How to Structure a Google Ads Account for E-commerce

As we head into the Black Friday peak season, having a well-organised Google Ads account can make a real difference to how far your advertising budget goes.

With more retailers competing for the same customers, and paying more for each click as a result, it pays to have a clear plan for which products you want to promote and how your advertising supports your sales goals.

Most e-commerce accounts start out fairly simple, but as new products launch and seasonal promotions come and go, the structure can become harder to manage. The result? Campaigns start to overlap, making it less clear where your budget is going, which activity is driving sales and where ad spend could be going to waste.

A well-structured account gives you that control back. It makes day-to-day management easier, and gives you a much clearer view of which products and campaigns are driving the greatest return on spend.

There’s no one-size-fits-all template. The right Google Ads structure depends on your product range, your budget, your margins and what you want to achieve as a business.

In this guide, we share how we approach account structure for the e-commerce businesses we work with, so you can sense-check your own set-up or have a more informed conversation with whoever manages it for you.

You don’t need to be a Google Ads expert to follow along, as we’ll explain the key terms as we go.

Start With the Commercial Objectives

Before building any campaigns, you should always start with what the account needs to achieve.

Some retailers prioritise total revenue, while others want to grow a particular category or attract more first-time customers. These objectives should shape how products are grouped and where budget is allocated.

A high-value product usually supports a different bidding strategy to a low-value item with limited stock. For example, a food and beverage client may have a specific high-value alcoholic range which would be on a different bidding strategy and Target ROAS to a lower-value alcoholic range.

Ensure Accurate Tracking is in Place

Accurate conversion tracking is essential to the optimisation of any Google Ads e-commerce account. Google’s automated bidding relies on this data to decide when to show your ads and how much to bid, so if purchases are not being recorded correctly, a good campaign structure will not make up for it.

An e-commerce account should record completed purchases, transaction values and, where possible, the products included in each order. Actions such as adding an item to the basket or starting checkout can also be tracked. These help show where users drop off and can highlight usability issues on the site, although completed sales should usually remain the main goal for optimisation.

Google Merchant Center also plays a major role in Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. Your product titles, descriptions and prices all affect how Google understands your catalogue and when your products are shown. As with SEO, clear and descriptive product titles help Google match your products to relevant searches.

Before launching or restructuring campaigns, we check that:

• Purchases are recording in Google Ads correctly and are not being counted more than once
• All products are approved in Google Merchant Center
• Prices and stock levels in the feed are accurate and match the website
• Product categories and product types are named consistently
• Consent Mode is set up correctly for UK and EU visitors, as this affects both measurement and remarketing
• Enhanced conversions are enabled to improve the accuracy of conversion tracking

Problems with feed data or tracking can hold back performance even when the account itself is well structured, so we always complete these checks first.

Choose the Right Campaign Types

Most e-commerce accounts use a combination of Performance Max, Standard Shopping and Search campaigns. Each has a different role, and understanding these roles makes it easier to decide where your products should sit.

Performance Max

Performance Max campaigns allow retailers to promote products across several Google channels, including Search, Shopping, YouTube and Gmail, from one campaign. They can work well for e-commerce when conversion tracking is reliable and the product feed is strong.

Products are organised into asset groups. Each asset group contains a set of products along with its own images, headlines and audience signals, which give Google an indication of who your customers are. For example, a fashion retailer might create separate asset groups for t-shirts, trousers and shoes so that each range has relevant messaging.

Performance Max gives Google more control over where and when your ads appear. Google has added more reporting in recent years, including a search terms report and campaign-level negative keywords, although you still have less visibility than with Standard Shopping or Search.

Standard Shopping

Standard Shopping offers more control over product groups, bids and campaign priorities. It suits retailers who want greater visibility over the searches their ads appear for, or tighter control over specific product ranges.

If you are starting an e-commerce account from scratch, we would usually recommend beginning with Standard Shopping. Being able to set and monitor your cost per click helps keep spend stable while the account gathers sales data. Performance Max can then be introduced, or tested against Standard Shopping, once there is enough data to work with.

Since late 2024, Performance Max no longer takes automatic priority over Standard Shopping when both campaigns contain the same product. Instead, the campaign with the higher Ad Rank is shown. Ad Rank is based on your bid and how relevant Google considers your ad to be. As a result, sales for one product can be split across both campaigns, so decide early on where each product should sit.

Search

Search campaigns show text ads above the organic results. In an e-commerce account, they are commonly used for brand searches and for broader category searches, such as “oak dining tables”, where a text ad can include information about your range, delivery or returns. For most retailers, Search supports Shopping and Performance Max rather than being the main source of sales.

How Many Campaigns Do You Need?

One of the biggest structural decisions is whether to group products into a small number of campaigns or divide them across several. As automated bidding needs enough conversion data to identify patterns and make effective decisions, splitting an account into too many campaigns means each one may have too little data and too little budget to perform well.

We would usually recommend grouping products with a similar category or price point into the same campaign. This gives each campaign more data to work from and reduces the chance of it being limited by budget.

Each campaign should also have a clear purpose. If two campaigns target the same products and audiences with a similar objective, it is difficult to tell what each one is contributing. While your campaigns will not bid against each other, (as Google only enters one of them into each auction) the sales and data are split between them. This makes reporting less clear and gives you less control over where budget is spent.

As a general rule, we avoid placing the same product in more than one campaign of the same type.

Using Custom Labels to Group Products

Custom labels are additional fields in your product feed that let you group products in ways that suit your business. Merchant Center allows up to five custom labels per product. For example, you could label products by profit margin, price band, best-seller status or season, and then use these labels to organise your campaigns and asset groups.

Because labels are managed in the feed, products can move between campaigns without the account being rebuilt. When a product becomes a best-seller or a seasonal range returns, updating its label moves it into the right campaign.

Custom labels can also help you find products that receive few or no impressions. Grouping these separately allows you to give them their own budget, rather than spend being concentrated on a small number of best-sellers.

Separate Brand and Non-Brand Activity

Brand searches usually behave differently from searches made by people who are unfamiliar with your business. Someone searching for you by name is likely to be closer to buying, so these searches often generate a stronger return than broader product searches. If brand and non-brand searches are combined, overall performance can look stronger than it really is.

Keeping brand searches separate makes it easier to see how much revenue comes from existing demand and how much comes from new customers.

Where budgets allow, we would recommend a dedicated Search campaign for branded keywords. This keeps spend on those keywords controlled and visible, and stops it reducing the budget available for other keywords you want to appear for.

Performance Max and Shopping campaigns can also show for brand searches. Brand exclusions in Performance Max and negative keywords in Shopping can be used to keep these campaigns focused on non-brand searches, leaving the brand campaign to cover people searching for you by name.

For newer retailers, there may not be enough brand search volume to justify a separate campaign yet. In this case, other campaigns can pick up branded searches for the time being, as long as this is taken into account when reviewing performance. A dedicated brand campaign can be introduced once the business has built more visibility.

Choose a Bidding Strategy for Each Stage

Automated bidding strategies perform best when Google has enough conversion data to work with. Setting a Target ROAS on a brand-new account gives Google very little to optimise towards, so we usually move through bidding strategies in stages.

For Performance Max and Search campaigns, a typical bidding strategy timeframe would be:

1. Start on Maximise conversions to gather initial purchase data
2. Switch to Maximise conversion value once order values are tracking reliably
3. Move to Target ROAS once conversion values are stable and strong month-on-month

 

Standard Shopping does not offer Maximise conversions, so the steps are slightly different:

1. Start on Manual CPC, or Maximise clicks with a maximum cost per click, to control spend while data is gathered
2. Switch to Maximise conversion value once sales are coming through consistently
3. Move to Target ROAS once revenue is stable enough to set a realistic target

It’s important to note that there is no fixed number of conversions that tells you when to move to the next stage and it is highly dependent on the industry and product value. We look for consistent results over several weeks rather than a single strong period, and allow time for conversions to come through before judging a change. Our guide to PPC bidding strategies explains each option in more detail.

Set Budgets Around Commercial Priorities

Budgets should reflect the value and potential of each campaign. Categories with stronger demand or better margins may justify a larger share of spend, while a new range of products may need a smaller testing budget until enough data has been collected.

Keep an eye on any campaigns marked as “Limited by budget” in Google Ads. This status means Google estimates the budget is restricting the traffic and conversions the campaign could otherwise achieve. If a campaign is meeting its target and is limited by budget, increasing its budget may bring in more sales. If a campaign is underperforming, that budget may be better used elsewhere.

In Standard Shopping, campaign priority (low, medium or high) decides which campaign uses a product when it appears in more than one. We recommend setting all Standard Shopping campaigns to low priority, so that no campaign is favoured over another and the higher bid is used. If each product only appears in one Shopping campaign, priority has very little effect.

We also find it useful to run a smaller campaign for best-selling products. This gives them their own budget and bids, so they are not sharing spend with the rest of the catalogue, and gives you more control over the cost of each sale.

Plan for Sales, Seasons and Product Launches

Seasonal promotions and product launches are one of the main reasons accounts become harder to manage, especially during the peak Black Friday and Christmas seasons. Rather than creating a new campaign each time, these can usually be handled within your existing structure.

Custom labels can be used to move seasonal products in and out of campaigns. For short sales lasting up to a week, seasonality adjustments let you tell Google’s automated bidding to expect a change in conversion rate during the sale.

Promotions added in Merchant Center can also appear alongside your Shopping ads.

Budgets for busy periods such as Black Friday should be agreed in advance, as demand often increases in the weeks leading up to a sale rather than only on the day itself.

Target New and Returning Customers

For many businesses, a new customer is worth more than a repeat purchase from an existing one, and Google Ads can be set up to reflect this.

Uploading a customer list, with the appropriate consent in place, helps Google identify people who have bought from you before. Google’s new customer acquisition goal can then be used to bid more for new customers or to focus on new customers only. Performance Max also uses audience signals, such as past purchasers or website visitors, as a starting point for finding similar users.

Remarketing, which shows ads to people who have already visited your website, can be an efficient source of sales. We would recommend looking at it separately in reporting, as these sales mostly come from people who already know your brand.

Create a Consistent Naming Convention

A clear naming convention makes an account easier to understand, particularly when several people are working on it. Campaign names should identify the campaign type, product group and market.

At TSD, we use hyphens to separate each part of a campaign name, and we abbreviate campaign types so that names do not become unnecessarily long:

• Performance Max: pm
• Search: ppc
• Standard Shopping: ss

For example, a Performance Max campaign for trainers in the UK would be named pm-uk-trainers.

The most important thing with any naming convention is consistency, so that anyone on the account can understand which campaigns are running at any given time.

Structure Reporting Around Better Decisions

With a clear account structure, performance is easier to interpret. Reporting should help identify which products are generating profitable revenue, where budget is being restricted and how much performance relies on branded searches. Metrics such as click-through rate and cost per click can help diagnose issues, but revenue and margin give a clearer view of commercial impact.

It is normal for Google Ads and Google Analytics to report different figures. Google Ads credits itself with sales that happen within a set period after an ad click, while Google Analytics shares the credit across the different channels a customer used before buying. Google Ads also records a conversion against the date of the click rather than the date of the purchase. As a general rule, if the difference between the two is consistently more than around 20%, we would investigate the tracking.

When reviewing return on ad spend, we recommend cross-referencing both platforms with the sales recorded in your e-commerce platform, such as Shopify or WooCommerce. Google Ads figures are often higher because of the differences in attribution, so your own sales data gives the most reliable view.

Building an Account That Supports Growth

Once the foundations of an e-commerce account are in place, there are opportunities to scale the structure.

Campaigns that are consistently achieving their Target ROAS can have their budgets increased so they are no longer limited by budget, with daily spend sitting below the daily budget. The ROAS target keeps spend controlled, while Google’s algorithm has more flexibility to find additional sales. Since Google’s August 2026 changes to Target CPA and Target ROAS, campaigns tend to deliver closer to their set target, so check that your targets still reflect what you want to achieve before increasing budgets.

Retailers with larger budgets can also split their strongest categories into their own campaigns, each with its own budget and target. Doing this too early can spread data too thinly, which is why it tends to work better once the account is established.

Beyond that, new campaign types such as Demand Gen, which runs across YouTube and Gmail, can help you reach potential customers before they start searching for products.

At Talking Stick Digital, we work with e-commerce businesses to review performance and structure their Google Ads accounts around the commercial results they need. If you would like a second opinion on your account, book a free digital audit with our team.