buys irrelevant clicks for most of the group.
Forgetting that reporting granularity follows structure — if two products share an ad group, untangling which one deserves the budget later means rebuilding anyway.

How AIAdKing handles Ad group

AIAdKing optimises at the ad-group and target level, setting bids that fit each group and pausing the targets inside a group that consistently lose money.

Ad group — quick answers