Organise your account with ad groups

Organising your account allows you to better serve the right ads to the right customers, and it allows you to better track the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.When people are searching online and they type a word or phrase, they're looking for information that's closely tied to those words. For example, if Eric types digital cameras and he sees an ad for film reels, he probably won't click the ad.

To show ads that are relevant to the searches of people that you're trying to reach, bundle related ads together with related keywords into an ad group. That way, all of your related ads can be shown to customers searching for similar things.

Although there isn’t one correct way to organise your account, this article goes over some best practices that you can follow.

Best practices

• Organise your campaigns and ad groups as you create them. Reorganising your account after you've created several campaigns and ad groups wipes out all the valuable data that you've accumulated, possibly affecting how your ads perform.
• When you need to use a different set of campaigns settings (e.g. budget or location targeting), create a separate campaign. For instance, if you sell clothing, you may want to set a budget for shirts and a different budget for trousers. In this case, you should create a campaign for shirts, and another campaign for trousers. 
• If you want all your ads to share a budget and you want to target the same set of locations, then you can just use one campaign. 
• For each ad group, pick a narrow theme and create ad groups around that theme. For each ad group, use keywords related to that theme. Consider also having your ads mention at least one of your keywords in its headline. This is because when someone searches for a term that matches your keyword, and they see one ad that mentions the keyword and another ad that doesn't mention the keyword, they are more likely to think that the first ad is more relevant to what they're searching for.
• You never know what message might resonate best with potential customers. Because of this, we recommend having at least 3 ads in each ad group and using optimized ad rotation. The optimize setting will optimise your ads for clicks in each individual auction using signals like keyword, search term, device, location and more. Learn about Ad rotation settings.

Example

Let's say that you own an online electronics shop and you create a Google Ads account so that you can begin to advertise the products that you sell. At the account level you can choose who else you'd like to have access to your Google Ads account and your preferred payment method. The top-most layer of your account might look as follows:

 

Account Online electronics store

Organise your campaigns

A campaign consists of a collection of ad groups. For your campaign, consider the following:

• How much you're willing to spend on clicks or conversions from your ads
• Networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show. 
• Other top-level settings that affect clusters of ad groups

For example, let’s say that you want to create ads for your inventory of televisions and cameras, so you create separate campaigns for each.

 

Campaign Campaign Televisions Cameras

Organise your ad groups

A common method for organising a Google Ads account is to organise with a category or business goal in mind. For many businesses, the way your website is structured is a good place to start, where each ad group representing a different page or category on your site. 

Ad groups can help ensure that your ads are relevant to your keywords. For example, for your camera campaign, you may want to create separate ads for digital cameras and compact cameras. You can create ad groups for each type of camera, each with its own set of focused, relevant keywords. For your television campaign, you can also create an ad group for each type of television you sell, such as flat screen and plasma TVs. 

 

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Flat Screen TVs Plasma TVs Digital cameras Compact Cameras

Within a particular ad group, you'll want to choose keywords that are closely linked to your ad text. For your digital cameras ad group, you might try keywords for different brands, models and prices for the digital cameras that you sell.

Tying it all together, your overall account structure might look like this:

 

Account Unique email and password Billing information

 

Campaign Campaign Televisions Cameras

 

Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Ad Group Flat Screen TVs Plasma TVs Digital cameras Compact Cameras

Related links

• About your account organisation
• Create a new ad group
• About your Google Ads account limits