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How a Google AdWords account is structured

June 5, 2008

Use the account structure to define a strategy. Signing up for the standard edition of Google AdWords equates to opening an account. An account consists of Campaigns and each Campaign consists of Ad Groups. Ad Groups contain ads and sets of keywords that are assigned to the ads.

This structure provides enormous scope for creating an overall stratgey at a high level (products, targets, etc.) and at a granular level (keywords). Get the strategy right and you have a highly targeted, cost-efficient marketing campaign. Get it wrong and you have a mish-mash of ads that are ineffective and difficult to monitor.

Account

The account is the highest level of the structure. It contains a unique e-mail address, password and billing details. Each account can contain up to 25 Campaigns.

Campaigns

A Campaign is the definition level for daily budget, language and location targets, start and end dates and ad distribution preferences. Create different Campaigns to target different languages and countries, or to control spend on certain keywords, or to market different products / services, or to cover different time spans.

A Campaign can contain up to 100 Ad Groups.

Ad Groups

An Ad Group is a collection of ads, each of which has a set of assigned keywords. An Ad group is structured around a particular theme or product or service.

Instead of having one ad with a large set of keywords, consider creating a number of ads within an Ad Group and breaking the set of keywords into smaller sets for each ad. This has the effect of making the keywords more relevant to each ad.

Filed in: Pay Per Click