Do You Need To Restructure Your PPC Account?

Updated January 11, 2023

Having worked with countless different PPC accounts over the years there’s nothing more daunting than looking at an account and deciding you need to restructure it. Creating all new AdGroups, regrouping keywords and building new ad schedules is nobody’s idea of fun but sometimes it’s necessary if your business has added a new product line, or opened a branch in a different location.

So, how can you rebuild your account with the minimum of effort and the maximum result;

Do you Need to Restructure Your PPC Account?

First things first. Do you really need to do it? Will it be worth the effort, or are you just making extra work for yourself? For example, if you are testing a new product range that makes restructuring look logical then perhaps create a standalone campaign until you’re sure the product range is going to stick around. If you notice a drop in CTR, is it ongoing, or just a blip?

Basically, if it looks like the problem is ongoing, you need to think about a restructure.

Key Things to Look For

So if you’re still on the fence on if you should be overhauling your account or letting it be, these are the key things you should be looking at:

• Are you stuck with low Quality Scores?
• Are you continually hitting your budget, or not using enough of it?
• Do you have lots of keyword crossover/ contamination?
• Is one AdGroup, or one campaign, stealing all of your budget?

These four signs can show that a restructure is what you need. If you can’t fix them in a couple of weeks, you might need to make some big changes.

How Do You Restructure Your PPC Account?

If you were the person that first created the PPC account then here’s your second chance. Now you have x years of experience working with PPC, whereas when you created the account you only had y(-x) years experience (fill in the blanks yourself)!

With the benefit of hindsight, you get to go back and correct all your past mistakes and start afresh. A good restructure will sort out any issues you’ve faced before are also take into account more complicated things like comprehensive negative lists, geographical overlap, budget complications and other things that typically get put off or ignored when you’re doing day-to-day maintenance.

Teething Problems

Once you’ve finished your restructure you’ll regret it. Like getting a new haircut; the first few days it looks awful, but after a week it’s like nothing ever changed. But stick with it. Once you’ve got used to the way things are laid out and where you need to go to maintain your account you should be set.

Now you just need to wait for the improvements to show. Don’t expect results overnight, sometimes changes will take a while to present themselves in reporting.

Photo credit – Top: Wiki