How to Structure Google Ads - For Scaling Shopify Brands

Every few months, a new "definitive" Google Ads account structure guide appears online. Same advice, different author. One campaign per product category, separate brand and non-brand. Run Shopping and Search in parallel, add a PMax on top. Done.

If it were that simple, every Shopify brand running Google Ads would be scaling profitably, but most aren't.

The reality is that account structure isn't a template you apply, it's a decision you make based on the specific brand, vertical, budget, and competitive landscape in front of you. We've seen unconventional structures dramatically outperform the trending textbook setups in crowded markets quite a number of times. We've also seen perfectly logical structures fail because they were the right answer for a different business.

This isn't a copy + paste framework. It's how we actually think about structure, and why we rarely build the same set up twice.

WHY STRUCTURE MATTERS MORE THAN MOST BRANDS REALISE

Account structure isn't just organisational tidiness. It directly determines how Google's algorithm allocates your budget, which audiences see your ads, how smart bidding strategies learn, and ultimately how efficiently your spend converts into revenue.

A poorly structured account creates internal competition - campaigns bidding against each other for the same searches, driving up your own CPCs. It limits Google's ability to optimise intelligently because the data is fragmented across too many campaigns to reach any meaningful learning thresholds. This also makes performance analysis genuinely difficult, because you can't isolate what's working when everything is tangled together.

But the answer isn't always the cleanest, most logical structure on paper. Sometimes it's a deliberately messy one that exploits how Google's auction system actually behaves in your specific vertical.

START WITH THE BUSINESS, NOT THE PLATFORM

Before we touch campaign configuration, we need to understand three things; margin profile across the product range, the competitive intensity of the search landscape, and where the brand sits in terms of awareness with its target audience.

These factors change everything.

A brand with high-margin hero products and lower-margin supporting lines shouldn't run a flat Shopping structure that treats all products equally. Budget will flow toward volume, not value, and your best products will often be underfunded relative to their profit contribution.

A brand entering a highly competitive vertical, eg supplements and wellness, faces a fundamentally different structural challenge to one operating in a niche with limited competition. In the super competitive markets, conventional structures can be predictable in ways that hurt you. When every competitor is running the same campaign architecture, differentiation sometimes comes from building yours differently (check out the Moo + Yoo case study to see how we approached the highly competitive haircare industry in a different way).

A brand with strong organic search presence and high brand awareness needs a different configuration to one that's genuinely unknown. The role of brand campaigns, the budget weighting between prospecting and remarketing, the value of upper-funnel activity - all of it shifts depending on where the brand actually sits in the market.

THE DECISIONS THAT ACTUALLY DEFINE STRUCTURE

Rather than prescribing a specific setup, here are the structural decisions we work through for every account, and why the answer is different each time.

Granularity versus data consolidation. The Google Ads instinct is often to build highly granular campaigns - one per product category, tightly segmented ad groups, maximum control. This was the go-to approach in the era of manual bidding. In a smart bidding environment, granularity can work against you. Campaigns need sufficient conversion volume to learn effectively. Fragment your data too much and every campaign is operating blind, making poor bidding decisions based on too little signal.

In competitive verticals especially, we often consolidate more than feels comfortable - fewer campaigns, broader structures - specifically to accelerate the learning phase and let smart bidding reach its potential faster. It looks less controlled but it frequently performs better.

Yes or No to Performance Max? PMax is polarising, and for good reason. It can be genuinely powerful, or a budget black hole depending entirely on how it's configured and what it's running alongside. The structural question isn't whether to run PMax, it's what role it plays relative to your other campaigns, what data you can feed into it and what guardrails are in place.

In some accounts we run PMax as the primary vehicle with tightly defined asset groups and strong audience signals. In others, particularly where we want granular control over search placements, we keep PMax narrowly scoped and let Search and Shopping campaigns do the heavy lifting. There really is no universal answer. The decision depends on everything from the brand's creative assets and the competitive landscape to how much conversion data the account already has.

Brand campaigns, are they essential or an expensive habit? Bidding on your own brand name is one of the most contested debates in paid search… and we get it, no one wants to spend money on people who are going to find them anyhow. The honest answer is that it’s more complex, we have to consider competitive pressure from other brands bidding on your terms, the incrementality of clicks you'd otherwise get organically, the data it feeds back into the system and how you want to weight budget between acquisition and retention. Read more on this here - Google Ads Brand Campaigns: Vanity Spend or Smart Strategy?

We've paused brand campaigns for clients and seen negligible impact on revenue. We've paused them for others and watched competitors immediately fill the space. The structural decision isn't the same twice, and any agency that tells you brand campaigns are always necessary - or never necessary - isn't dissecting the data.

Remarketing architecture is a whole other consideration. Most accounts treat remarketing on Google as an afterthought - a single audience, a generic message, a low budget. A properly structured remarketing setup segments audiences by behaviour and recency, really makes use of your Klaviyo connections, and serves different creative to different intent levels. Cart abandoners from the last seven days are not the same audience as someone who browsed your homepage three weeks ago, and treating them identically wastes the opportunity that remarketing actually presents.

WHEN UNCONVENTIONAL STRUCTURES WIN

In busy verticals - fashion, beauty, supplements, homewares - conventional plug and play Google Ads structures tend to produce conventional results. When every brand in the market is running similar campaign architectures with similar bidding strategies, you're competing purely on product and price within a system where the rules are the same for everyone, but others have incredibly deep pockets.

Some of the best-performing accounts we've built have used structural approaches that wouldn't appear in any best practice guide and might raise an eyebrow from our peers, until they get deeper into the rationale. Intentionally consolidated campaign structures that sacrificed control for learning speed. Unusual budget weighting toward upper-funnel activity that competitors weren't investing in. Hybrid Shopping and Search approaches that exploited gaps in how competitors were bidding.

In every case these were responses to specific competitive environments and specific brand situations. The insight came from looking at what was actually happening in the auction, not from applying a framework.

This is the part that's genuinely hard to systematise. It requires understanding Google's auction mechanics well enough to identify where the ‘done thing’ creates predictable gaps, then having the knowledge to build something different when the data suggests it'll work.

WHAT GOOD STRUCTURE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

Not a specific configuration. A set of principles.

Every campaign should have a clear, singular objective - and the bidding strategy, budget, and targeting should all point toward that objective coherently. Campaigns without a clear job to do tend to produce unclear results.

The account should generate enough conversion data at the campaign level to support smart bidding effectively. If a campaign is getting fewer than 30–50 conversions per month, it's learning too slowly to optimise well so the structural response is usually consolidation, not more granularity.

Budget allocation should reflect business priorities, not platform defaults. Google will spend your money wherever it finds conversions, which isn't always where your margins are highest or your growth ambitions lie. Structure is how you direct that spend toward what actually matters for the business.

And the structure should be reviewed regularly, not set once and left. What works at £3,000 per month often needs rebuilding at £5,000 per month and again at £8,000 per month. What works one month often needs a rebuild when a well-funded competitor enters the space.

THE HONEST ANSWER

If you're looking for a definitive account structure playbook, sorry… we don’t have one, and any guide that offers you one is either oversimplifying or hasn't spent enough time in competitive accounts to know better.

What we’d tell you is that the brands we work with that scale most effectively on Google are the ones willing to let us interrogate their structure regularly, test unconventional approaches when the data suggests it, and bring some Nutshell nimble magic to the table!

If your Google account isn’t delivering the results you need, it might just need a review. You can book in a free 30 minute call with us to discuss what set up might help push the numbers in the right direction.