Open a Google Ads account that has been running for a few years and you’ll often find one campaign holding everything: every service, every town, one shared budget, and a few hundred keywords sitting in a single ad group. It works after a fashion, but it’s hard to read and harder to fix. Your Google Ads account structure decides how much control you have over where the money goes, so it’s worth getting right before you worry about anything fancier.
How an account is organised
Google describes an account as three layers: the account itself, campaigns, and ad groups (about your account organisation). The account holds your login and billing details. Campaigns each have their own budget and settings, including locations and language. Ad groups sit inside campaigns and hold a set of similar ads and keywords.
That middle layer is the one that matters most. Because budget and location settings live at campaign level, a campaign is really a decision about what you want to spend on and where. Mix two things with different priorities into one campaign and they end up competing for the same pot of money.
Start from how your business makes money
Google suggests organising an account around a category or business goal, and for many businesses the structure of the website is a sensible starting point, with each ad group reflecting a page or category on the site. For a small business I’d go one step further and ask which services you actually want more of.
Say you run a heating firm in Cheltenham. Boiler installation might be your most profitable work, boiler servicing brings in steady repeat customers, and emergency repairs are urgent but unpredictable. Those are three different jobs with three different values, so they deserve three campaigns rather than one. If boiler installation is worth far more per enquiry, you’ll want to decide how much to spend on it deliberately, not leave it to whichever keyword happens to attract the most clicks.
The same logic applies to a solicitor, an accountant or a garden landscaper. One campaign per main service is usually the right starting point, and it keeps reporting honest. If an account has a single campaign, the question “is boiler servicing profitable?” simply can’t be answered.
Keep ad groups tight
Inside each campaign, ad groups should each cover one tightly related theme. In the heating example, the installation campaign might have one ad group for new boiler installation, one for boiler replacement and one for combi boilers. Each ad group gets its own adverts, written around that theme (organise your account with ad groups).
The practical benefit is that the advert a searcher sees matches what they typed. Someone searching for a boiler replacement who sees an advert about boiler replacement is more likely to click, and more likely to feel the landing page is the right one when they arrive. It also makes it much easier to see which themes are producing enquiries and which are only producing clicks.
There’s no magic number of keywords per ad group. If you can’t describe what the ad group is about in a few words, it’s probably covering too much.
Separate by location when it changes the economics
Location is a campaign setting, so it’s a natural place to split. A business serving Cheltenham, Gloucester and Bristol might find that the three areas behave very differently: different competition, different cost per click, different customer value. Giving each area its own campaign lets you set separate budgets and see the results side by side, rather than guessing from one blended figure.
Don’t split purely for the sake of it, though. If you cover a small area and get a modest number of enquiries, three tiny campaigns can leave each one with too little data to learn from. Our guide to Google Ads location targeting covers the setting that most often catches people out when they do this.
Don’t spread a small budget too thin
This is the trade-off with every extra campaign. Each one needs enough budget and enough conversions to give you something meaningful to read, and automated bidding in particular does better with more data (our guide to bidding strategies explains why). With a budget of a few hundred pounds a month, a sensible structure may be only two or three campaigns, with the rest of the detail handled by ad groups.
If you’re still working out how much to spend overall, start with how much to budget for Google Ads, then decide how to divide it.
Brand, services and everything else
One split worth making early is separating searches for your own business name from searches for your services. People searching for you by name already know who you are, they convert at a much higher rate, and the clicks are usually cheap. Put them in the same campaign as your generic service keywords and the results blend together, making the generic campaign look better than it really is. Keep brand in its own campaign and you can see what your paid advertising is genuinely winning from people who didn’t know you.
Negative keywords are part of structure too. They’re how you stop one campaign or ad group picking up searches meant for another, and how you keep irrelevant searches out altogether. We’ve written separately on negative keywords if that’s the area to tackle next.
Check the structure supports your tracking
A neat structure is only useful if you can measure what each part delivers. Make sure conversion tracking is counting genuine enquiries, such as calls and form submissions, and not junk. Otherwise you’ll be reading clean campaign-level reports built on unreliable numbers. The common problems are listed in our post on conversion tracking mistakes.
Getting your structure reviewed
If your account is one big campaign, or you inherited it from a previous agency and don’t know why it’s set up the way it is, restructuring is often the quickest improvement available, and it doesn’t need extra budget. You can request a free Google Ads audit and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d change. If you’re starting from scratch, our Google Ads setup service builds the structure around your services and areas from day one, and our Google Ads management keeps it working as the account grows.
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