Naming Campaigns and Adgroups

Adgroups and campaigns keep your account organized

While you do have the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to name campaigns and adgroups whatever you feel like, hastily assigned campaign names like: “DansCamp”, or “Edna”, or “MyBestToday”, can cause you trouble trying to stay organized as your account grows. 

Done correctly, your adgroup/campaign name combinations can offer you a lot of organization and keep your account easy to read as it grows. For many users, coming up with names for their adgroups and campaigns is the most dreaded aspect of creating and managing search campaigns. 

What are campaign and adgroup names really for?

There are only two dimensions to consider in organizing your Google Ads search campaigns: Campaigns and Adgroups. All we have to do is cover what each of these “containers” is for and your account structure will become obvious. 

• An adgroup contains keywords and ads for one customer need.  Therefore, the best way to name an adgroup is to assign a name that is relevant to the customer need, such as: EmergencyBurnCare, or ToyotaTransFix, or OrganicPromoShirts.
• A campaign has settings and locations for some adgroups.  Therefore, the best way to name a campaign is to assign a name relevant to the locations and settings. For example: a campaign named: Mobile24×7_USA, would indicate that this campaign is only for mobile devices and runs all the time in the entire country.
• Don’t name a campaign after the adgroups that are in it.  Adgroups can come and go from campaigns, depending on which locations and settings you want to apply to which adgroups. So let’s not confuse the issue by naming campaigns for anything other than their locations and settings.

Campaign and adgroup combinations that say something

Let’s see how we can use better campaign and adgroup names to help keep us organized as we grow our account. Let's avoid spaces and silly characters (#/?{@^*#&) and keep them down to 50 characters max - so we’re not typing in long search strings when we’re looking for them in a very crowded spreadsheet or account.

So you can now name your adgroups and campaigns in a way that will make managing them a LOT easier over time. 

• The adgroup: EmergencyBurnCare, showing up in the campaign: Mobile24×7_USA, would tell you a lot about what’s going on with that campaign/adgroup combination.
• If you were to create a new adgroup called: NeckInjuries, would it go into the same campaign? Well, do you want to use the locations and settings from the campaign: Mobile24×7_USA?
• If you want to run your new adgroup: NeckInjuries in different locations and at different times, then you’ll need to create a different campaign for it. Hopefully, you will assign this new campaign a name that is more descriptive of its settings and locations than Edna.