Google Ads Account Structure: How to Build Your Account the Right Way

Why Google Ads Account Structure Matters

A well-organized Google Ads account structure is not just about keeping things tidy — it directly impacts your advertising performance. The way you organize campaigns, ad groups, and keywords determines your Quality Score, which in turn controls how much you pay per click and where your ads appear on the search results page.

Advertisers who invest time in building a proper account structure consistently see lower CPCs, higher click-through rates, and better return on ad spend. Those who throw keywords into a handful of generic ad groups end up paying more for worse results.

The Google Ads Hierarchy

Every Google Ads account follows a strict hierarchy with four levels:

Account Level

Your Google Ads account holds everything together. It is linked to a billing profile, a time zone, and a currency. Most businesses need only one account, but agencies or multi-brand companies may manage several.

Campaign Level

Campaigns are the highest organizational unit within your account. Each campaign has its own daily budget, bid strategy, geographic targeting, language settings, and network selection (Search, Display, or both).

Think of campaigns as your strategic buckets. Common ways to organize campaigns include:

• By service or product category — one campaign for "Plumbing Services", another for "Electrical Services"
• By location — one campaign for London, another for Manchester
• By match type — one campaign for Exact match, one for Phrase, one for Broad
• By intent — one campaign for high-intent "buy" keywords, another for informational queries

The key principle: each campaign should group keywords with a similar conversion probability and business value, so you can allocate budget and bid strategies effectively.

Ad Group Level

Ad groups sit inside campaigns. Each ad group contains a set of keywords and the ads that will show when those keywords trigger. The tighter the relationship between your keywords and your ads, the better your Quality Score.

The golden rule of ad groups is thematic tightness. Every keyword in an ad group should be closely related so that the ads can speak directly to the search intent. If your ad group contains both "emergency plumber" and "bathroom renovation", your ad copy cannot be relevant to both — and your Quality Score suffers.

Keywords and Ads

At the bottom of the hierarchy sit your keywords (the search terms you want to trigger your ads) and your ads (the Responsive Search Ads that users see). Keywords have match types — Exact, Phrase, or Broad — that control how closely a user's search must match your keyword.

How Account Structure Affects Quality Score

Google assigns a Quality Score (1-10) to each keyword based on three factors:

1. Expected Click-Through Rate — How likely users are to click your ad
2. Ad Relevance — How closely your ad matches the search intent
3. Landing Page Experience — How relevant and useful your landing page is

A higher Quality Score means Google charges you less per click and shows your ad in a higher position. The relationship between account structure and Quality Score is direct: when your ad groups are tightly themed, your ads can include the exact keywords users are searching for, which improves both ad relevance and expected CTR.

Campaign Organization Strategies

Strategy 1: Organize by Theme

Group keywords by business category. A plumbing company might have campaigns for "Drain Cleaning", "Pipe Repair", "Boiler Installation", and "Emergency Plumbing". Each campaign gets its own budget based on business priority.

Strategy 2: Organize by Location

If you serve multiple geographic areas, create separate campaigns per region. This lets you allocate more budget to high-performing areas and adjust bids based on local competition.

Strategy 3: Organize by Match Type

Create separate campaigns for Exact, Phrase, and Broad match keywords. This is the professional setup that gives you independent budget control per match type. You can bid aggressively on proven Exact match traffic while limiting spend on Broad match discovery.

Ad Group Best Practices

Keep Ad Groups Tight

The number one mistake in Google Ads is stuffing too many keywords into a single ad group. When your ad group contains 20 different keywords, your ad copy has to be generic enough to cover all of them — which means it is not truly relevant to any of them.

Use Keyword-Specific Ad Copy

Your headlines should include the keywords your audience is searching for. An ad headline that reads "Best Plumber in London" when someone searches for exactly that has a dramatically higher CTR than a generic "Professional Services Available".

One Landing Page Per Ad Group

Each ad group should point to the most relevant landing page for its keywords. Sending "drain cleaning" traffic to a generic homepage wastes the user's time and kills your conversion rate.

How Budget Allocation Maps to Structure

Your campaign structure directly determines how your budget is distributed. If you have one giant campaign with all your keywords, Google decides how to split your daily budget across all ad groups — and it often favors high-volume, low-converting keywords over your most profitable ones.

By splitting into separate campaigns, you take back control:

• Allocate 50% of budget to your highest-converting campaign
• Give 30% to campaigns that are scaling
• Reserve 20% for Broad match discovery campaigns

This level of control is only possible when your account structure supports it.

Scaling Account Structure

The challenge with a well-structured account is scale. If you have 50 services and 30 locations, you need 1,500 ad groups — each with unique, keyword-tailored ads. Building this manually takes days or even weeks.

This is exactly the problem that automation tools solve. Instead of creating each campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad by hand, you define the building blocks (keyword lists) and let the tool generate the full structure with all the permutations.