Paid Search: Account Structures

Just like auctions, account structure is often seen as one of the less sexy topics within paid search. This is a huge shame though, as how you structure your account is arguably one of the most fundamental and impactful decisions you can make while running paid search. But first:

What is an account structure?

A paid search account has various different levels of hierarchy:

• Campaigns
  ‍Campaign level is the highest level of structure within an account. While an account could have hundreds and hundreds of campaigns, most will have maybe a dozen. Campaigns will often be split by keyword theme (e.g. a clothes retailer might have one campaign for each gender, and one for children) but can be split however you like. We’ll come back and look at more ways you might split out your campaigns later.‍
• Within each campaign are a number of different ad groups. Ad groups are often used as a more granular way to split out keyword themes. To see this, let’s continue the example above of the clothes retailer. Within their men’s clothing campaign they might have an ad group for men’s trousers, one for men’s shirts and so on.
• ‍Within each ad group, you’ll have one or more keywords. Your keywords determine what search terms you actually bid on. There are a couple of different types of keywords that we’ll come to later, for now we’ll just look at what are called Exact Match keywords, keywords that bid on a specific term and no others. [mens trousers] is an…