Google Ads Campaign Management: Frequently Asked Questions

A campaign is a budget, a set of targeting rules and a group of ads pointed at some part of your business. Underneath it sit ad groups, which bundle keywords sharing an intent with ads that speak to that intent. Structure exists so you can control budget separately where needed and so the reporting is readable — it is not a filing exercise for its own sake.

It depends on what a customer is worth to you and how contested the relevant searches are, but there is a floor worth knowing about. Automated bidding needs a steady flow of conversions to learn from. If your budget cannot realistically produce that, narrow the target rather than spreading the same money more thinly.

Longer than most people want, and the constraint is conversion volume rather than elapsed time. Judging an account on a fortnight of data or a dozen conversions means acting on noise. What you can assess in week one: whether tracking works, whether the search terms are relevant, and whether the landing page performs on a phone.

Whatever action means a real person is worth talking to — a form submission, a booked call, a purchase, a phone call over a set duration. Not page views, not time on site, not engaged sessions. Report a soft action as a conversion and automated bidding will get very good at buying something that does not pay anyone's wages.

Usually because the account is optimising towards the wrong definition of success. If every form fill counts equally, bidding learns to buy the cheapest ones, which come from the least qualified traffic. Send real outcomes back into the platform so a lead that became a customer is worth more to the algorithm than one that never could.

Weekly for the things that decay — the search terms report, budget pacing, anything that broke. Structural changes such as new campaigns, new landing pages or a different bidding strategy should be deliberate and spaced far enough apart that you can attribute the result to the change. Accounts fiddled with daily tend to perform worse.

It is Google's 1–10 estimate of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are, and higher relevance genuinely does lower what you pay for a given position. Treat it as a diagnostic: a low score tells you where to look, usually at a mismatch between the search and the page. Optimising the number itself rather than the mismatch is wasted effort.

For anything beyond brand searches you need a dedicated page. A homepage is built to serve every visitor, which means it answers no specific search directly. Sending paid traffic there is the most common and most expensive unforced error in paid search.

Sometimes, and later than the platform will suggest. Broad match works when conversion tracking is reliable and the account has enough conversion history for the system to have learned what a good customer looks like. On a new account with neither, it is an efficient way to fund a great many irrelevant clicks.

It can work well on accounts that already have solid tracking, real conversion volume and, for retailers, a clean product feed. It is not a first campaign and not a repair for an account that is not converting — it offers less visibility and will spend confidently in the wrong direction if the tracking is wrong.

Four things: admin access to the ad account and to analytics and tag management if they exist; a written definition of what makes a lead worth having; a way to record outcomes, even a spreadsheet marking each enquiry junk, unqualified, qualified or won; and someone who answers enquiries quickly.

Then you should be told why in terms you can check — not enough search volume, a landing page losing people, a price point the market will not meet, or a conversion action that was never set up properly. Paid search does not suit every business, and where there is no existing demand to capture, the useful answer is to say so early rather than to keep spending proving it.