Campaign Setup and Management
Structure and settings
The hierarchy - account → campaign → ad group → keywords and ads - determines where settings live. Budget, networks, locations, languages, bidding strategy, and conversion goals sit at campaign level; keywords, ads, and most targeting refinements sit at ad group level. Negative keywords can be applied at campaign or ad group level, or through shared lists at account level.
Match types: broad reaches related queries, phrase requires the meaning to be included, and exact requires the same meaning including close variants. Close variants mean exact and phrase also match misspellings, singular/plural forms, and reorderings - a frequent trap. The search terms report, not the keyword list, shows what actually triggered ads.
Common traps
- Believing an ad group setting overrides a campaign setting.
- Assuming location targeting defaults to presence only; the default includes presence or interest.
- Expecting a budget change to fix a bid strategy problem, or vice versa.
- Forgetting that a shared budget lets one campaign consume another's spend.
- Assuming pausing keywords erases their historical data.
Rule of thumb: one tightly themed ad group with 5-20 keywords and 2-3 responsive search ads; judge performance by search terms, not by keyword list alone.
Worked example: a campaign holding 'running shoes', 'trail shoes', and 'shoe laces' should be split into three ad groups so that ad copy and landing pages match each intent, and so negatives can be applied without blocking valid traffic.