Why campaign structures are crucial to Google Ads success

The campaign level is where you set the overall budget for your campaign. You can apply start and end dates, as well as ad schedules of when you want your ads to run and what regions you want your ad appearing in. You can also set different objectives for your campaigns. For example, you might have one campaign with objectives to drive purchases, but then another to drive PDF downloads. Having these different goals will allow the campaign to better optimise towards your key performance indicators.

Within campaigns, you might have multiple ad groups. Think of these as buckets of keywords, segmented by theme. You’lll want to keep your ad groups themed by the keywords in them, so you can tailor your ads to the keywords you have in your account. If you were selling jewellery, under a campaign named “Earrings” you might have an ad group for “hoop earrings”, and an ad group for “drop earrings”.

These are specific words or phrases that users type into their search bar which triggers your ads to show. You’ll want to make sure your keywords are matching their ad group name. In this case, you’d not want to add ‘drop earring’ keywords in a ‘hoop earrings’ ad group, especially if a ‘drop earrings’ ad group already exists. The keyword level allows you to set keyword match types, and set bids for keywords (if you’re not using a smart bidding strategy).

Finally, we have ad level, which are the actual advertisements you want to show to users, consisting of headlines, descriptions, a landing page and potential ad assets. The best practices for writing Google Ads are widely debated, but specifically for responsive search ads (RSAs), you’ll need:

• At least three headlines.
• At least two descriptions.
• A landing page.

Google display ads are ads that appear on the Google Display Network (GDN). You’ll be familiar with these from the banner ads you see around the internet, most commonly on news sites. However, they aren’t all image-based ads: text ads can appear also if you have this box ticked in your Google search ads. Sites you’d expect to see display ads on would be news websites, for example, due to them often populating a large amount of ad space. 

This campaign type is predominantly aimed at driving brand awareness rather than website traffic or conversions, therefore target users higher in the marketing funnel. 

This being said, display campaigns also give you the function to remarket to previous visitors of your site, which therefore allows you to put your ads in front of previous visitors who might be likely to buy. 

Shopping ads can appear either at the top of a user’s search result or in the Google shopping results. The products that are displayed in your shopping results come directly from your product feed and should be set-up in your Google Merchant Centre account and linked with your Google Ads account. 

Your shopping ad will use the image of your product, as well as provide some extra information, such as any sales, promos or delivery fees that might come with the product. With more shopping ads appearing above search ads nowadays when users have an ecommerce-based search query, it’s vital for ecommerce organisations to consider testing shopping ads.

Demand Gen campaigns are a hybrid campaign, utilising Display and Video campaign ad types. While being strong at delivering a brand awareness campaign, they’re also ideal for bringing in new leads, particularly to pages where you can supply the users with free materials in return for contact information. Consider this campaign type if your website has some lead magnet content.

App campaigns are rarely utilised on Google Ads, as their main focus is to push app installations or in-app activity rather than website conversions. The ads often appear on search, display, YouTube and Google Play store placements. Consider using this only if you want to increase your app engagement.

While not directly connected to Google Ads, LSAs is a specific ad format that allows users to be connected to specific local services (i.e. local plumbers, electricians, tradesmen etc). Instead of text ads, the ad might just give the phone number, message option, and customer rating of the business.

Finally, we have smart campaigns, which used to be Google’s default campaign setting when you first created a Google Ads account (now replaced with Performance Max). The campaign uses an automated approach, creating ads based on the content on your website, which are then displayed across Google search and display networks. These are good for small businesses who may be unsure how to use Google Ads to start with – although since this campaign type does not use keywords, you will not be able to know what search queries your smart campaign has ranked for. We’d recommend opting for a search and display campaign bid strategy over a smart campaign.

While it’s tempting to simply put all your ad groups under one campaign with a top-level budget, this wouldn’t be best practice. You’ll want to break out your campaigns when:

• You want to target different product or service areas on your website. For example, if you sold jewellery, you might want to push a £50 daily budget through a necklaces campaign, but only £20 through earrings. Keeping these in different campaigns allows you to give both campaigns their own unique budget, whereas you wouldn’t be able to do this inside one campaign.
• You’re wanting to target different locations. For example, you might have a certain budget to target the United Kingdom, but another budget to target the United States. Separating these allows you to better control your budgets.

At the same time, you don’t want to spread your campaign budgets too thin. For example, if you had a necklace campaign and only gave it a daily budget of £2, but its average CPC is £2.50, you’d rarely expect any clicks to come through your ads. If you’ve only got a small daily budget, consider focusing on one or two areas of your product categories or service areas your business promotes, and scale from there when budget permits.

Ad group structures are often a grey area in PPC, with many different strategies being used. Some accounts prefer to split their ad groups by match type, by location-based keywords, and even by advanced ad copy tools such as Dynamic Keyword Insertions (DKIs) or Location insertions.

Here at Splitpixel, we use a combination of all three set-ups. However, for a business just starting out its PPC efforts, we’d suggest segregating your ad groups when you meet any of the following:

• When you know that you have different landing pages for different keywords. For example, you wouldn’t want to mix necklaces and earring keywords in the same ad group, as you’ll want to point necklace users to the necklace page, and vice versa.
• When you know you want to purposely change your ad copy to be more bespoke to your keyword. For example, a business might want to segregate “drop earrings” and “hoop earrings” as keywords, even though they may send users to the same landing page, as an advertiser might want the headlines to be more bespoke to either a “drop earrings” or “hoop earrings” search result to improve their click-through rate.
• We’d also suggest separating any keywords that contain “Near Me” into their own ad group. This is so you can use Location Insertions, where a headline would dynamically change to the users’ location, making a users’ search more personal. 

While it’s an older technique, some advertisers like to segregate their ad groups by keyword match type. For example, having one ad group for exact match only, and another ad group to contain the same keywords, but using a phrase match type instead. This is a technique designed to save advertisers money since exact-match keywords are typically cheaper than phrase-match keywords. A technique known as cross-negativing is then used, where you negate the exact match keywords from the phrase match ad groups, to prevent any ad group cross-over (leading to inflated CPCs).

There are limited data and case studies to suggest which type works best and, after all, all accounts are different. However, the benefit of mixed-match type ad groups is that they cut down your ad group structure by half. 

Picture this: you have one campaign running, with ad groups for necklaces, earrings and bracelets. Because you’re segregating ad groups by match type, you have six running, one each for exact and one phrase. This means you require at least six responsive search ads. If you drive 100 clicks, this data will likely be scattered across six RSAs.

Whereas if you didn’t segregate your ad groups by match types, you’d only need a minimum of three RSA. Not only does this keep your data and structure more concise and easy to manage, but Google’s machine learning algorithms don’t have to learn double the amount of RSAs. In theory, pushing more data through fewer RSAs will quicker Google’s machine learning, allowing you to speed up identifying the top-performing ad texts in your account.