Every few years the Google Ads community decides the previous best practice for account structure was wrong and announces a new approach. In 2016 it was single keyword ad groups. In 2020 it was themed ad groups with three to five keywords each. In 2023 it was "just let Performance Max handle everything." Each time, the advice arrived with the same confidence, and each time it turned out to be situationally true at best and actively harmful at worst when applied universally.

The honest position in 2026 is that there is no single correct account structure. There never was. What has genuinely changed is not the answer, but the thing the structure is supposed to accomplish.

Account structure used to be primarily about keyword relevance, Quality Score, and manual bid control. You built tight ad groups because tighter ad groups meant higher relevance, which meant better Quality Scores and cheaper clicks. You built elaborate structures because you needed granularity to set different manual bids for different contexts.

Smart Bidding made much of that granularity unnecessary. The algorithm adjusts bids in real time based on hundreds of signals simultaneously, many of which you cannot manually account for. What structure now needs to accomplish is giving that algorithm clean data, enough conversion volume per campaign to learn from, clear separation between conflicting goals, and enough human visibility to catch problems before they compound.

That is the frame to carry through everything that follows.

The Foundational Principle: Consolidation Beats Fragmentation

The single most common structural error in 2026 is over-fragmentation. Accounts with too many campaigns, too many ad groups, and too many small budget segments produce an environment where no individual campaign generates enough conversion data for Smart Bidding to optimize effectively.

Smart Bidding needs data. An ad group generating five conversions per month gives the algorithm almost nothing to learn from. A campaign generating ten conversions per month is marginally better but still well below the threshold where meaningful optimization occurs. Google's own guidance places the minimum at 30 to 50 conversions per month per campaign for Smart Bidding to work reliably. Below that, the algorithm is guessing more than it is learning.

This has a direct structural implication. You should run the minimum number of campaigns and ad groups that still gives you adequate control and visibility. More is not better. More fragments your conversion volume, slows learning, produces inconsistent performance across the account, and creates a management burden that leads to campaigns being left unattended.

The question to ask about every campaign in your account is: does this campaign generate enough conversions independently to justify its own budget and bidding strategy, or would it learn and perform better consolidated with a related campaign? For many accounts that have grown organically over years of adding campaigns without ever consolidating, the answer for many campaigns is no.

Audit your account. Find campaigns generating fewer than 15 conversions per month. These are candidates for consolidation into campaigns with related goals. The transition takes time and requires careful budget management to avoid disrupting learning periods, but the long-term result is an account where every active campaign has enough signal to do its job.

Layer One: The Campaign Types and Their Roles

A well-structured account in 2026 is not built around one campaign type. It is built around a deliberate combination that covers different parts of the customer journey.

Brand Search campaigns protect your branded terms from competitors, capture high-intent branded searches at efficient costs, and produce conversion data that should be kept separate from non-brand performance reporting. These are almost always the highest-converting campaigns in any account. Keeping them isolated prevents their strong performance from flattering the averages and hiding problems in non-brand campaigns. Every account with any brand recognition should have a dedicated brand campaign.

Non-brand Search campaigns capture intent from users who are searching for your category or solution type without knowing your brand. These are your highest-effort campaigns in terms of ongoing management, because they require keyword strategies, negative keyword maintenance, ad group structure, and continuous search term analysis. They are also where most of the strategic work lives and where the largest efficiency gains are available.

Performance Max campaigns complement Search by extending reach across all Google channels simultaneously and by capturing conversion opportunities that Search would not reach through keyword targeting alone. The relationship between PMax and Search should be designed rather than left to default behavior. PMax should have brand terms excluded so it does not compete with your brand Search campaign. It should have negative keywords applied to prevent wasted spend on clearly irrelevant queries.

Demand Gen campaigns fill the upper funnel, building awareness and intent among users who are not yet searching for your category. This is the campaign type most commonly missing from accounts that have hit a Search impression share ceiling and cannot find new growth.

Depending on the business, you might also run Shopping campaigns for product-based businesses, Discovery campaigns now folded into Demand Gen, or app campaigns if app installs or engagement are business objectives. The principle is the same across all types: each campaign has a clear, distinct role, a sufficient budget to perform that role, and metrics that are appropriate to what that campaign is actually designed to accomplish.

Layer Two: Campaign Naming and Organization

Naming conventions are not glamorous but they are genuinely important. An account with inconsistent or unclear campaign names is harder to audit, harder to hand off, harder to report from, and more likely to have problems that go unnoticed for extended periods.

Whatever format you choose, use it consistently from the beginning and document it somewhere accessible to everyone who touches the account. Inconsistent naming creates an account archaeology problem where understanding what a campaign does requires opening it and reading through the settings.

Apply the same logic to ad groups. An ad group named Ad Group 1 or the default generated name is almost useless for management at scale. Name ad groups after their intent or theme: Enterprise Pricing Queries, Demo Request Terms, Competitor Comparison, Services Broad. Anyone reading the name should understand immediately what intent the ad group is capturing.

Labels work as a second organizational layer, particularly useful for temporary categorizations: campaigns in learning period, campaigns being tested against a challenger, seasonal campaigns, campaigns under specific budget constraints.

Layer Three: Ad Group Structure and Depth

The right number of ad groups per campaign has changed significantly as match types have changed.

Single keyword ad groups, once popular because they provided total control over which exact query triggered which exact ad, are no longer necessary or recommended in most cases. Broad match with Smart Bidding now handles query variation better than manual keyword control ever could. The signal from a single keyword SKAG is often too narrow for Smart Bidding to learn from.

Themed ad groups built around intent clusters are the right approach for most Search campaigns in 2026. An intent cluster groups keywords that share the same user need and could plausibly convert through the same ad and the same landing page. Keywords that share an intent cluster belong in the same ad group. Keywords that serve different intents, even if they use similar vocabulary, belong in separate ad groups.

For most accounts, seven to ten ad groups per Search campaign is the practical range. Below that, you may be forcing keywords with genuinely different intents into the same ad group and accepting relevance trade-offs. Above that, you are probably fragmenting budget and conversion volume to the point where individual ad groups cannot generate enough data for Smart Bidding to learn from them.

The key constraint is not a specific number of ad groups, it is whether each ad group generates enough conversion data to contribute to campaign learning. An ad group that generates zero or one conversion per month is a data void. It consumes budget and impressions without producing useful signal. Either consolidate it with a related ad group that has more volume, or pause it if the intent it covers is not worth the investment.

Layer Four: Match Types in 2026

Broad match has become significantly more capable over the past three years, and the right match type strategy in 2026 is different from what it was in 2021.

Broad match keywords, combined with Smart Bidding and a well-maintained negative keyword list, now capture more relevant traffic and produce better results for many advertisers than the same keywords in exact or phrase match. Google's semantic understanding of search queries has improved to the point where broad match can identify relevant intent across a wide range of query formulations that would not have matched previously. The 18 percent increase in unique search query categories with conversions that Google reports from AI Max campaigns reflects this same underlying capability improvement.

Exact match still has specific use cases: protecting high-value branded terms, ensuring coverage of specific high-intent queries where broad match expansion would be inappropriate, and running controlled tests where you need to know precisely which queries triggered the ads.

Phrase match has become somewhat redundant as broad match has improved. It is tighter than broad but looser than exact, which made it the obvious middle ground when broad match was undisciplined. That middle ground role has shrunk as broad match quality has increased.

The practical match type strategy for most accounts: use broad match for general campaign coverage paired with Smart Bidding, use exact match for brand terms and specific high-priority queries, and maintain robust negative keyword lists to prevent broad match from expanding into genuinely irrelevant territory.

Layer Five: Budget Architecture and Allocation Logic

Budget allocation across campaigns should follow performance data and business priorities, not equal distribution or historical precedent.

The first principle is making sure each active campaign has enough daily budget to function. A campaign with a target CPA of $50 and a daily budget of $30 will generate less than one conversion per day on average. That is not enough data for learning or optimization. Budget campaigns at your target CPA multiplied by at least two, ideally five to ten, to give the algorithm enough to work with.

The second principle is tiering campaigns by strategic importance. Brand campaigns typically deserve disproportionate investment relative to their traffic volume because they defend your most valuable, highest-converting traffic from competitors. Performance Max campaigns built on solid conversion data deserve investment because they compound learning over time and access inventory that Search cannot reach. New campaigns in learning periods need enough budget to generate learning quickly without extending the learning period through starvation.

The third principle is ongoing reallocation based on what the data shows. Budget should flow toward campaigns that are performing well on the metrics that matter most, and away from campaigns that are consuming budget without producing proportionate results. This reallocation should happen on a cycle, weekly for larger budgets, monthly for smaller accounts, using performance data rather than assumptions.

Shared budgets, available in Google Ads, allow multiple campaigns to draw from a single budget pool with Google distributing it toward whichever campaigns are most likely to convert at a given moment. They are useful for situations where you have closely related campaigns and want to let the algorithm optimize budget distribution dynamically. They are less useful for campaigns with meaningfully different objectives or priorities where you need to guarantee minimum investment for each.

The Structural Red Flags Worth Auditing For

Four structural problems appear repeatedly in accounts that have grown without deliberate architecture.

Campaigns competing with each other for the same queries is a chronic waste. If your brand Search campaign and your non-brand Search campaign both appear for the same queries, or if two non-brand campaigns capture overlapping intent, you are bidding against yourself, inflating costs and fragmenting data. Regular search term audits across campaigns catch this problem. Brand exclusion lists on PMax campaigns prevent the most common version of it.

Conversion action proliferation makes it impossible to understand what is actually working. Accounts that have been running for years often have conversion actions created for long-past campaigns, test actions that were never removed, duplicate actions tracking the same events through different tags. Quarterly audits of your Conversions list, pausing or removing anything that is not a current, relevant signal, keeps Smart Bidding working from clean data.

Campaigns in permanent learning periods occur when the account makes too many changes too frequently, resetting learning before it can complete. Every significant change to a campaign, whether budget, bidding strategy, ad copy, or audience, can reset the learning period. An account where someone is making changes weekly across multiple campaigns may never allow any campaign to exit the learning period and reach stable performance. Change cadence matters as much as what changes are made.

Over-reliance on automation recommendations from Google is a subtle structural risk. Google's optimization recommendations are designed to improve performance on Google's metrics, which overlap significantly but not entirely with your business objectives. Blindly applying recommended budget increases, audience expansions, and new campaign types adds cost and complexity without necessarily adding value. Evaluate each recommendation against your actual business goals before applying it.

The Account Structure Review Cadence

A well-structured account does not stay well-structured without periodic review. The natural drift of a Google Ads account over time is toward increasing complexity, accumulation of legacy campaigns and settings, and gradual misalignment between the account's architecture and current business objectives.

Monthly reviews should cover performance by campaign type, budget pacing and efficiency, any campaigns that have generated zero conversions in the past 30 days, and search terms flagged for new negative keywords.

Quarterly reviews should cover the full account structure: whether the current campaign set matches current business priorities, whether any consolidation opportunities exist in fragmented campaigns, whether conversion actions are current and accurately reflecting business goals, and whether the naming and organization conventions have been maintained.

Annual reviews should step back further and ask whether the account's fundamental architecture still fits the business. Companies that have added product lines, entered new markets, changed their ICP, or shifted from lead generation to e-commerce often find their account structure reflects old decisions that no longer fit. A structural rebuild, though disruptive in the short term, can unlock significantly better performance by aligning the account architecture with current reality.

The goal is not a perfect structure at any single moment. It is a structure that adapts as the business evolves and that gives Google's AI the cleanest, most complete signals available at each stage of growth.

Auditing your own account structure is one of those tasks that always reveals more than you expect. ClickHub's account health view surfaces structural issues, campaign conflicts, and optimization opportunities across your entire account so you can find and fix what is actually holding performance back.

How to Structure a Google Ads Account in 2026: The Architecture That Actually Scales