Google AdWords Campaign Structure

Campaign structure can lend a lot to the success of your campaign for many reasons. One of the important reasons that campaign structure is so important is because of the way Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword, ad and campaign. Your Quality Score will have a major impact on the cost and performance of your campaign.

AdWords Campaign Structure:

The first thing to understand is the campaign structure that AdWords uses and then build your campaign around that with a few thoughts in mind. Let’s start by analyzing the base campaign structure:

• Campaign 1 – On the campaign level you can define all the main settings like Daily Budget, Target Geographic Locations, Target Network etc…
  • Ad Group 1 – You can have as many ad groups in a campaign as you’d like. On the ad group level, we will create multiple ad creatives and add many keywords.
    • Ad Copy 1 – You can create as many ads as you see fit.
    • Ad Copy 2
    • Keyword 1 – By default all keywords use the ad copy’s landing page unless you specify otherwise. The same holds true for the keyword bid.
    • Keyword 2
  • Ad Group 2
    • Ad Copy 1 – You can create as many ads as you see fit.
    • Ad Copy 2
    • Keyword 1 – By default all keywords use the ad copy’s landing page unless you specify otherwise. The same holds true for the keyword bid.
    • Keyword 2

What Should I Do?

Some advertisers break down their campaigns by brand, others by category, and yet others by product. There is no set correct way to do this. Here are some best practices:

Use ad groups. Use many ad groups. It is best not to have more than 40-50 keywords in an ad group. Google’s algorithm doesn’t like having to sort through hundreds of keywords and will just use the more general terms. If you break up your campaign into many ad groups, you give each keyword set a chance to perform well.

One way of breaking up your campaign into ad groups is to separate the best performing keywords into their own ad group. By separating the top performing keywords into its own ad group you will have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) in that group. The higher the CTR, the higher the Quality Score.

Additionally, you can break your campaign into multiple ad groups based on product category or brand. Always make sure to use highly relevant Ad Copy and Landing pages. Google will analyze this as well as the campaigns historical data to assign a Quality Score. Remember, the higher the Quality Score means better overall campaign performance.