I’m a CMO (and former Googler) helping DTC brands and online retailers make sense of the things that matter. Subscribe to my newsletter for my unique perspectives, relevant data, and ways to grow your business.
How to Structure a Google Ads Account
I've been meaning to get back into writing and recently put together a video on how I think about structuring Google Ads accounts for optimal performance that I figured I'd share out. With the holidays coming up, yesterday now is the best time to ensure your campaigns are in a place to take advantage of the expected demand.
There are a few key things I like to aim for when structuring an account:
- Less is more and consolidation is king. The more conversion volume you can capture on a campaign, the better. Not only does this help Google's AI learn more about your business and your customers, it also allows the algorithm to make more decisions on how to allocate your budgets and bids accordingly.
- Creating space for (slight) control. You want to design a structure that gives you the ability to scale keywords, adgroups, and campaigns up or down based on performance.
- Theming based on business objectives. The only it makes sense to have multiple campaigns is when there is a clear need for a distinct KPI (eg. Target ROAS) which is usually the case for retailers and brands who have a wide variance of margins across their product catalog.
- Build a journey. As you'll see in the video, Google Ads can hit all areas of the funnel and can be an incredible tool to find brand new customers while converting those actively in buying mode. Lean into setting up touch points at the areas of the funnel that make sense for your business and let data-driven attribution (which also makes bidding decisions) do the work on your behalf.
The role of a performance marketer is now 100% about giving the right signals, data, and assets to the machine. At this point, an account that is managed by human intervention will lose out to one that is leveraging AI and automation.
Give the machine the goods, and it'll return what you're looking for. This is the way to separate yourself from the competition. The better inputs you put in, the better outcomes you're gonna get.
Some inputs that are severely under-leveraged include: profit margins of products, lifetime value of customers, specific text assets (eg. RSAs, sitelinks, extensions), detailed product feed specifications, and more. Leverage these and you can take advantage of advanced machine learning to win.
Additionally, marketers who understand and lean-in to the true journey that your consumers are going on before buying your product will be able to further separate themselves from competitors who are beholden to one attribution model or single-source of truth.
The best marketers I know use a variety of data sources and signals to triangulate what's working and what's not. Performance marketing is probably 80% data-driven and 20% intuition based and the harder the channel is to measure, the better it probably is for your business.
With all the chatter and back and forth on Twitter and LinkedIn about "why Broad Match won't work" or "why PMAX is the devil", I couldn't be more confident that those who actually take the time to read the manual and understand how this all works can take a bunch of market share from the haters.
Lastly, I've gotten pretty good at spot-checking Google Ads accounts and finding ways to squeeze more profits out of them. Here is a link to purchase a 10-minute recorded audit should you want some insights and takeaways for your business.
- Ben
Hi! I'm Ben
I’m a CMO (and former Googler) helping DTC brands and online retailers make sense of the things that matter. Subscribe to my newsletter for my unique perspectives, relevant data, and ways to grow your business.
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