What's the Maximum Number of Ad Groups Allowed in a Google Ads Campaign?

A standard Google Ads campaign can hold up to 20,000 ad groups. That ceiling drops sharply for two campaign types built around simpler, more automated structures: Local campaigns and App campaigns are each capped at only 100 ad groups, per Google's official account limits documentation.

Why the Limit Varies by Campaign Type

Google Ads sets different ad group ceilings depending on how a campaign type is designed to be managed:

• Search, Display, Video, and Shopping campaigns — up to 20,000 ad groups per campaign, the standard limit for manually structured campaign types.
• Local campaigns — capped at 100 ad groups, matching the simplified setup Google built for driving store visits and local actions across Search, Maps, Display, and YouTube from a single, mostly automated campaign.
• App campaigns — also capped at 100 ad groups, since App campaigns rely on machine learning to place creative across Search, Display, YouTube, and Discover rather than on granular manual ad group segmentation.

Very few advertisers approach the 20,000-ad-group ceiling in practice. The accounts that get close tend to be large, manually segmented search campaigns built around highly granular geographic, product-level, or keyword-based ad group structures.

It's an Account-Wide Ceiling, Not a Soft Guideline

The 20,000 figure sits inside Google's broader system of account limits, which also caps the total number of campaigns, keywords, and extensions an account can hold. These are hard technical ceilings enforced by Google Ads' serving infrastructure, not recommendations — there's no setting to raise them for an individual campaign.

What Happens If You Hit the Cap

An advertiser who reaches the ad group limit for a campaign can't add new ad groups to that same campaign. The only options are deleting or consolidating existing ad groups, or moving the new structure into a separate campaign. Google does not offer an exception request process for this specific limit.

Why This Rarely Comes Up for Most Accounts

Account structures have generally moved toward fewer, more consolidated ad groups over the past several years, as Smart Bidding and broad match keywords reduced the need for the tightly segmented single-keyword-ad-group approach that was once common in Search campaigns. A consolidated modern account is far more likely to bump into a different account limit — such as keywords per ad group — before it ever gets near 20,000 ad groups in one campaign.

A Related Limit: Keywords Within Each Ad Group

The ad group ceiling isn't the only structural limit in play. Each individual ad group also has its own cap on how many keywords it can hold, tracked separately from the 20,000-ad-groups-per-campaign figure. An advertiser restructuring a large account to stay under the ad group ceiling needs to check both numbers — consolidating ad groups to use fewer of them only works if the keyword count per consolidated ad group also stays within its own limit.

Bottom Line

Unless you're running an unusually large, manually segmented Search or Shopping campaign, the 20,000-ad-group ceiling isn't a practical constraint. Local and App campaigns hit their much lower 100-ad-group cap far sooner, so plan those campaign types around consolidated ad groups from the start rather than one-ad-group-per-location or one-ad-group-per-asset structures.

Source: Google Ads Help, "About your Google Ads account limits" (support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6372658).