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Building Effective Google Ads: A Strategic Guide to Campaign Organization
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Struggling with how to organize your Google Ads campaigns? This episode cuts through the confusion with actionable guidance on structuring pay-per-click advertising that delivers results. We break down the hierarchy of campaigns, ad groups, and keywords while offering a surprisingly simple approach to organization: mirror your website's main navigation menu.
One critical strategy we discuss is the importance of separating branded from non-branded campaigns. Many businesses mistakenly believe bidding on their own brand terms wastes money—our case studies prove otherwise. When companies stop bidding on their brand names, competitors swoop in with their ads, intercepting potential customers and ultimately reducing overall revenue. We explain why Google typically charges you less than competitors to bid on your own terms due to relevance factors, creating a compelling reason to protect your brand presence.
Budget considerations heavily influence optimal campaign structure. For small businesses spending $30/day, we recommend keeping it simple with 1-3 campaigns maximum. At $100/day (approximately $3,000/month), expanding to 3-5 campaigns becomes viable. We explore why higher budgets typically yield better results—not just from increased exposure, but because Google's algorithms have more data to optimize performance. The most compelling advantage of PPC? Unlike SEO's 6-12 month timeline, well-structured campaigns can deliver measurable results within days, making it perfect for businesses seeking immediate traffic and lead generation.
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PPC Advertising Fundamentals
Speaker 1So I want to talk just a little bit about how to structure a pay-per-click advertising campaign. Now, what pay-per-click advertising is? It's like Google Ads, microsoft Ads, and basically you don't pay unless somebody clicks on your ad, so you can show for free, but then once someone clicks, then that's when you pay. And so with Google Ads there's there's a lot to it. I want to just focus a little bit on campaign structure. So in Google ads you have campaigns, in campaigns you have ad groups and in ad groups you have keywords. Now you create ads on the ad group level and you have groups of similar ad groups on the campaign level. Okay, so it's kind of like a little little funnel.
Speaker 1Um and so a lot of people ask, like what's a good campaign structure? And my answer is there's not just one way to do it Right. There's lots of different ways depending on what your goal is as a company. However, if you want just a very quick and easy way to structure your campaigns, I would look at the main menu on your website and use that as a guide. So say, you were selling like clothing, right?
Speaker 1So you might have men's clothing, women's's clothing or apparel if you want to get oh, you're saying so almost like use the collections of.
Speaker 2If you're an e-commerce business, use the collections of what you're selling to as the structure of your campaigns yeah, I think that's a good way to start, makes sense.
Brand vs Non-Brand Strategy
Speaker 1Now, once you do that, I split them. So say, you have men's apparel, you want to split them in brand and non-brand, and what that means is people searching for your brand's name with like apparel or shirts or pants or whatever attached to it, okay, okay. So the reason why I recommend doing that is because you want to be able to control your budget. What's being spent on branded terms versus non-branded terms and we talked a little bit about this in a previous episode of like people saying, oh, it's a waste of money to spend ads on your brand terms because people will purchase anyway. But we've seen from case studies of accounts that we manage when they do that, their overall revenue drops case studies of accounts that we manage.
Speaker 1When they do that, their overall revenue drops. So it is not 100% guarantee, if you do not bid on your brand terms, that they'll just keep purchasing.
Speaker 2Yeah, because if you get to a point where competitors are bidding on your brand terms, then they're going to pop up first.
Speaker 1They're going to show up first.
Speaker 2And we know that the top search in google is foundational when it comes to like the first click yeah, they get everyone the overwhelming majority of the first click yeah, or of clicks. So you, if so under a specific clothing company. He has a specific name, like let's, I don't know, like northern something clothing company. You want to be the top one always when someone types in your name.
Speaker 1You don't want a competitive.
Speaker 1A southern right, you know what I mean like uh, you don't want that to pop up first and then they have to scroll down to yours because think about it like a competitor could offer, like could target your brand specifically and offer a discount for a discount right if they sell something similar, and so typically this isn't always the case, but typically if you bid on your own branded terms, you get it a lot cheaper than what your competitor would, and so like, because google ads looks at relevance, like how relevant is this search term to what you're selling on your website.
Speaker 2That makes sense.
Speaker 1Okay, so we'll call it North Point Apparel. Okay, that's kind of actually a cool name, so like North Point T-shirts.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1Okay, if your competitor doesn't sell North Point t-shirts, they're going to have to pay way more because it's not as relevant.
Budget Considerations
Speaker 1That makes sense and so you don't want to give your competitor an opportunity, you want it to be. You want to basically bid on your own terms, so that it makes it really difficult and expensive for your competitor to bid on your terms. And so, with a campaign, you want the branded and non-branded to be able to control the budget, to be able to control the messaging and also targeting If you need to specifically target locations, things like that. Those are all good reasons to have a campaign and so, yeah, I that's. That's kind of where I would recommend most people to start is look at your primary product categories and then separate them brand and non-branded and that's a fantastic start to organizing, you know, like a Google ads account.
Speaker 2So let's say you're a service industry that doesn't necessarily have like, uh, you can't break it up the same, how would you do a service industry? You already mentioned location Would that be a big one?
Speaker 1Location would be really important, Obviously the main service you have.
Speaker 2If you have multiple services, those would be the kind of the collections would be the multiple services and then location would be the other one. What else would you focus on?
Speaker 1So I do also want to point out budget is a big driving factor. If you are only spending like 20 bucks a day, the structure of your account it doesn't make sense to build out this big account. You want to go smaller, yeah, so you're thinking.
Speaker 2Let's say, a small business is probably spending maybe 30 to a hundred dollars a day somewhere around there. Um, how many like a $30 campaign or a day budget? How many campaigns are you going to set up?
Speaker 1One to three max. Three even is stretching it a little bit. In fact, we recently organized an account for a client to where they offered three different services and they're spending about $ bucks a day yeah which is pretty low, um, especially if it's a high-end service, which this one is like, yeah, typically it's pretty expensive it's kind of testing the testing the waters, yeah, start getting started, but it's nothing big yet right and so.
Speaker 1So yeah, one to three max for that low of a budget. I probably more like one to two campaigns on that kind of a budget, if you're looking at $100 a day, which would be about $3,000 a month.
Speaker 2In Google Ads, how many campaigns are you setting up? If you're Three to five, okay, still relatively small, obviously, but it gives you enough to, let's say, you're a clothing company, you're spending $3,000 a month and $100 a day. It gives you enough to separate your collections, like we talked about, and probably have a branded terms campaign as well. So that gives you at least some leeway to play with. Obviously, the bigger the budget, you can do a lot more testing.
Timeline for Results
Speaker 1You can get more granular in your targeting and messaging things like that. It's definitely helpful, and I typically see a lot more success in higher advertising budgets than the lower ones, just because Google doesn't have as much data to work with. On the lower budgets, that makes sense, and so it's harder data to work with on the lower budgets that makes sense, and so it's harder. It takes longer to see results Because you know Google's AI pro. Like algorithms, they need time, they need data, and if we're just bringing in tiny little bits of data, it just it needs a lot longer to be able to accomplish that.
Speaker 2If you're a small business owner, whether you hire somebody or setting up yourself, what's the timeframe that you expect results for either leads or for it to be really effective, where you're like, oh wow, this is really working.
Speaker 1Well, that's the great thing about these advertising campaigns If you're targeting the right keywords, the right audience, you can see results within a couple of days. Yeah, right, which is which is amazing, because you know, with SEO, it's a very long play. With SEO, the efforts that you put in now are going to come to fruition in 6 to 12 months, yeah, but with ads, you can get results within a week, which is pretty incredible.
Speaker 2Thanks for listening. Every week we go over news, tips, tricks and best practices to help you grow your small business, so follow and subscribe below.
Speaker 1For more information, check out our website at launchingproscom, where you get access to a bunch of free resources and courses designed to launch and grow your business online. Check out the links below.