Read time 7-10 mins

Adwords Advice: How to Structure Your Adwords Account

27/03/2018 - Digital Marketing

So you’ve got your Ad Grants account approved (or recovered) - hooray! Time to start making lots of lovely ads that will send hordes to your website in no time at all and become a PPC ninja! Let’s go!

OK so just slow down a sec. While Adwords offers some great opportunities to build your audience (and who doesn’t want $10,000 of free advertising a month?) it’s important to structure it right. There’s no hard and fast way to do it and it depends on factors like your website, organisation set up, offering etc. but here we’ll run through a few basics to help get you started. If you’re completely new to Ad Grants, have a read of our intro to Ad Grants piece about the basics and differences between paid for and charity accounts.

Google Ads interface, displayed on an Apple Macbook in a white office

Once you’ve completed the basics it’s time to get started on the structure of your account. Getting the structure right will keep your costs low and (crucially) quality score high (the ranking by which Google determines how good your ad is) and helps you pull reports and see what’s working and what’s not, so those clicks, impressions and conversions are free to go forth and multiply.

Before beginning, it’s important to understand 3 basic elements of an Adwords account: Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords.

Campaigns: Campaigns are the scaffolding of your account, within which will sit Ad Groups. Campaigns should be fairly broad as the Ad Groups is where the detail lies but it’s here you can set location, language, bidding strategy etc. Well structured accounts should only have a few campaigns.

Ad Groups: These sit within a campaign and relate to a specific product. They include elements such as a sitelink, headline and description copy. The copy in your ads should relate as closely as possible to the keywords and copy on your website in order for them to show up.

Keyword: These will be linked to each Ad Group and will be triggered when someone enters a search term relating to this, which will in turn trigger your ad. It’s important to use keywords that are as unique as possible for each ad group and ensure they relate as closely as possible to your offering.

So these are the basic building blocks of your Adwords, but what do we actually mean by structure? Much like your website, your Adwords account should have a logical structure and it very much depends on your organisational model. It tends to vary between organisations, but generally we find there are 3 ways that work well:

According to website or organisational structure: Is your site structured by product or service? Depending on the way your organisation is structured you may want to set up different campaigns to reflect this e.g. Fundraising, Shop, Events etc.

By product or services offered: It can help to think of what you’re selling or linking to as a product within a bigger campaign. Say you’re a theatre offering a variety of shows, it may make sense to organise your account by season with each show as an Ad Group within it (as each show is the ‘product’ but the season is the overarching ‘campaign’ that links them all together). Or if you’ve an online Shop, it may make sense to start with this as a campaign and each product as an Ad Group. However if you’ve a large range of a specific type of product - say prints - and there’s an artist or type of print that’s particularly popular or unique, consider setting this up as a campaign by itself.

By location: If your organisation doesn’t have a physical home, has multiple hubs or programmes touring shows etc. In this case, consider setting up your account with locations as campaigns. You can do this at campaign level so that your ads show to people in the right area, so you can make sure you’re targeting the people most likely to be interested in that service or product. Or if you offer something in multiple languages make sure to target this here too.

For example, say you’ve a production of Hamlet that’s going to London, Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh. The likelihood is that people will want to see the show that’s closest to them, but Hamlet is a popular show which is bound to throw up a lot of results, so how to make sure they see the ad relevant to them? Setting up location settings will make sure the ad is only seen by people within a location or radius you determine.

So in this case, it’s best to structure your account so that campaign = location and within this Ad Group = product. This plays into Google’s hands as it loves showing users stuff that’s near them and helps to prevent you bidding on your own keywords, thus keeping prices low and the quality score high.

Following these steps and stopping to think about how your organisation works, the range or products and also what you might want to do or add in the future will help to make sure you get the most out of your Ad Grant and max out that $10k.

Of course ongoing monitoring and optimisation is key, but following this will help make it easier and spur on growth.

We also offer one off Adwords 'health checks', set up and ongoing maintenance of Ad Grant accounts, if you’re interested in finding out more drop us a note below.