Organizing Campaigns & Ads
AdWords is organized into three layers: account, campaigns, and ad groups. It’s important to understanding how these layers can help you organize your ads and keywords into ad groups and campaigns so that AdWords can then target your ads for the right audience.
To show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you’re trying to reach, bundle related ads with related keywords. In other words, create ad groups. A collection of ad groups forms a campaign. Your campaign is the master control for your ad groups where you can choose how much you’re willing to spend on clicks or conversions from your ads, the networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show, and other top-level settings that affect clusters of ad groups.
Example
Let’s say you own an online electronics store and you create an AdWords account so you can begin to advertise the products that you sell. The top-most layer of your account might look as follows:
You’ve decided to advertise your inventory of televisions and cameras and create two separate campaigns for each. Splitting your account into two campaigns ensures that you can devote at least half of your online advertising budget to each product area.
Focusing on your camera campaign, you might create various ad groups for different types of cameras like digital cameras and compact cameras.
Within a particular ad group, such as digital cameras, you choose keywords that are very closely linked to your ad text. Types of keywords you might try are different brands, models, and prices for digital cameras.
Tip
A common method for organizing an e-commerce website AdWords campaign is to organize it the way your website is structured. However, when using AdWords for lead generation, you should organize your campaign structure according to your keyword research and utilize different landing pages for each ad group.
Seeing your account organization at a glance
Once you’ve created your first campaign, you’ll see an “All online campaigns” panel appear on the left side in the Campaigns tab of your AdWords account. From this panel, you can see at a glance how your campaigns and ad groups are organized. This folder structure also allows you to quickly move around your account.
Tip
Campaign organization is extremely important. You should consider and plan your campaign at the beginning, rather than try to reorganize later. Reorganizing your account after you’ve created several campaigns and ad groups will wipe out all the valuable data you’ve accumulated and possibly affect how your ads perform.
AdWords account limits
These are the limits for an AdWords account:
- 10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns)
- 20,000 ad groups per campaign
- 20,000 individual targeting items per ad group (such as keywords, placements, audience lists, and product targets)
- 300 display ads per ad group (includes image ads)
- 4 million active or paused ads per account
- 5 million individual targeting items per account (such as keywords, placements, audience lists, and product targets)
- 10,000 location targets (targeted and excluded) per campaign, including up to 500 proximity targets per campaign
- 100,000 active legacy ad extensions per account
- 1.3 million references to legacy ad extensions per account
- 100,000 active upgraded ad extensions per account
- 10,000 ad group references to upgraded ad extensions per account
- 10,000 campaign references to upgraded ad extensions per account
Most advertisers will never reach theses limit. Many accounts are best organized by creating one campaign and several ad groups within that campaign, and two or three ads and 10-35 keywords within each ad group.
If your ad groups are close to reaching their keyword limit, AdWords will place a notice in your account. Learn more about keyword limits and how to create an effective keyword list.
Developing A Plan
Before you start building your campaigns, it’s important to develop a plan for your AdWords advertising. Think hard about your business and what you want to accomplish with your ads.
For every campaign you create, you get to choose a budget, pick where your ads appear geographically (within a specic country, city, or within a custom-created area that you specify), and select where your ads appear online (on search pages, display network pages, or both).
When you’re creating your campaigns, ask yourself the following questions to get a better picture of how you should set them up to maximize your
- What does your business offer?
- How is your business different from its competitors?
- Who is your core audience?
- Where do you provide services?
Once you know what you want to do with your AdWords campaigns, it’s time to put your plan into action. Structure each campaign around just one goal – like increasing signups or selling more coffee beans. You should separate campaigns by theme or product line (such as coffee beans, coffee gifts, teas). Or use the same structure for your campaigns as you do for your website.
Remember to keep your audience in mind. Target only the locations where you offer services, and target the language in which your ads are written. If you have an international audience, split your campaigns by country.
Finally, give each campaign an appropriate name – such as its goal. This makes tracking and editing your campaigns much easier later on.
Campaign Settings
Campaign settings can include your budget, network, bidding options and adjustments, location targeting, campaign end date, and other settings that affect an entire campaign. Keep in mind that not all campaign settings are available with every campaign type. Learn more about campaign types and their available features.
General Settings
Campaign name: Edit the name of a particular campaign.
Campaign type: Determines which of the settings and options below you’ll see as you customize your campaign. Tailors the set-up process to just what’s relevant for your goals.
Locations: Target your ads to almost any geographic area. Specify countries, territories, regions, cities, or custom areas where you want your ads to show.
Languages: Target your ads by your customers’ language preference. For example, only customers whose Google interface language is Spanish will see ads in a campaign targeted to Spanish.
Networks: Determine where on the Internet your ads will show. Ads can appear on Google’s Search Network or Display Network, or both.
Devices: Campaigns target all types of devices by default. Note that if you have a “Display Network only” campaign, you can target specific operating systems, device models, as well as carriers and wireless networks. To see these options, go to the “Devices” section on your Settings tab, and click advanced mobile and tablet options. If you have a different campaign type and would like to use these targeting options, you might consider creating a “Display Network only” campaign.
Bidding option: Choose automatic or manual bidding for ad clicks (Max. CPC). Advanced options let you choose to pay per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM bidding) or set a cost-per-acquisition bid (Conversion Optimizer, CPA bidding).
Tip
You can increase or decrease your bids to gain more control over when and where your ad are shown by setting bid adjustments.
Budget: Adjust your campaign’s daily budget at any time.
Delivery method: Choose either standard or accelerated delivery for your daily budget to determine how quickly your ads are shown each day if your campaign is limited by budget.
Advanced settings
Ad extensions: Show relevant business information (such as a phone number) with your text ads. Create and manage your ad extensions from the “Ad extensions” tab.
Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling: Specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your AdWords ads to appear. You can also adjust bids for your ads during certain time periods.
Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping: Your ad rotation selection determines how often we deliver your active ads in relation to one another within an ad group. Frequency capping limits the number of times your ads appear on the Google Display Network to a unique user.
Automatic campaign optimization (Display Network only): By default, your campaign is optimized based on the targeting elements you’ve selected, such as keywords, audiences, or placements. Select “Auto-optimized” if you’d like Display Campaign Optimizer to find additional conversions for your campaign automatically.
Experiment (BETA): Make experimental changes to your bids, keywords, and ad groups in your campaign. As traffic accumulates on your experiment, statistical differences may emerge. Evaluate and apply changes based on your tests.
Editing your campaign settings
If you don’t have any campaigns yet, click the +Campaign button to create a new campaign and follow the instructions on the page to complete your ad group. Once you have a campaign, you can edit its settings as often as you like.
Here’s how to do it:
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the Campaigns tab. Under All campaigns,click the name of the campaign that you’d like to edit.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click Edit next to the settings you’d like to change.
- Click Save after each change.