Page recap.
Layers | Account Structure | Reorganising your account |
Google Ads is organised into three layers:
| There is no one structure that fits all, and different structures can be successful | After your ads start serving, restructuring or reorganising your account is more challenging |
Account and campaigns structure
A well-organised and structured account is easier to manage, to optimise, and provides you with better results.
A good structure will save you money and time as your ads are triggered by relevant searches and served to the right audiences.
Quality is one of the most important things about your account, and the Quality Score is designed to reward that quality as it impacts your cost, eligibility, and ranking.
Google Ads is organised into three layers:
Account.
Campaigns.
Ad groups.
Account
Your time zone can only be shifted eastward, and once over the lifetime of your account.
To correct your time zone selection you need to contact Google directly to request the change as it can’t be done within your account.
Your account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information. You can also invite others to access your account.
Campaigns
Campaigns should focus on your products or areas of your business.
Let’s say you’re a supermarket. Your campaigns should be your products, for example, pasta, fish, meats, vegetables, fruits, etc.
Your ad campaign has its own goal, and settings such as networks, locations, languages targeting, as well as a budget, bidding, start/end dates, and ad rotation.
These settings determine where your ad appears.
Ad groups
A campaign is a collection of ad groups.
Ad groups should focus on specific subcategories or types of your campaigns.
With the supermarket example above in mind, your ad groups should the type of your products. So, for the pasta campaign, you have ad groups such as spaghetti, fettuccine, gnocchi, etc.
An ad group is a collection of keywords, ads, and website placements.
Account limits
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6372658?hl=en-GB
Typical account structure
However, there is no one structure that fits all, and different structures can be successful.
Organise your account with the structure that fits into your business needs and goals.
Other account structures
By campaigns and ad groups mirroring your website
A structure that mirrors your existing website structure works well because it aligns ad groups and landing pages. Google’s official recommendations
By products and services
This structure is very similar to your website’s structure, but it is centred on your most valuable services and products.
For example, let’s say you are an electrical store and sell computers, your campaigns could be:
Desktop | Laptop | Tablets.
Your ad groups should focus on brand, size or others:
Lenovo | Dell | Acer | 13 inches | 14 inches | 17 inches, etc.
You should sort your valuable, best selling and high demand products to create specific targeted campaigns.
Referring to the example above, let’s say your best selling product is a Lenovo 13 inches laptop.
You then create a specific campaign for Lenovo 13 inches laptop with its own budget, bidding, ads, targeting, etc.
By location
This structure works well to improve conversions and lead-generation if your business has multiple locations.
Let’s say you are a United Kingdom nationwide cosmetic clinic with branches or consultation rooms in different cities.
In London, you offer facial rejuvenation and hair transplant. In Manchester, you offer facial rejuvenation, hair transplant and eye surgery, and in Liverpool hair transplant and varicose veins.
You then create specific campaigns for each location.
Referring to the example above:
A campaign for people searching for facial rejuvenation and hair transplant treatments geo-targeted to London.
A campaign for people searching for facial rejuvenation, hair transplant and eye surgery treatments geo-targeted to Manchester.
A campaign for people searching for hair transplant and varicose veins treatments geo-targeted to Liverpool.
By searcher intent
Searcher intent is also known as user intent.
With this structure you organise your account separating keywords into funnels.
Top funnels/campaigns for relevant action-oriented keywords, and lower funnels/campaigns for research keywords.
You can also separate keywords as informational – users who want to find general information, commercial – users who want to compare, and transactional – users who are ready to make a purchase.
By segmenting ad groups according to your most specific keywords and landing pages you want to target, Google Ads will show your ads to people who are more likely to be interested in these keywords so that you can reach your ideal audience.
By match types
This structure allows you to split keywords into separate campaigns and ad groups to control your budget and invest with the highest converting keywords.
Create campaigns and ad groups for exact, phrase, broad and modified broad matches.
For example:
Exact match campaign
Ad groups 1-2-3, etc. Each ad group contains only exact match type keywords.
Phrase match campaign
Ad groups 1-2-3, etc. Each ad group contains only phrase match type keywords.
Broad match campaign
Ad groups 1-2-3, etc. Each ad group contains only broad match type keywords.
Broad match modifier campaign
Ad groups 1-2-3, etc. Each ad group contains only broad match modifier type keywords.
This structure is ideal to implement if you have a large account, time and a good knowledge or expertise with Google Ads.
However, if your time is quite limited and you are running a fairly small account, it may be more advantageous to set campaigns with all match types into the same ad groups.
For example:
Match type campaign
Ad group #1 contains exact, phrase, broad and broad modified match type keywords all in the same ad group.
Ad group #2 contains exact, phrase, broad and broad modified match type keywords all in the same ad group.
Ad group #3 contains exact, phrase, broad and broad modified match type keywords all in the same ad group.
Negative keywords
Use negative keywords to ensure each campaign is served the right match type.
For example, set negative exact match keywords to your phrase, broad, and broad modifier campaigns.
Negative Keyword Lists
Instead of applying negative keywords to each campaign individually, create negative keyword lists and add negative keywords to the lists. You can then apply lists across appropriate campaigns or ad ad groups in your account.
TOOLS & SETTINGS > Negative keyword lists > Edit, remove or apply negative keywords.
Bids
Set your bids based on results, for example, if the exact match campaign is producing better results than the broad match campaign, raise the converting keyword bids and lower the bids in the equivalent broad match campaign.
Raising bids and applying negative keywords ensures you get the right search term/query matched to the right ad group.
However, if you experience search term misrouting, it means Google is matching according to bids or CTR (Click through rate) of your ads, and in this case, you need to reconsider your bidding strategy.
By best keywords
This structure allows you to turn on and off keywords based on results as you create ad groups for your top performer keywords.
Set broad match keywords into a broad match ad group and use it as discovery keywords.
The discovery ad group is a simple method of expanding your keyword list, find relevant keywords, evaluate their performance, and find negative keywords.
Run the keyword search terms for this ad group and move the performing keywords into an exact match ad group. Set these keywords as negatives into your broad match ad group.
Within your exact match ad group, the well-matched keywords, ads, and landing page improve your Quality Score.
This structure helps you to find at glance the best performing keywords and set the appropriate budget and bids for them.
However, it requires time to get good results, and to consistently check your broad match ad group search terms to move performing search queries into the exact match ad group.
When using this structure, you may find that when you move keywords from broad to exact match type, their volume decreases considerably affecting your impressions and reach.
If this structure impacts the number of your conversions, you need to re-evaluate your account structure.
By device
This structure works if most of your customers find you by mobile phone, tablets, or if you have a local business.
According to Google, 50% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone will visit a store within a day. Similarly, 56% of ‘on-the-go’ searches have local intent, while 78% of location-related mobile searches will result in an offline purchase.
Source: https://econsultancy.com/trends-local-seo-2019/
However, if you have a small account, it may be better to follow the standard account structure and use the bid modifier for each device within the same campaigns/ad groups.
For larger accounts, separate campaigns targeting computers, tablets, and mobile devices and distribute your budget accordingly.
On each device, users’ behaviour is different. Therefore, it is important to segment your message. Create specific ads and banner ad sizes (if you have a Display Network campaign) for mobile that point to a well designed mobile landing page.
ValueTrack parameters
ValueTrack parameters direct users to a device-specific landing page at the keyword level and enable measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device.
https://adwords.googleblog.com/2013/03/new-valuetrack-parameters-for-enhanced.html
Check your bounce rate on your mobile campaigns, and if you find that most clicks are from mobile apps, exclude all the irrelevant categories, especially Gaming.
Use bid modifiers to control your cost and performance.
You can increase/decrease your bid by a percentage to optimise your campaign’s budget for certain devices, you can decrease bids up to 90% or increase bids up to 900%.
This is the percentage of change that can occur when you’re bidding for searches on mobile devices.
To opt out of a device, decrease bids by 100%.
Reorganising your account
After your ads start serving, restructuring or reorganising your account is more challenging.
If you have to reorganise your account, do not move high performing keywords, but move low performing keywords to new ad groups instead.
When you move a keyword, the keyword needs to build up a new history within the new ad group.
Extract from my Book ‘Making Google Ads Work’.
