A messy Google Ads account wastes money and makes reports confusing. A tidy one makes every decision easier. Employers often hand a junior an existing account and ask, "What would you change?" Understanding structure is how you answer.
The layers
- Account: the business's home in Google Ads, with its billing, users and overall settings such as currency and time zone. Currency usually cannot be changed later, so choose cedis if the business pays in cedis.
- Campaign: sets the budget, the campaign type, the locations and languages, the networks, the bid strategy and the schedule.
- Ad group: a set of closely related keywords and the ads written for them.
- Keywords: the words and phrases that decide which searches can show your ads.
- Ads and assets: what people see, plus extras such as phone numbers and extra links.
Organising campaigns
Create separate campaigns when you need different budgets, locations or goals. For example, a hotel might have one campaign for rooms and another for its conference hall, because they have different budgets and customers. A business serving Tamale and Accra might split by location if it wants to control spending in each.
Tight ad groups
Each ad group should cover one theme, so the ad can speak directly to every keyword in it. If an ad group mixes "laptop repair", "phone screen repair" and "printer ink", no single ad can be relevant to all three. Split them into three ad groups, each with its own ads.