The commonest shape for a grant account is one campaign holding everything the organisation does. It is the shape an account arrives in when somebody sets it up once and the ads are never revisited, and it is the shape that makes every other problem harder to see.
The shape that recurs in accounts that are being looked after is three campaigns, split by what the reader wants rather than by what the organisation offers:
- Programmes and services — somebody looking for the thing the organisation does. The ad groups here are the services themselves, one per service, named the way a member of the public would name it.
- Getting involved — volunteering and donating. Two ad groups, because they are two different people: one has time, one has money, and an ad written for both speaks to neither.
- Finding help and learning more — the searches that are about the subject rather than about you. Lower intent, often higher volume, and the campaign to watch when the click-through rate moves.
Why three rather than one or ten
Three is enough to budget separately, which is the whole practical point: the donation campaign and the service campaign want different daily budgets, and inside one campaign they cannot have them. It is also enough to pause one without taking the others down — and pausing the weakest campaign is the fastest honest move an account has when its rate is drifting.
Ten is worse than one. Each campaign needs its own budget, its own negatives and its own attention, and an account with ten campaigns and one person looking after it has nine campaigns nobody reads.
The numbers under it
- Two ads per ad group, so there is something to compare. One ad tells you nothing about itself.
- Roughly nine keywords per ad group — enough to cover how people phrase the thing, few enough that one ad can answer all of them.
- Sitelinks and callouts at campaign level, not per ad group, unless they would genuinely differ.
- A daily budget per campaign that adds up to what the account can actually use, which is usually more than the sum it was created with.
A starting shape, not a rule of the programme. Google asks for a click-through rate, conversion tracking and keywords within its policies; how the campaigns are arranged is yours.
Questions people ask
We have one campaign and it is doing fine. Split it?
If it is above the threshold and spending what you want it to spend, the reason to split is control rather than rescue: separate budgets, and the ability to pause one thing.
Where do seasonal appeals go?
Their own campaign, with its own dates and budget, so that when it ends it ends — rather than quietly dragging an average for the rest of the year.
Can the agent build this?
Yes, from a brief: the campaigns, the ad groups, keywords with match types, negatives at the right level and the ads. It arrives as a proposal, and a specialist applies it.