AdWords Help

Organizing Your Account

Objective: Learn how to build a strong foundation for success. Find out how to organize your account logically at the campaign and ad group levels.

Campaign Strategy

Every account starts with a single campaign. Each campaign — whether you have one or multiple — should reflect a single, overarching goal. When building a campaign, ask yourself "What do I want to achieve with this campaign?" Your answer might be to target a certain audience, sell more products, increase signups, or bring in more leads.

Some effective ways to organize your campaigns are by:

• Theme or product line (coffee products, tea products, gift baskets)
• Your website's structure, such as by categories (purchase, learn, signup)
• Different brands (X, Y, and Z)
• Geography (New York, Chicago, and United States)
• Language (English, Spanish, German)
• Distribution preference (search engines only, content sites only, or both search and content)
• Budgets (different budgets per product line)

Map your structure on paper first to provide a template for the real thing.

Strategies for Account Organization

Google AdWords gives you a basic structure to work within. From here, it's essentially up to you to organize your own campaigns, ad groups, keywords and placements in a way that makes the most sense. Organization is a key component to starting off strong and to helping you determine what works and what doesn't.

Note: This lesson is geared toward campaigns that are using only keyword targeting. However, many of the concepts can also be applied to campaigns that use placement targeting in conjunction with keyword targeting. To learn more, please read the lesson about how keywords and placements work together.

Ad Group Strategy

Just like your campaigns, your ad groups should be organized by common theme, product, or goal. Often, picking keywords and placements can lay the groundwork for your ad group strategy. Think hard about your keywords and placements. When choosing keywords, think of what words someone would use to search for on Google when seeking your product. Try writing down every keyword that comes to mind. You can refine them later. (This is discussed more in the Selecting Keywords lesson.)

Next, group similar keywords together — such as by a common theme. Each grouping reflects an ad group. For example, if your campaign goal is to sell more coffee beans, logical ad groups might include:

Gourmet coffee beans	Organic coffee beans	French roast beans
Keywords: Specialty coffee Gourmet coffee Gourmet coffee beans	Keywords: Organic coffee beans Decaf organic coffee Natural coffee	Keywords: Decaf French roast coffee French roast coffee beans French coffee beans

Similarly, when choosing placements, consider where your typical customer might be browsing, and target those types of sites for ad placement. Although this lesson is geared toward campaigns that are using only keyword targeting, many of the concepts can also be applied to campaigns that use placement targeting in conjunction with keyword targeting. To learn more, please read the lesson about how keywords and placements work together.

If you find that the keywords or placements in one ad group become unwieldy, split the ad group into two to make them easier to manage.

Finally, give your campaigns and ad groups descriptive names. This helps you manage your account at a high level without memorizing what each of your ad groups contains.

Review, Test, and Refine Account Organization

Your AdWords account needs constant checkups. You can continue to reorganize your account as you learn more. The key is to check your progress and continue to refine your account. As you add more products, keywords or placements, you may need to reorganize your account. This is explained in more detail throughout this lesson and in the Optimizing Your Account lesson.