Account structure

Structure is not tidiness. Every boundary you draw does two things: it creates a budget you can control separately, and it splits the data the bidding algorithm learns from. Those two pull in opposite directions, and structure is how you resolve the tension.

The hierarchy

Account → campaign → ad group → keywords/assets. Budget, location, language, campaign type and bid strategy live at the campaign level. That is the level that matters most, because it is where the money is controlled.

Split when you need separate control

Legitimate reasons to split a campaign out:

• it needs its own budget you do not want cannibalised
• it targets a different country or language
• it has a genuinely different efficiency target
• it needs separate reporting for a real decision

Brand versus non-brand is almost always worth splitting, because brand converts far better and mixing them makes both unreadable — and lets brand traffic subsidise the appearance of your prospecting.

Do not split for neatness

Every split thins the conversion data feeding the bid strategy. Smart Bidding gets better with more conversions per campaign, so a beautifully granular account with 40 campaigns converting twice a month each will underperform four consolidated ones. The old single-keyword-ad-group orthodoxy is actively harmful with modern bidding.

The rule of thumb: consolidate until you lose control you actually need, then stop.

Budgets

Budgets are campaign-level and daily; spend flows across the month. A campaign persistently limited by budget is not merely spending less, it now behaves differently under target-based bidding — see the Smart Bidding module. Shared budgets are convenient and make attribution of constraint harder; use them sparingly.

What trips people up

• Structuring for reporting that nobody reads, at the cost of bidding performance.
• Not splitting brand out, then believing the blended ROAS.
• Leaving a campaign budget-limited for months and calling it "efficient".

You have got this when

For each campaign in an account you can say why it exists separately — and "it seemed tidier" is not one of the answers.