How should I structure my Google Ads campaigns?

Start with measurement: the best campaign structure is the one your bidding can actually optimize

Before you touch campaigns and ad groups, decide what “success” is and make sure Google Ads can measure it consistently. Modern Google Ads optimization leans heavily on conversion goals, conversion values, and automated bidding. If your measurement is messy, the “perfect” structure will still underperform because the system will optimize toward the wrong outcomes (or won’t have enough reliable signals to learn).

Use conversion goals to keep optimization clean (and avoid “goal soup”)

Conversion goals are designed to group related conversion actions into meaningful categories (for example, Purchases or Contacts) so campaigns can optimize toward what matters most. In practice, this means you’ll usually get the best results when your account has a small set of truly meaningful account-default goals that most campaigns share, rather than every campaign optimizing to a different mix of micro-actions.

Make sure each goal you expect bidding to optimize toward includes at least one primary conversion action. Primary actions are eligible for bidding and show in the main Conversions reporting, while secondary actions are for observation and typically belong in “All conversions” reporting.

Decide when to use account-default goals vs campaign-specific goals

For most advertisers, the cleanest structure is: pick a small number of account-default goals (the conversions that represent real business value) and let most campaigns optimize toward those. Use campaign-specific goals only when a campaign has a genuinely different job to do and optimizing to the account-default goal would push the wrong behavior (for example, a campaign dedicated to lead calls while the rest of the account optimizes for qualified form fills).

If different conversion actions have different business value, don’t solve that by fragmenting campaigns. A better long-term approach is to assign meaningful conversion values so Smart Bidding can prioritize higher-value outcomes without you needing to build a maze of separate campaigns.

Don’t ignore attribution settings when you restructure

Campaign structure decisions affect what you learn from reporting, but attribution settings affect how credit is assigned along the path to conversion. Keep your attribution approach consistent while restructuring so you can interpret performance changes correctly. If you change goals and attribution at the same time you rebuild structure, you lose the ability to diagnose what actually helped.

Build the structure from the top down: campaigns for control, ad groups (or asset groups) for clarity

The simplest way to think about structure is: campaigns exist to control targeting and budget; ad groups (Search) or asset groups (Performance Max) exist to keep messaging, landing pages, and intent aligned. When advertisers struggle with structure, it’s usually because they’re using campaigns for something that should be handled at the ad group level, or they’ve split campaigns so tightly that budgets and learning are starved.

When you should split into separate campaigns (and when you shouldn’t)

Create a new campaign only when you need separation for control or reporting that can’t be achieved cleanly another way. The most defensible reasons are:

• Different budgets must be protected (for example, Brand must never consume Non-brand budget, or a high-margin category must be prioritized).
• Different locations or languages require different strategy, ads, or landing pages.
• Different goals or bidding targets truly need different optimization (for example, separate CPA/ROAS targets because margins differ meaningfully).
• Different inventory/campaign types require different inputs and controls (Search vs Performance Max vs Video, etc.).

If your reason is “I want more keywords” or “I want everything neatly separated,” that’s usually a sign you should consolidate, not split. Over-segmentation is one of the fastest ways to reduce volume, slow learning, and make performance volatile.

Search campaigns: structure around intent, then keep ad groups tightly themed

For Search, I typically recommend starting with a small number of campaigns organized by intent and budget needs (often Brand vs Non-brand, plus any major product/service divisions that have different economics). Then, inside each campaign, create ad groups that are tightly themed around what the customer is actually looking for.

A practical rule that still holds: your ad groups should be specific, each with its own closely related keyword set and multiple high-quality ads so the system can optimize and you can learn which messaging resonates. Tight themes improve relevance, which helps performance in the auction and usually improves efficiency over time.

Two structure details matter more now than they did years ago:

First, ad group meaning matters. When keywords aren’t identical to a search term, AI-based prioritization can favor the most relevant ad groups based on the meaning of the search term, the full set of keywords in the ad group, and the landing pages in the ad group. This makes “themed ad groups” more than neat organization—it’s how you help the system understand what belongs where.

Second, eligibility issues can break your intended structure. If the “right” keyword can’t serve (because the campaign is limited by budget, the keyword has low search volume status, creatives or landing pages are disapproved, or targeting isn’t met), a different keyword/campaign can end up serving instead. Clean structure plus clean eligibility is how you keep control.

Keyword match types: avoid duplicate clutter and lean into Smart Bidding where it fits

Match types are often where structure gets bloated. Broad match can cover the reach of narrower match types (and more), which means you usually don’t need to repeat the same keyword in exact, phrase, and broad “just in case.” That kind of duplication rarely improves performance and often makes management harder.

If you use broad match, treat Smart Bidding as part of the structure, not an optional add-on. Broad match uses more signals to find relevant queries (including user signals, landing page content, and other keywords in the ad group), and it’s designed to work best when bidding can react to auction-time context.

Then use negatives as your guardrails. Your search terms reporting becomes your feedback loop: it tells you where intent is drifting so you can refine with negatives rather than endlessly rebuilding keyword lists.

Negative keywords: decide what belongs at the account level vs campaign level

If you sell one core thing and there are obvious “never relevant” searches, account-level negative keywords are a clean way to apply exclusions broadly across Search and Shopping inventory in many campaign types. This is especially useful for brand suitability and obvious intent mismatches that you would never want any campaign to pay for.

Then layer campaign-level or ad group-level negatives for more nuanced control. As a best practice, keep negatives focused on truly irrelevant intent (not just “expensive clicks”), because over-blocking can reduce volume and remove valuable variations you didn’t anticipate.

Performance Max: structure with fewer campaigns, cleaner asset groups, and deliberate controls

Performance Max is built to access multiple channels from one campaign and optimize toward your specified conversion goals using automated bidding and budget optimization. Structurally, this means you usually want fewer Performance Max campaigns than you think you do—often one per major business line or goal set—unless you have a clear need for separate budgets, locations, languages, or targets.

Inside a Performance Max campaign, the “structure” is primarily your asset groups. Each asset group should represent a single theme or audience intent cluster, with assets (headlines, descriptions, images, videos, and other assets) that belong together. The system mixes and matches assets within the group across eligible channels, so thematic consistency matters. Audience signals are optional, but they can help guide automation toward the kinds of users you believe are most likely to convert—and the system can still expand beyond those signals if it predicts better results.

Two important interaction rules should shape your overall account design when you run Search alongside Performance Max:

Search can be prioritized when the query is identical to an eligible Search keyword. If a user’s query is identical to an eligible Search keyword, Search is prioritized over Performance Max. If it isn’t identical, then Ad Rank can determine what serves.

Within Search, identical exact match keywords have the highest priority. If multiple items could match, identical exact match keywords take top priority; identical phrase/broad keywords and Performance Max search themes can also be prioritized when they are identical to the search term, and AI-based prioritization helps select the most relevant ad groups when terms aren’t identical.

For control, use the right tool for the job. Brand exclusions are the recommended way to prevent Performance Max from serving on brand searches because they’re designed to be more comprehensive than negative keywords (covering misspellings and variants). Use negative keywords cautiously in Performance Max—primarily for essential brand safety or completely irrelevant terms—because it’s a restrictive lever that can reduce the system’s ability to find converting traffic. Recent platform improvements have expanded controls for Performance Max (including more negative keyword management options, increased search theme limits per asset group, and additional demographic/device controls), so revisit your settings if you last structured Performance Max a year or two ago.

Budgeting and governance: make your structure scalable, diagnosable, and ROI-driven

Once your campaigns and groups are logically organized, the difference between “manageable” and “chaos” comes down to budgeting discipline, naming consistency, and a simple diagnostic routine you follow every time performance shifts.

Budgets: when to use shared budgets (and when not to)

If you have multiple campaigns that share the same business goal and you mainly want the system to fluidly allocate spend to wherever it can perform best, shared budgets can be a strong operational move. A shared budget is a single average daily budget shared across multiple campaigns, allowing underutilized budget to reallocate to campaigns that can use more traffic.

In mature accounts, shared budgets are often most effective when paired with portfolio bidding for campaigns that truly share goals and economics. That said, shared budgets are not a universal fit. Certain campaign types and scenarios aren’t compatible, and you should avoid shared budgets when you need strict budget control per campaign (for example, protecting Brand or isolating a regulated service line).

Keep naming and reporting simple enough that a human can spot problems fast

A good naming convention is part of structure. You want names that immediately tell you: campaign type, intent, geo, and (if relevant) product line. This becomes critical when you scale, run experiments, or hand off management. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s speed of diagnosis.

A quick diagnostic checklist to validate your structure (use this before you rebuild anything)

• Conversion goals: Are campaigns optimizing to the right goals, with at least one primary conversion action per goal that matters?
• Budget constraints: Are key campaigns limited by budget in a way that could force “wrong” campaigns/ad groups to serve?
• Eligibility blockers: Are ads or landing pages disapproved, or is targeting too restrictive for the searches you expect?
• Ad group clarity (Search): Are ad groups truly thematic with aligned landing pages, or are they mixed enough that relevance gets ambiguous?
• Query control: Are you actively using search terms insights and negatives (including account-level negatives where appropriate) to prevent intent drift?
• Performance Max inputs: Are asset groups built around single themes with strong assets, and are brand exclusions/negative keywords being used intentionally rather than aggressively?

If you build your account around clean goals, controlled campaign splits, tight thematic groupings, and disciplined exclusions, you’ll end up with a structure that’s easier to scale and typically produces better ROI—because both you and the bidding system can make clearer decisions with cleaner data.

If you’re restructuring your Google Ads account, it usually helps to keep the framework simple: start by defining a small, consistent set of primary conversion goals (with values where possible), create new campaigns only when you truly need separate budgets, geos, inventory types, or fundamentally different optimization targets, and then use tightly themed ad groups or asset groups to keep keywords/search themes, ads, and landing pages aligned—while relying on a clean negative keyword strategy and clear naming to make diagnostics easier. If you want a lightweight way to sanity-check (and maintain) that structure over time, Blobr connects to your Google Ads account and runs specialized AI agents that continuously surface concrete, prioritized actions—like generating negative keyword suggestions to cut waste or aligning top keywords with the right landing pages—so your structure stays coherent without constant manual digging.