What a good Google Ads account structure actually looks like.
A good Google Ads account structure is one where you can tell which spend produced which outcome without exporting anything, and where you can change one thing without disturbing the rest. Everything else is detail. Segment campaigns by what you would genuinely budget differently, keep one search intent per ad group, and stop there. Structure exists to give you control and clarity, not to satisfy a rule about how many campaigns an account should have.
Structure is a control system, not a filing cabinet
Almost every argument about account structure is really an argument about tidiness. Should products be grouped by category or by margin? Should brand terms live in their own campaign? Should there be one ad group per keyword?
None of those questions can be answered in the abstract, because structure is not there to be tidy. It is there to do two jobs. It has to let you see which spend produced which outcome, and it has to let you change one thing without side effects. If a structure does both, it is a good structure, even if it breaks whatever convention you read last week.
Split a campaign when you would fund the halves differently
The campaign is the budget boundary. That is almost all it is. So the test for whether two things belong in separate campaigns is simple: would you ever want to give one more money than the other, or turn one off while leaving the other running?
If the answer is yes, split them. If the answer is no, you have created a reporting line you will never act on, and you have divided your conversion data across two campaigns that now each learn more slowly.
The things that usually pass this test:
- Brand and non brand. You will always want to fund these differently, and mixing them makes every blended number meaningless.
- Markets you would scale independently, whether that is countries, states, or service areas.
- Product tiers with genuinely different margins, where a sale at one price is worth several at another.
- Prospecting and remarketing, because one is buying attention and the other is buying a decision.
One intent per ad group, not one keyword
The single keyword ad group was a sensible response to an older Google Ads, where match types were literal and a keyword meant what it said. That is no longer true. Close variants mean a single keyword ad group now catches a spread of queries anyway, so you have the administrative cost of hundreds of ad groups and none of the control they used to buy.
The replacement is one intent per ad group. Every keyword in the group should be answerable by the same ad and the same landing page. If you would want to say something different to someone searching one term than to someone searching another, they are different intents and they belong apart.
This is a better test than volume, category or match type, because it is the test the ad copy actually has to pass.
Shopping is a feed problem wearing a campaign structure
For ecommerce accounts, most of what people try to fix with campaign structure is actually in the product feed. Titles that do not contain the words people search. Product types left blank. Custom labels unused, so there is no way to segment by margin or by season.
Fix the feed first, then use custom labels to build the structure. That gives you the thing campaign splits are supposed to give you, which is the ability to fund your best sellers differently from your long tail, without running twenty campaigns that all compete for the same queries.
We have written this up in full in the Tali & Tasi case study, where budget had been spread evenly across a catalogue regardless of what sold.
Performance Max does not remove the need for structure
Performance Max hides the structure rather than removing it. The asset groups, the listing groups, the audience signals and what you exclude are all structural decisions, and they behave the way campaign and ad group decisions always did.
The one thing it genuinely changes is that you can no longer see everything, which makes the decisions you can still control more important rather than less. Segment your listing groups. Exclude brand if you want to measure incrementality. Feed it audience signals built from your own customers rather than leaving it to guess.
How to tell yours is wrong
You do not need an audit to spot most of it. These are the signals we see most often when we take over an account:
- You cannot answer the question which campaign made us money last month without building a report.
- Changing a budget in one campaign changes the results in another, which means they are competing for the same queries.
- Several campaigns have fewer than a handful of conversions a month, so none of them can learn anything.
- Ad groups contain keywords that would need different ads to serve honestly.
- The negative keyword list was written once, at setup, and has not been touched since.
- Brand terms are mixed in with everything else, so the account looks profitable and is not.
What to do first
If you are rebuilding, do it in this order. Get conversion tracking right before anything else, because a structure optimized against the wrong signal will confidently get worse. Then separate brand from non brand so you can see what you are actually paying for. Then consolidate: most accounts we inherit have too many campaigns rather than too few, and merging them gives the bidding enough data to work with.
Only then start splitting again, and only where you can answer the budget question with a yes.
Questions we get asked.
How many campaigns should a Google Ads account have?
- As few as possible while still letting you fund things separately. Most accounts we take over have too many rather than too few, which spreads conversion data thin and slows down the bidding. If you cannot say what you would do differently with two campaigns, they should be one.
Should I still use single keyword ad groups?
- Usually not. Close variant matching means a single keyword ad group catches a spread of queries anyway, so you pay the administrative cost without getting the control it used to buy. Group by search intent instead: everything in an ad group should be answerable by the same ad and the same landing page.
Should brand keywords be in their own campaign?
- Yes, almost always. Brand traffic converts at a much higher rate and a much lower cost, so mixing it into other campaigns makes the whole account look like it is performing when it is not. Separating it is also the only way to tell whether your non brand spend is actually paying for itself.
Does Performance Max mean structure no longer matters?
- No. It moves the structural decisions into asset groups, listing groups, audience signals and exclusions, and it hides some of the reporting. Because you can see less, the decisions you can still control matter more.
