What are Campaigns and Ad Groups?

Starting up on Google Ads?

This article will help you get a good idea of the way to group and structure the ads you put out with Google.

The moment you set up your Google ads, you will need to organize your output through various campaigns and ad groups. At the very top level of the structure is going to be your account, which represents the brand or company you’re advertising for.

People who manage campaigns for other companies can actually have several accounts underneath an Agency umbrella. But essentially, one account is used for one company or brand.

Within the account are different Campaigns, and within those campaigns are different Ad Groups. 

How do we structure this?

The campaign level is going to be where you define the “bigger picture” for the account. This is the level where you will have different campaigns for:

• Google search traffic
• Display network traffic
• Video ad traffic

Other things that you should define in the campaign level:

Location. It would be good to have separate campaigns for each location if:

• You’re targeting lots of different locations and different countries
• You have a business in many different locations

The campaign level is where you will define your budget.

Typically, you’d set a budget per campaign. You can also do shared budgets if you want multiple campaigns to share the same budget.

You will also define your bid strategy (manual or automated) at the campaign level.

You also set the schedule at the campaign level, which defines the time frame in which your ad is going to run.

As an Ads Manager, you should not handle a dozen campaigns at the same time. Why? Let’s go and take a look at Ad Groups first and come back to this at the end.

Ad Groups

Within the campaigns, there are ad groups. Ad Groups is a targeting option combined with an ad or a set of ads.

In a search campaign where you are targeting keywords, an Ad Group would have a set of keywords and an ad (or set of ads) that are specific to those keywords.

For example, here’s a construction company with services such as:

1. Bathroom remodeling
2. Kitchen remodeling
3. Basement remodeling

There will be times that they have to split up the keywords. There would be keywords related to bathroom remodeling for one Ad Group. And the ads within that Ad Group would be specific to bathroom remodeling. They should also have a different ad group for “kitchen remodeling”. The same thing goes for “basement remodeling”.

For display campaigns and Youtube video campaigns, Ad Groups will not target keywords. Instead, it will target TOPICS and PLACEMENTS (only showing the ads to specific websites or specific Youtube videos). You can set up a different Ad Group for different targets.

Keep in mind, ads don’t necessarily have to be different. They just have to be set in different Ad Groups due to different bidding strategies that will be applied for certain topics or placement.

And here’s where we answer why a good Ads Manager shouldn’t choose to handle more than a dozen campaigns at the same time: it’s a lot to deal with, and remember, these ads, once placed, are paid for! With several Ad Groups that you would have to keep in mind per campaign, you’ll want to maximize your budget by keeping in mind the best strategies and keywords to use per Ad Group.

So that ends our little dive into the world of Campaign and Ad Groups. Use it wisely and good luck!