Modernising a Legacy Google Ads Account Without Breaking It

A client asked for help modernising their legacy Google Ads account.

The structure was complex:-

• More than 50 campaigns.
• Thousands of keywords scattered across hundreds of ad groups.
• Complex rules.
• Various bid adjustments for locations, devices, time of day and so on.

Performance was OK but he felt like the whole thing was held together with string and duct-tape. He worried that not using Google's newer features would either make his account crash suddenly one day or slowly get worse over time.

But, he couldn't make wild changes and hope for the best. The business had to have a steady flow of leads.

A successful restructure leaves the account easier to understand, easier to optimise and better positioned for the future.

Understanding why the account looks like it does is key to getting from sticky mess to well-oiled machine.

I get started with this by asking myself three questions:-

1. What was the person who designed the current structure trying to achieve?

2. Do we still want to achieve the same thing today?

3. If we were starting from scratch today, how would we do this?

If you're lucky you'll be able to ask the person who designed the current structure what they were trying to achieve. But, for me, that hasn't been possible in most cases. I've had to try and reverse engineer their intentions from the way the account looks today.

A quick warning. If you don't have access to the person who built the account you might look at the current structure and write them off as a complete moron.

While that might be true, I prefer to start with the assumption that although the structure might not look like what we'd build today, my predecessors weren't all idiots. Especially if performance is OK at the moment.

You see, what's considered good practice evolves.

• Best practice when I started was to adjust your manual CPC bids a few times a day to maintain the sweet spot in ad position 2. Ad position 1 was too expensive, ad position 3 was too low. That's no longer best practice or even possible.

• A few years ago we were all getting great results using Alpha/Beta campaigns and SKAGs. Today those structures might be considered obsolete.

So, if we rule out stupidity as the reason for the current account structure, what's left? I can think of two things:-

• Business requirements.
• Optimisation.

We'll start with the business requirements. That's where the account structure reflects some underlying business need or constraint.

Let me give you a few examples I've seen.

A client has duplicate campaigns for each of his 8 offices. The campaigns have the same keywords, landing pages and ads. The only thing that's different is the location targeting - a 50 mile radius around the office.

There is a business requirement to spend the ad budget allocated to each office only on leads for that office. Separate campaigns make this possible.

If we didn't have this business requirement it might make more sense to have one campaign with several location targets.

Another client runs separate campaigns for each of the resorts they bring tourists to even though the target demographic is the same.

They don't advertise all the resorts all the time. They prefer to be able to pause or enable the ads at campaign level instead making changes across many ad groups. Again if we didn't have this constraint we might have consolidated the campaigns to get more data.

The other reason for legacy account structure is optimisation.

At it's heart Google Ads in-the-account optimisation boils down to getting three decisions right as often as possible:-

1. Should we show an ad to this person now?

2. What should the ad say to win the click?

3. How much should we offer for a click?

Over time how we've done this has changed. In the past we used Alpha/Beta campaigns to prioritise spending on high-converting keywords. We used SKAGs to show the most relevant ads. We separated campaigns or ad groups by device to bid the right amount for a mobile user vs a computer user. And so on.

Today we might use broad match, offline conversion uploads and a target conversion value bid strategy to do this. Tomorrow we'll do something else.

But if you understand what the goal of the legacy structure was, and find out if the goal is still important you'll be more confident in your restructure.

If you've found this useful, you might also find this article on the human side of account restructures worth a read: https://pete-bowen.com/i-ve-inherited-a-mess

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