1) Simplification starts with redefining “control” (and spotting false control)
Most accounts get messy for a good reason: someone, at some point, needed a lever to pull. The problem is that many of the “levers” people create (extra campaigns, duplicate ad groups, endless naming variants) don’t actually create control—they create fragmentation. That fragmentation makes it harder to understand performance, slows down automated bidding learning, and forces you to manage budgets manually across too many moving parts.
Real control in Google Ads usually comes from a short list of mechanisms: clean conversion goals, budget control at the right level, clear traffic steering (geo/language/brand vs non-brand intent), and consistent guardrails (brand exclusions, negative keywords, URL rules, and placement controls where applicable). Campaign count is not a control mechanism by itself.
When you should split vs consolidate (a practical decision rule)
If you want to simplify without losing control, you need an honest rule for when separate campaigns are truly justified. In my experience, you only “earn” a separate campaign when at least one of these is true: you need a different budget that must not mix, you need fundamentally different bidding targets (like very different target CPA/ROAS), you need different location or language settings, you have meaningfully different conversion intent (not just different keywords), or you have business constraints that require isolation (regulatory, brand safety, inventory limitations, or stakeholder reporting requirements).
If the only reason for splitting is “it feels more organized,” that’s a sign you should consolidate—and recreate organization with labels, naming, and reporting views instead of extra structures.
The most common “complexity traps” I see in mature accounts
One trap is creating many small campaigns to “make sure each product gets spend,” then manually reallocating budgets every week. Another is building one campaign per match type or one campaign per audience segment, then wondering why performance is volatile. A third is having separate campaigns that are effectively identical but differ in small, hard-to-notice settings (conversion goals, location presence settings, landing pages, or exclusions), which makes troubleshooting nearly impossible once results shift.
The fastest path to simplification is to consolidate anything that shares the same goal, the same conversion setup, and the same success metric—and then put your “control energy” into settings and guardrails that scale.
2) A proven simplification blueprint (without giving up oversight)
Step 1: Consolidate around conversion goals first (not around keywords)
Before you merge anything, make sure you’re not merging campaigns that are optimizing toward different outcomes. In Google Ads, campaigns typically perform best when they can learn from a consistent set of account-default goals, and you only override with campaign-specific goals when you truly need different optimization behavior. If you do use campaign-specific goals, treat them as an exception—not the default—because they can reduce shared learning across the account and create hidden differences between “similar” campaigns.
Also be careful when changing which conversions are included for bidding: Smart Bidding adapts over time, so big goal changes often require gradual target adjustments to avoid spend shocks and performance whiplash. If you’re assigning different values to different conversion actions, value-based bidding (for example, Target ROAS or Maximize conversion value) can often give you the “control” you want without splitting campaigns into tiny buckets.
Step 2: Simplify Search/Display/Shopping management with shared budgets + portfolio bid strategies (where it fits)
If you’re managing multiple campaigns with the same business objective, shared budgets can remove a huge amount of manual budget babysitting by letting underutilized budget flow to campaigns that can use it. This works best when paired with a portfolio bid strategy so bidding and budget distribution align around one goal across a set of campaigns. Once linked, the shared budget stays associated with the campaigns in that portfolio, and it updates automatically as campaigns are added or removed—meaning fewer “oops” moments where a new campaign launches with the wrong budget or gets forgotten.
Two important operational nuances matter during simplification. First, shared budgets are not compatible with every campaign scenario, and they aren’t compatible with certain experiment setups. Second, if you switch between an individual budget and a shared budget in the middle of the day, delivery can behave as though the campaign has spent $0 since the switch—so plan budget-structure changes for low-risk windows (often the start of day or low-traffic periods) to avoid confusing pacing.
Step 3: Simplify Performance Max by consolidating campaigns and using asset groups for “structure”
With Performance Max, simplification looks different because some classic control levers (like portfolio bid strategies and shared budgets) aren’t available for this campaign type. The way you keep control while simplifying is by reducing the number of campaigns where settings are effectively the same, and using asset groups as your internal structure.
Asset groups are designed to bundle creatives around a theme or audience and can be built around your website categories or sections. Instead of creating separate campaigns for every category, you often get cleaner management (and stronger learning) by running fewer campaigns and creating multiple asset groups for different themes, final URLs, and creative angles.
To keep steering traffic effectively in a simplified Performance Max setup, lean into the controls that scale across fewer campaigns. Search themes help guide keywordless targeting by providing phrases your customers are likely to use—especially useful for niche offerings or new launches. The platform guidance is to keep themes broad, avoid duplicates, and use event-specific themes when you need quick seasonal alignment. Recent updates have also increased the available search theme capacity per asset group (making consolidation easier without losing directional control).
For brand control specifically, use brand exclusions when you want to prevent Performance Max from serving on brand searches (yours or competitors). This is more comprehensive than negative keywords for brand protection because it can cover misspellings and variants. Negative keywords are still valuable, but they’re a blunt instrument; use them primarily for essential brand safety or truly irrelevant traffic blocking.
Step 4: If you’re consolidating multiple Performance Max campaigns, do it intentionally (and slowly)
When consolidating Performance Max campaigns, performance stability comes from consistency. If you move budget from one campaign to another, align settings first (conversion tracking and goals, bid strategy and targets, location and language settings, landing pages, creative/asset groups, and exclusions). If you’re manually shifting budget between campaigns, a gradual transition approach (for example, stepping budget over week by week rather than in one big move) reduces learning disruption and makes performance changes easier to interpret.
- Pre-merge checklist: confirm conversion setup/goals, bidding targets, location presence settings, language, landing pages/URL behavior, exclusions (including account-level negatives), and any value rules are aligned.
- Post-merge checklist: watch bid strategy status and learning behavior, check search terms and placement insights available to you, monitor budget pacing for at least 1–2 full conversion cycles, and avoid stacking multiple major changes in the same week.
3) How to keep “control” after you simplify (without rebuilding complexity)
Use labels as your “virtual campaign structure”
Once you consolidate, you still need a way to answer stakeholder questions like “How did Category A do vs Category B?” without creating separate campaigns for everything. That’s where labels become your best friend. Apply labels consistently across campaigns, ad groups, ads, and even keywords where relevant, and then use label-based reporting to compare performance across your custom categories.
In practice, this replaces messy structural duplication with clean, scalable reporting. You can maintain a single consolidated campaign while still getting segmented visibility by product line, margin tier, funnel stage, creative theme, or promotional calendar.
Centralize exclusions so you don’t lose guardrails as you consolidate
Simplification fails when irrelevant queries or brand-unsafe traffic creeps in and nobody can quickly fix it across the whole account. Centralizing exclusions prevents that. Account-level negative keywords can apply across Search and Shopping inventory (including Performance Max), giving you one place to enforce global exclusions. Negative keyword lists also help you apply consistent exclusions without copying the same negatives campaign by campaign.
For Performance Max brand traffic management, brand exclusions are the cleanest lever when your goal is “don’t spend on brand in this campaign.” Use negative keywords more sparingly in Performance Max, because overly restrictive negatives can block the system from finding valuable demand.
Use experiments to de-risk consolidation (instead of “hoping”)
If you’re worried that consolidation will remove too much control, test it. Custom experiments let you compare an experiment campaign against the original while sharing traffic (and budget), so you can validate the impact of structural changes before committing. Custom experiments are available for specific campaign types (such as Search, Display, Video, and Hotel campaigns) and have practical constraints (only one running at a time per campaign, with a limited number scheduled). Also, don’t keep changing the base campaign while the experiment is running—moving goalposts makes results harder to trust.
My rule of thumb is simple: use experiments when the change would be hard to reverse psychologically (because everyone will blame the consolidation), or when the business impact of a mistake is high. For smaller accounts, you can also do controlled rollouts by consolidating one cluster at a time and keeping all other variables stable.
The “control stack” I recommend after simplifying
When the dust settles, you should be able to run fewer, stronger campaigns while staying in control through a layered approach: consistent goals and bidding, budget management at the appropriate level (shared budgets + portfolio bidding where applicable), centralized exclusions (account-level and list-based), thematic structuring via asset groups (for Performance Max), and reporting structure via labels. That combination gives you fewer knobs—but the right knobs—so the account becomes easier to manage and more predictable to scale.
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
| Area | Key principle | Practical actions in the account | Relevant Google Ads documentation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redefining “control” and deciding when to split vs. consolidate | Control comes from goals, budgets, targeting, and guardrails — not from having lots of campaigns. You only “earn” a separate campaign when budgets, bidding targets, locations/languages, conversion intent, or hard business constraints truly differ. |
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| Step 1: Simplify around conversion goals (not keywords) | Campaigns learn best when they optimize to a consistent set of conversion goals. Campaign-specific goals should be an exception. Use value-based bidding to handle different values without splitting into many small campaigns. |
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| Step 2: Shared budgets and portfolio bidding for Search/Display/Shopping | When multiple campaigns share one business goal, use shared budgets and portfolio bid strategies to reduce manual budget shuffling and let the system allocate spend and bids optimally. |
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| Step 3: Simplifying Performance Max with fewer campaigns and more asset groups | Performance Max doesn’t support shared budgets or portfolio bidding, so simplification means running fewer campaigns with distinct settings and using asset groups to organize themes, URLs, and creatives. |
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| Step 4: Consolidating multiple Performance Max campaigns safely | Stability comes from consistency. Align settings and shift budget gradually so the algorithm can relearn without “whiplash.” |
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| Reporting control with labels instead of extra campaigns | Use labels as your “virtual structure” so you can keep campaigns consolidated but still report by category, funnel stage, or theme. |
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| Centralized guardrails: negatives, lists, and brand controls | Consolidation only works if exclusions and brand safety are applied centrally. Account-level controls and shared lists prevent gaps as you simplify. |
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| Using experiments to de-risk consolidation | When the stakes are high or stakeholders are nervous, use experiments to test simplification instead of making irreversible changes in the main campaign. |
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| “Control stack” after simplification | Fewer, stronger campaigns; control shifts from sheer structural complexity to a deliberate stack of goals, bidding, budgets, exclusions, asset groups, and labels. |
|
Let AI handle
the Google Ads grunt work
If you’re trying to simplify a Google Ads account without giving up “control,” it helps to shift control away from having lots of campaigns and toward clearer goals, shared budgets or bidding where it makes sense, centralized guardrails like negatives and brand exclusions, and reporting structure via labels and asset groups. Blobr fits naturally into that workflow by connecting to your Google Ads and running specialized AI agents that continuously analyze your structure and performance, then surface concrete recommendations—like where consolidation is safe, where exclusions should be standardized, or how to keep Performance Max organized with fewer campaigns—so you can reduce complexity while still keeping the rules and constraints that matter to your business.
1) Simplification starts with redefining “control” (and spotting false control)
Most accounts get messy for a good reason: someone, at some point, needed a lever to pull. The problem is that many of the “levers” people create (extra campaigns, duplicate ad groups, endless naming variants) don’t actually create control—they create fragmentation. That fragmentation makes it harder to understand performance, slows down automated bidding learning, and forces you to manage budgets manually across too many moving parts.
Real control in Google Ads usually comes from a short list of mechanisms: clean conversion goals, budget control at the right level, clear traffic steering (geo/language/brand vs non-brand intent), and consistent guardrails (brand exclusions, negative keywords, URL rules, and placement controls where applicable). Campaign count is not a control mechanism by itself.
When you should split vs consolidate (a practical decision rule)
If you want to simplify without losing control, you need an honest rule for when separate campaigns are truly justified. In my experience, you only “earn” a separate campaign when at least one of these is true: you need a different budget that must not mix, you need fundamentally different bidding targets (like very different target CPA/ROAS), you need different location or language settings, you have meaningfully different conversion intent (not just different keywords), or you have business constraints that require isolation (regulatory, brand safety, inventory limitations, or stakeholder reporting requirements).
If the only reason for splitting is “it feels more organized,” that’s a sign you should consolidate—and recreate organization with labels, naming, and reporting views instead of extra structures.
The most common “complexity traps” I see in mature accounts
One trap is creating many small campaigns to “make sure each product gets spend,” then manually reallocating budgets every week. Another is building one campaign per match type or one campaign per audience segment, then wondering why performance is volatile. A third is having separate campaigns that are effectively identical but differ in small, hard-to-notice settings (conversion goals, location presence settings, landing pages, or exclusions), which makes troubleshooting nearly impossible once results shift.
The fastest path to simplification is to consolidate anything that shares the same goal, the same conversion setup, and the same success metric—and then put your “control energy” into settings and guardrails that scale.
2) A proven simplification blueprint (without giving up oversight)
Step 1: Consolidate around conversion goals first (not around keywords)
Before you merge anything, make sure you’re not merging campaigns that are optimizing toward different outcomes. In Google Ads, campaigns typically perform best when they can learn from a consistent set of account-default goals, and you only override with campaign-specific goals when you truly need different optimization behavior. If you do use campaign-specific goals, treat them as an exception—not the default—because they can reduce shared learning across the account and create hidden differences between “similar” campaigns.
Also be careful when changing which conversions are included for bidding: Smart Bidding adapts over time, so big goal changes often require gradual target adjustments to avoid spend shocks and performance whiplash. If you’re assigning different values to different conversion actions, value-based bidding (for example, Target ROAS or Maximize conversion value) can often give you the “control” you want without splitting campaigns into tiny buckets.
Step 2: Simplify Search/Display/Shopping management with shared budgets + portfolio bid strategies (where it fits)
If you’re managing multiple campaigns with the same business objective, shared budgets can remove a huge amount of manual budget babysitting by letting underutilized budget flow to campaigns that can use it. This works best when paired with a portfolio bid strategy so bidding and budget distribution align around one goal across a set of campaigns. Once linked, the shared budget stays associated with the campaigns in that portfolio, and it updates automatically as campaigns are added or removed—meaning fewer “oops” moments where a new campaign launches with the wrong budget or gets forgotten.
Two important operational nuances matter during simplification. First, shared budgets are not compatible with every campaign scenario, and they aren’t compatible with certain experiment setups. Second, if you switch between an individual budget and a shared budget in the middle of the day, delivery can behave as though the campaign has spent $0 since the switch—so plan budget-structure changes for low-risk windows (often the start of day or low-traffic periods) to avoid confusing pacing.
Step 3: Simplify Performance Max by consolidating campaigns and using asset groups for “structure”
With Performance Max, simplification looks different because some classic control levers (like portfolio bid strategies and shared budgets) aren’t available for this campaign type. The way you keep control while simplifying is by reducing the number of campaigns where settings are effectively the same, and using asset groups as your internal structure.
Asset groups are designed to bundle creatives around a theme or audience and can be built around your website categories or sections. Instead of creating separate campaigns for every category, you often get cleaner management (and stronger learning) by running fewer campaigns and creating multiple asset groups for different themes, final URLs, and creative angles.
To keep steering traffic effectively in a simplified Performance Max setup, lean into the controls that scale across fewer campaigns. Search themes help guide keywordless targeting by providing phrases your customers are likely to use—especially useful for niche offerings or new launches. The platform guidance is to keep themes broad, avoid duplicates, and use event-specific themes when you need quick seasonal alignment. Recent updates have also increased the available search theme capacity per asset group (making consolidation easier without losing directional control).
For brand control specifically, use brand exclusions when you want to prevent Performance Max from serving on brand searches (yours or competitors). This is more comprehensive than negative keywords for brand protection because it can cover misspellings and variants. Negative keywords are still valuable, but they’re a blunt instrument; use them primarily for essential brand safety or truly irrelevant traffic blocking.
Step 4: If you’re consolidating multiple Performance Max campaigns, do it intentionally (and slowly)
When consolidating Performance Max campaigns, performance stability comes from consistency. If you move budget from one campaign to another, align settings first (conversion tracking and goals, bid strategy and targets, location and language settings, landing pages, creative/asset groups, and exclusions). If you’re manually shifting budget between campaigns, a gradual transition approach (for example, stepping budget over week by week rather than in one big move) reduces learning disruption and makes performance changes easier to interpret.
- Pre-merge checklist: confirm conversion setup/goals, bidding targets, location presence settings, language, landing pages/URL behavior, exclusions (including account-level negatives), and any value rules are aligned.
- Post-merge checklist: watch bid strategy status and learning behavior, check search terms and placement insights available to you, monitor budget pacing for at least 1–2 full conversion cycles, and avoid stacking multiple major changes in the same week.
3) How to keep “control” after you simplify (without rebuilding complexity)
Use labels as your “virtual campaign structure”
Once you consolidate, you still need a way to answer stakeholder questions like “How did Category A do vs Category B?” without creating separate campaigns for everything. That’s where labels become your best friend. Apply labels consistently across campaigns, ad groups, ads, and even keywords where relevant, and then use label-based reporting to compare performance across your custom categories.
In practice, this replaces messy structural duplication with clean, scalable reporting. You can maintain a single consolidated campaign while still getting segmented visibility by product line, margin tier, funnel stage, creative theme, or promotional calendar.
Centralize exclusions so you don’t lose guardrails as you consolidate
Simplification fails when irrelevant queries or brand-unsafe traffic creeps in and nobody can quickly fix it across the whole account. Centralizing exclusions prevents that. Account-level negative keywords can apply across Search and Shopping inventory (including Performance Max), giving you one place to enforce global exclusions. Negative keyword lists also help you apply consistent exclusions without copying the same negatives campaign by campaign.
For Performance Max brand traffic management, brand exclusions are the cleanest lever when your goal is “don’t spend on brand in this campaign.” Use negative keywords more sparingly in Performance Max, because overly restrictive negatives can block the system from finding valuable demand.
Use experiments to de-risk consolidation (instead of “hoping”)
If you’re worried that consolidation will remove too much control, test it. Custom experiments let you compare an experiment campaign against the original while sharing traffic (and budget), so you can validate the impact of structural changes before committing. Custom experiments are available for specific campaign types (such as Search, Display, Video, and Hotel campaigns) and have practical constraints (only one running at a time per campaign, with a limited number scheduled). Also, don’t keep changing the base campaign while the experiment is running—moving goalposts makes results harder to trust.
My rule of thumb is simple: use experiments when the change would be hard to reverse psychologically (because everyone will blame the consolidation), or when the business impact of a mistake is high. For smaller accounts, you can also do controlled rollouts by consolidating one cluster at a time and keeping all other variables stable.
The “control stack” I recommend after simplifying
When the dust settles, you should be able to run fewer, stronger campaigns while staying in control through a layered approach: consistent goals and bidding, budget management at the appropriate level (shared budgets + portfolio bidding where applicable), centralized exclusions (account-level and list-based), thematic structuring via asset groups (for Performance Max), and reporting structure via labels. That combination gives you fewer knobs—but the right knobs—so the account becomes easier to manage and more predictable to scale.
