Each day, 15% of the searches on Google are new, and what’s amazing is that this statistic has remained true for over a decade.1 People continue to come to Google because they trust it to deliver the right information at the right time. And every unique search creates an opportunity for businesses to supply critical information and reach those people through Search ads. Simply put, Google enables advertisers to match customer intent with potential solutions, creating value for businesses of all sizes.
Historically, marketers have driven performance with Search ads by structuring their accounts to control every aspect of a campaign, from matching their keywords to specific customer queries to crafting every ad creative that customers see to setting the exact price they want to pay per query. The standard to achieve this was highly segmented, granular campaign setups.
But innovations in Google AI have transformed how marketers can reach relevant customers and grow their businesses. These changes have impacted how marketers optimise their campaigns as well. Just as automated bidding is now the standard practice over manual bidding, segmentation is quickly becoming an outdated approach.
While navigating these shifts, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re not competing against AI, you’re competing against other marketers who are using it. This article will explain how you can use AI more effectively to maximise value from your Search campaigns.
AI requires a strategic shift
Campaign hypersegmentation was once a best practice, but now it has the opposite effect on AI-powered advertising campaigns. Oversegmentation limits AI’s effectiveness; AI works best when you remove unnecessary constraints. Understanding this reality and its implications for your search advertising strategy are critically important if you’re relying on AI solutions now or plan to in the future.
Sephora provides a powerful example of how a brand can overcome hypersegmentation. The beauty brand grew concerned that its complex search account structure — based on its extensive product lines — hindered its profitability and volume targets in the U.K.
Practically speaking, simplifying your account structure requires two components: data and keyword themes.
While Sephora’s marketing team had adopted broad match and value-based Smart Bidding — the foundation of Google’s AI-powered solutions — they saw an opportunity to consolidate small campaigns with minimal volume and conversions. The team responded by simplifying the brand’s account structure, which decreased its total number of campaigns by a massive 85%. In doing so, Sephora increased its campaign conversion rate by 42% with a higher average order value of 6%, resulting in a 13% increase in return on ad spend.
As you can see, making the shift to simpler accounts is key to maximising the potential of AI-powered Search ads. Below, I’ll walk through what simplification looks like in practice, and the benefits of getting started today.
Signal what’s important to you through data and themes
The first thing to know about AI is that it interprets information similarly to the way humans do.
Imagine trying to derive insights from information in seven different documents. To understand the main takeaways, you’d have to read all seven documents separately, then try to piece together the important points. This is much harder than if everything was in one document, organised by sections that create a logical progression. The same holds true for AI; unnecessary segmentation can make it harder for AI to learn and optimize toward your goals.
Here’s a good barometer to understand how to organize your account structure: Is it easy for you to understand, optimise, and derive insights from this? If the answer is yes, there’s a good chance it’s easy for AI to understand too.
We recommend ordering your campaigns and ad groups around what you care about most, and the themes that are most related to each other.
Practically speaking, simplifying your account structure requires two key components: data and themed ad groups. Data acts as fuel for AI, and the AI powering Google Ads works better when that data is de-duplicated and centralised around clear marketing objectives. Since AI can only optimise toward what you tell it to, it’s important for your data to convey which actions are important to you, how you value them, and what your goals are.
Theming is crucial, because it provides AI with additional context on what matters to you. By grouping keywords into similar themes, Google AI can better understand your keywords, select the best one, and determine which ad to serve for each query.
With that in mind, we recommend structuring your campaigns and ad groups around what you care about most, as well as the themes that are most related to each other, particularly in terms of creative and keywords. As an example, imagine that you’re a florist who wants to understand how your roses are selling. If you put “red roses,” “12-stem roses,” and “pink roses” in different campaigns or ad groups, it would be difficult for you to understand how “roses” as a category is performing. A simpler grouping of “roses” would make it easier for you and easier for AI too.
Reap the benefits
To help with account simplification, we created an ABCs of account structure. While the structure may look slightly different for every business, the goals are the same: more consolidated data, themed ad groups, and fewer campaigns. The benefits of a simplified advertising campaign structure are fairly universal as well.
Better performance
Search ads are incredibly powerful today because of Smart Bidding, which uses advanced machine learning and a range of other signals to optimise your bids for every search and customer. And, as Sephora showed, using Smart Bidding with a simplified account structure can improve the performance of your campaigns.
If your ads don’t have “good” or “excellent” Ad Strength, it may be a sign that your ad groups are too loosely themed.
In line with the ABCs, the most important thing you can do for Smart Bidding is to give it the best data you can and remove any unnecessary segmentation. This means providing accurate conversion data for all the actions you care about and using a value-based bidding strategy to optimise for your best customers. By doing so, you’re signaling what matters to you, what your goals are, who your highest value customers are.
Proper theming will also drive performance. The Ad Strength of your ads can be a helpful indicator of whether or not your ad groups are themed effectively, so use it as feedback. If your ads don’t have “good” or “excellent” Ad Strength, it may be a sign that your ad groups are too loosely themed, and your keywords aren’t as relevant to your ads as they could be.
Improved accuracy and efficiency
Minimising the number of campaigns and consistently theming ad groups aids campaign accuracy and efficiency in multiple ways. Instead of requiring an employee to track multiple goals, keywords, and audiences across multiple campaigns, which can cause confusion, fewer campaigns make it easier to have eyes on all variables.
Saving teams time on manual campaign management frees them up to focus on the overall business strategy and to make long-term adjustments. The creation and management of future campaigns becomes easier as well.
Deeper insights
With simple and tightly themed ad groups, it’s easier to see insights and trends of how campaigns are performing in the areas you care most about when they’re grouped intentionally. The florist can clearly see how each flower group is performing by looking at the results. Likewise, AI has the full picture and can better optimise for the existing campaign and future ones.
AI will continue to shape Search advertising
Modern marketers are well versed in adapting to rapidly evolving standards and best practices, and the only guarantee is that change will continue. By making the effort to simplify your account structure and align it with how AI works, you’ll ensure that your campaigns have the right foundation to drive better performance, greater efficiency, deeper insights, and improved optimisation for your search strategy.
