Account Architecture for Scaling Paid Search

A messy account structure becomes expensive as you scale. When you're managing dozens of campaigns across multiple products or regions, organization is critical - poor organization wastes time and makes optimization impossible. Here's how to structure your PPC account for scale, speed, and clarity.

Build Logical Campaign Separation

Separate campaigns by intent, geography, or product group. This helps maintain control over budgets and bidding. Create distinct campaigns for branded versus non-branded traffic - they have different conversion rates and cost structures. You’ll need to treat them differently.

Use clear naming conventions that allow for easy filtering and reporting. Structure names like this "US | Non-Brand | Bottom-Funnel | Running Shoes" or this "UK | Brand | Top-Funnel | General". This makes it easy to analyze performance by country, funnel stage, or product category.

Segment by funnel stage to optimize bidding and messaging appropriately. Top-funnel awareness campaigns should use different bid strategies and ad copy than bottom-funnel purchase campaigns.

Use your shared budgets strategically - like for related campaigns targeting similar audiences. If you’ve got separate campaigns for different product categories in the same geographic area, shared budgets let Google automatically allocate spend to the best-performing opportunities.

Use Portfolio Strategies for Consistency

Implement portfolio bidding strategies across related campaigns to maintain consistent performance goals. If you want a 4:1 ROAS across all your ecommerce campaigns, use a portfolio target ROAS strategy instead of setting individual targets for each campaign.