Account structure is not exciting - but it determines everything else

Account structure is not glamorous. Nobody is excited to talk about campaign hierarchy and ad group taxonomy. But every other decision you make in Google Ads - bidding, targeting, creative, budget allocation - is constrained by your account structure. Build it badly and you spend the next two years working around the problems it creates.

The principle I always start with

Structure should reflect intent - specifically, the different intents of different types of searcher. A person searching "emergency plumber Manchester" has a different intent to someone searching "how much does a plumber cost". Those two queries should not share an ad group, ideally not even a campaign. They need different ads, different bids, and probably different landing pages. Group by intent, not by keyword volume or theme alone.

How many campaigns do you actually need

This depends on your business, your budget, and your goals. But a useful rule of thumb: you need a separate campaign any time you need a separate budget, a different location target, a different device strategy, or a different bidding goal. If two groups of keywords share all of those things, they can probably live in the same campaign. If any one of those things differs, separate campaigns keep things cleaner and give you better control.

Ad group size - tighter is better

Ad groups should be tight. I aim for 5 to 15 closely related keywords per ad group. The closer the keyword themes, the more relevant the ad copy can be, and the better your Quality Scores will be. Ad groups with 50 or 100 keywords are almost always trying to be too many things at once.

For high-value terms I will run a single keyword ad group. That sounds extreme but it gives you absolute control over what ads show, what landing page is used, and what bid is applied. For campaigns where margin matters, that level of control pays for itself.

The naming convention nobody bothers with

Spend 30 minutes creating a consistent naming convention before you build anything. Campaign name should tell you the goal, the product or service, the location, and the network. Ad group name should reflect the keyword theme and match type. Without this, accounts become unmanageable as they grow - especially if you hand them over to someone else or come back to them after six months.

Restructuring an existing account

If you have inherited a messy account, the temptation is to rebuild it from scratch. Resist that. You lose historical data and quality score history when you recreate campaigns. Instead, work systematically - consolidate where campaigns overlap, tighten ad groups gradually, and redirect spend toward the better-structured parts of the account. Restructure as you optimise, not all at once.