The BEST Google Ads Campaign Structure in 2025

Then over 1,000 Google Ad account audits in my career. Last year alone, I did a few hundred account audits personally. And I still see one of the biggest issues with accounts is actually campaign structure. So I'm going to show you in this video the best campaign structure you should be running today. Okay? So when I have done audits, many audits, the issue with campaign structure is fragmented structures in these accounts that aren't really spending a lot or don't have a lot of data. And the issue with that is the key is consolidation. So when you have consolidation, and in this beautiful little visual I have for you guys today on my iPad, when you have consolidation, you are allowing for faster machine learning for the Google algorithm, especially if you're going to be tapping into smart bidding, which eventually you're going to want to once you have a optimized campaign. Now this is what happens. A lot of times when I'm doing audits, I see this and it's segmented campaigns and they've got like, you know, campaign one gets 250 clicks, campaign two is getting 250 clicks. Obviously this is hypothetical campaign three, 250-campaign-4, 2:50. So all of those clicks, there's a thousand clicks, but they split that up amongst four different campaigns. And then if you think about like, let's say conversion rates only a few percent, especially if you're just getting going, what happens? Slower learning, limited data per campaign. And so think about this. What happens if all of these were actually moved over into a single campaign? Well, now you get 1000 total clicks inside of a single campaign, which means you have faster learning, more data for optimization. So now this works obviously if you're running similar themed terms, right? It probably doesn't work if you sell $10,000 garden fountains and then you also randomly sell TVs or computer monitors, right? Those you wouldn't want to lump in together into one campaign. So you still have to theme it out. But if the theme is around the same topic or product category or are very similar and it's going to have similar goals, right, then it makes sense to start consolidated. And why? What are the benefits of that? Faster algorithm learning, better budget optimization, more reliable smart bidding, and clear performance trends. Okay, another visual of this. This is a fun analogy that I've done before in the past, fishing, right? So think of your segmented campaigns now as fishing nets and you're in the same pond or lake, ocean or whatever. But now your, if you're segmented campaigns, you have, you have these small nets, right? So you have multiple small nets and they're out fishing. Well, what happens there? Well, again, slower learning, less efficient catch, more effort to manage. So instead of a couple small little boats with small, little fishing nets, instead, with one consolidated campaign, you have one big, large net, you're going to have faster learning, you're going to have better catch, efficiency of the fish and easier to manage. So that's why instead of having three little small boats out with small nets, big commercial fishermen have big boats and big nets. And so if we were to actually like draw a circle here of like, this would be our, you know, fancy little pond or lake, you know, instead of having like, okay, hey, Mr. Fisherman, you go there and you go here, Bob, and you go over there, Jeff. Well, they're only getting these small little areas, right? Of, of this entire body of water. Okay, well, what happens if actually I get this giant boat with. And this is going to be a terrible net, but I get a giant boat with this giant net that we can cast and there you go, right? You're taking up like 10x more of the body of water versus those three little small nets. So that is how you kind of have to think about it. You know, when you see people, they go into their accounts and they've got like all these campaigns very similar themes as well. Maybe it's like display monitors, but they decided to split it by, hey, we're gonna have our 32 inch monitors in this campaign and we want everything below 25 inch over here. Well, that doesn't. Why, right? Why are you the way that you are? Is it because of some weird thing that you wanted to track? Because it's going to negatively impact the way those campaigns are going to be able to perform because there is the fragmented data of it. When in reality, listen, you sell display computer monitors, put those all in one campaign to start, get enough data flowing in there, get enough conversion volume flowing in there, dial that thing in, then worry about segmenting because what you start to segment is low performers or fat, basically. And that is where the optimization cycle takes place. But you've got to get the campaigns breathing room with lots of, lots of good data. So it's, that's why, I mean, today, listen, Google Ads, the more data you have, it's got to be good data. But the more data you have, the easier it is to start managing the accounts. The, the less data is very finicky to work with. Really, really hard to work with. And so always be thinking, consolidating. Think big fishing boat, not a bunch of Small fishing boats. Here is another way of looking at it in regards to smart bidding learning requirements, right, you're going to need 30 in 30 days for target CPA. You're going to need 30 and 30 days for troas. Generally speaking. Now people in the comment section are going to be like, I, you know, I've done well and I only get five conversions a month. Sure, whatever, it's going to happen. But in most cases you're going to need consistent conversion volume of at least 30 plus. I'm not saying it's impossible for it not to to happen and work with lower conversion volume. It does. I'm saying most cases you need enough volume and usually 30 plus in a month is that sweet spot. Or in some cases you need more, in some cases it can be less. Right, but you need consistent volume there. Well, when you again segment, right, let's look at the learning impact of segmenting with those four campaigns, those four campaigns, let's say you're getting 40 total monthly conversions. You're now only getting 10 conversions per month in those four campaigns. So these, you know, four campaigns that we broke out up there, you're now only getting 4 or 10 conversions. 10 conversions. 10 conversions. 10 Conversions. Not enough for the smart bidding to work how we want, right? With consistency. And so when you segment, it negatively influences then what you're able to do with the smart bidding. However, again, if we're in one nice consolidated one campaign here, we got 40 total conversions. Now in one campaign, our smart bidding is going to have a better time of learning because it's meeting the convert conversion volume threshold that it operates the most effectively at. The other thing, and I've talked about this in any of the video trainings I've done in regards to responsive search ads, because you can have 15 headlines, you can have four descriptions and a lot of people would, they'll fill all of that out. The problem is you need 2000 impressions in the top positions over 30 days to get the performance labels. And the performance labels are going to show you how well one of your assets are doing. Whether it's the headline or description, it's going to say low, good, best, etc. Well, you need 2000 impressions in the top positions over a 30 day period just for those performance labels to actually even start applying. Okay, well also let's look at this. 15 headlines, four descriptions. That's 2700 possible combinations, right? And so you're going to need 100 impressions per combination to have enough data. So that means you're going to need 273,000 impressions for all combinations. That will not happen when you segment your campaigns out. And that's why consolidation helps even in the ad testing now. Because when you're getting more impressions consolidated into one ad group, you're now able to actually start allowing responsive search ads to do what they do well. And that's test all of these different combinations. I have more of that in my responsive search ad videos. And so those videos will probably be in the description below, where I go kind of more in depth, especially step by step on how to build these responsive search ads. But when it comes to like ad testing and whatnot, and with these combinations that you need to get performance metrics to give that proper testing, you're going to usually need either super high volume already, so you're going to be a big, big spender, maybe spending hundreds of thousand dollars per month. But what I see is a lot of smaller spending accounts, whether that's a few thousand dollars per month or even, you know, 10, 20k per month. They have all these segmented campaigns and then all these segmented ad groups and then they're trying to run all these crazy fully filled out responsive search ads. And I'm like, it's doing nothing because none of these are getting enough impressions to even get performance labels. So all these combination numbers that are needed in order for that responsive search ad to be fully tested, it doesn't happen because you've fragmented all of that data. And so what can happen, you know, when, when you start looking at consolidating? Well, here's a case study and I actually did a video on this, but we took an account from 20 campaigns down to literally just two campaigns in over 120 day period. We were able to actually increase revenue by $290,000 in revenue at a double roas. Okay, and so what did we do? I, we, we took a, an account, they had 20 campaigns and actually most of those campaigns were only getting like 5, 10 conversions a month. So they, they, they fragmented all of that data. Right? What we did, and this was very similar product types to it, it made absolutely no sense to do this split that they did. But they were utilizing some AI tool that wanted to break everything out in like the most granular way possible. Again, I used to love those types of structures five years ago. Just doesn't work as well today. Consolidation works the best. We took them, we just consolidated, all right, and we properly set up the consolidation in the campaigns, but we consolidated this down to 2, allowing all of that data to flow into that one campaign. Guess what happens to then the smart bidding that we were utilizing? Boom. We just, we were like feeding it now all of this data and what happened was $290,000 increase in revenue at a double ROAS in 120 day period. So you know, not sometimes less is more with Google Ads today not you know, not needing to go in there and a lot of people feel like they have to go make all these different changes every day. No, it's not how many changes. It's the right changes that matter in your account. And in this case the right change was actually let's get this consolidated down now over time. So people might ask this right? Because they're going to be like well hold on a second. I've heard you talk about, you know, splitting campaigns by performance and things. Yes. When you've got enough data. So let's say those two campaigns that we went from 20 to two, let's say now we're in this optimization stage where we start to see hey, actually there's some product categories or products that are not doing very well in those, in our, in our consolidated campaigns. We may now start and I call this, you know, cutting the fat or pruning. We may now start pruning that where we're, we're starting to take out low performers and this would obviously be in regards to an E Commerce because this was an E commerce case but we're taking out low performers that, and we're moving those then into their own consolidated campaign structures. Usually a standard shopping campaign in that case running some sort of hybrid approach there. But we, we consolidated then you prune. If you try to segment and over segment too quickly, then again you fragment the data. You don't get enough data in each campaign, you don't allow any breathing room for the smart bidding and nothing even takes off. So that's why you start consolidated. It's almost kind of like a shotgun approach I suppose. Then you start, you know, lasering in. Eventually you're going to have a sniper rifle campaign is super laser targeted. But you start, start broad, allow lots of data to come in, then you prune, then you cut fat and you move things out and segment from there. Only if you have the volume though you must continue to have a lot of volume there for that to happen. So when two segment, well brand versus non brand, right. So if I'm Nike, I'm going to have a Nike campaign and I don't want my Nike keywords being mixed in with non brand Nike keywords. Right. So if someone's looking up, if or if I have a non brand golf apparel campaign, I don't want my, you know, non brand people looking just for like golf, men's golf hats, women's golf hats, et cetera. I don't want Nike to be a part of that. Right. If someone's looking for Nike though, I want Nike to be specifically split out. This is, if you are Nike, like you own Nike, this is your account. So whatever your brand is, you know Bob's computer parts dot com, right? You want Bob's computer parts, people who are searching for that in a branded campaign. And you do not want Bob's computer parts showing in any of your non brand campaign efforts. Again, in Bob's computer parts it would be computer part search terms or search keywords that he's going after. You don't want Bob's brand name showing there. It would skew the data. So you segment in that case locations, especially international targeting. That makes sense to segment in many times, you know, time zone differences, audience differences there. So I do like to segment usually with locations, categories. I already brought this up in this video, you know, TVs versus video games or in my crazy case today, it was garden fountains that are 5 to $10,000 versus TVs or computer display monitors. Obviously you wouldn't want to put those things together. And so it's got to be when I'm talking about this consolidation, I'm still talking about a proper themed campaign. And if you want to know how to build a proper theme campaign, go watch how to set up a Google search campaign the right way. I have a video on that that'll be in the description below. Another reason to segment different goals, right? So if you're E commerce and you have different margins for different brands or different product categories, probably good idea to have different splits because you wouldn't want to consolidate the same products or same keywords into a campaign that you're like, actually I need, you know, I need a 5x here and a 2x here because I've got different margins on those. So different goals would be a reason to segment and then what no longer works? Single keyword ad groups. You don't want to be utilizing single keyword ad groups anymore. That is dead. Segmenting campaigns by alpha beta structure, that used to be my old favorite method back in the day. That is dead. You don't need a segment by match types, you do not need to segment by device. All of that is dead. You no longer need to worry about any of That I still see that today. It no longer makes sense. You don't need to do that. Then going into. All right, well, what about ad group structure? Well, with ad group structure, like your campaign, you want to consolidate. So the goal with ad groups is no longer skags, right? The single keyword ad groups. It's now, you know, themed ad groups. Someone created the. This is not my. I did not create this. Someone created stag. Okay? Single themed ad groups. And so in this case for a plumber, we have a plumbing campaign. But instead of splitting out all of these search keywords into individual ad groups, which would be like the old skag method, we have themed ad groups. So we have a general plumbing ad group. And this is just like plumbing companies, plumbing services, plumbing near me, etc. Then we have emergency. So here we've got emergency plumber, 24. 7 plumber. So the ad copy there is going to resonate for the 24. 7 and emergency plumber searches, right? So you can focus 100% of your ad copy on just what people care about for those emergency and 24. 7 searches, which obviously is going to be like, you know, emergency plumber, we can be there in one hour, yada, yada. Right? That may not resonate with someone. Emergency plumber might not mean anything to someone who's just looking for plumbers near me. Okay. Like, I, you know, it's not really an emergency. I just need to get this particular job quoted out. So general, you're going to have probably more general ad copy. Emergency is going to be super focused on emergency. And then we've got affordable plumbing, affordable, any of the cheap plumbers, affordable plumber sort of searches. All right, well, our ad copy here now needs to be really focused on price. The emergency people might not care as much about price. Right. I just, I need someone now, okay? The affordable person. Like, I'm probably willing to wait maybe a day or two. So, like, be there in an hour doesn't resonate as much with me as more like, cool. They're running some sort of new customer sale right now. So you can really, really laser target then your ad copy and resonate then with the searcher at that moment. And that's why. So stag, it's themes. You're just theming out those ad groups, but you're, you're putting and consolidating as many of those keywords as you can into those themes. Now, don't, don't go too crazy. I see people dump 100 keywords into their ad groups. You don't need to do that. But you just have to think strategically, but you have to think strategic in themes what you don't want, and I see this, you don't want one plumber ad group and then you lump all of these keywords into you know, just one ad group, right? You do not want that. You do want to then theme these out, but these are still consolidated in a, in a way that makes sense, in a way where the ad copy you can write to that searcher in that moment and you're still going to get hopefully enough impression data at those ad group levels within a themed plumbing campaign. In those themed ad groups you go always think consolidation and only segment when necessary. Hey, I just recently launched a group called PPC Copilot. It is a Google Ads support group. Any question you have on Google Ads I will get you an answer in that group. I'm doing weekly Q&As. I have several courses in there. A lead gen accelerator course that's going to be local service based businesses or any form of lead generation you're trying to do with Google Ads, whether you're national or software etc. As well as E commerce accelerator which that is going to be obviously for E commerce businesses. So mainly you know, shopping ads, performance max, etc. The performance max course that I've done, that's going to be a part of that group as well. Then I'm also doing doing playbook videos as they come up. So when I'm training my team here at Grow My Ads, questions arise within accounts. It's very situational based, not something a generic or general course can cover. Even if you're trying to do advanced topics in a course, you're trying to talk to a broad audience. Well, these little situations I create videos on and add them into the archived course module that we have in that group. So basically we're ending up with a wiki of all of these different playbooks of what to do when you're in this situation. So we're constantly updating, doing monthly trainings, weekly Q&As, and then if you just got questions, you will get an answer from either myself, the co founder of Grow My Ads, Luke Donahue, or one of our team of experts here at Grow My Ads. So if you're running Google Ads, whether you're a business owner or a freelancer, or you work in terms of internally somewhere and you just want a group of experts as an insurance policy, just in case you have questions or you have an issue that arises and you want expert advice on that. Make sure to go check that out again. PPC copilot that will be in the description below. If not, no worries. I hope to see you on the next video.