Account structure that still makes sense in a year

The test of an account structure is not how it performs this month. It is whether someone can open it in a year, look at the campaign list, and immediately know which lever to pull. Most accounts fail that test badly. I have opened accounts with forty campaigns, half of them paused, named things like Search 2 Copy Final, where nobody living could explain what any of them were for.

Structure is a reporting decision

Automated bidding took most of the old reasons for granular structure away. You no longer need one keyword per ad group to control bids. The system does not need your help splitting traffic by device or hour of day, and in most accounts it does that better than a human would.

What structure is still for is answering questions. Every boundary you draw in the account is a line in a future report. If you want to know whether roofing repair is more profitable than roofing replacement, those need to be separate campaigns. If you never need to know, do not split them. Structure exists so that spend can be attributed to a decision you might actually make.

The corollary is uncomfortable for people who like tidy accounts: a split you will never act on is not organization. It is fragmentation, and it costs you conversion data in every bucket you create.

The splits that earn their keep

These are the boundaries I keep in almost every account, in priority order.

• Brand versus non-brand. Always separate. Blending them makes cold acquisition look profitable when it is not, and it is the single most common source of misleading reporting I encounter.
• Profit lines that differ materially. If two services have very different margins or very different sales cycles, they need separate budgets. Otherwise the algorithm will optimize toward whichever converts more easily, which is usually the cheap one.
• Geography you would ever budget differently. Separate countries, yes. Separate districts of one city, almost never.
• Languages. Separate campaigns, always. Mixed-language ad groups produce ads nobody wants to click.
• Campaign type. Search, Shopping, Demand Gen, and Performance Max serve different jobs. Since Google folded standalone Display into Demand Gen in 2026, the type list is shorter than it used to be, which is a mercy.
• Prospecting versus remarketing. Different job, different economics, different definition of success.

How to build a structure you can read later

1. Write the questions first. Literally list the decisions you expect to make: should I spend more on service A, is the second city worth it, is remarketing paying for itself. Each question that requires isolated spend becomes a campaign boundary. Questions you will not act on do not.
2. Adopt a naming convention and never break it. Something like Search Brand BG, Search NonBrand Roofing US, PMax Retail EU. Type, intent, product, market. Boring and consistent beats clever.
3. Keep ad groups few and thematically tight. Enough keywords per group that the ad copy can honestly match all of them. If you cannot write one headline that fits every keyword in the group, split it. If you can, do not.
4. Give each campaign enough conversion volume to learn. If splitting a campaign leaves each half with a couple of conversions a month, do not split it. Signal starvation costs more than the reporting clarity gains.
5. Document it outside the platform. One page. What each campaign is for, what the target cost per lead is, what the primary conversion action is, and why. Update it when you change something. This single page has saved more accounts than any optimization I have made.
6. Delete rather than pause. Old paused campaigns are noise. Remove them once their history is no longer needed. Archive the notes, not the clutter.

Where the rules bend

Very small budgets should be flatter than the advice above suggests. If you spend a modest amount a month, one Search campaign for brand and one for everything else is often correct, and any further division starves the bidding.

Very large accounts go the other way. When a single product line spends serious money on its own, splitting by sub-category becomes legitimate because each piece still has plenty of signal, and someone in the business genuinely owns each budget.

Ecommerce with thousands of SKUs follows different logic again, organized around margin bands and product performance rather than around themes. The principle survives though: split where you would take a different action, not where the catalog happens to have a category page.

What to do next

Open your campaign list and try to write, in one sentence per campaign, what it is for and what number would make you change it. Any campaign where you cannot do that is either misnamed or should not exist. Fix the names first, because naming is free and it makes the next problem visible. Then start merging the fragments that never earned their separation.

A structure you can read is worth more than a structure that is theoretically optimal. You will make far better decisions in an account you understand.