My AdWords Account

One of the biggest obstacles I face with clients is taking control of a messy and hard to manage account. Often times AdWords accounts change hands over time, have an “old school” strategy for setup, or just have too many cooks in the kitchen for a lack of better terminology. This often leads to an account with more campaigns, ad groups, and keywords than you know what to do with.

I speak with many clients who feel like they are drowning in their accounts and don’t even know where to begin. Upon analyzing these accounts, I often have the same sentiments; it can feel impossible to know what the best first step is because there are so many things that can and need to be fixed.

The obvious question is then, “Do we try to fix what currently exists or would it be better to start over?” Either option can feel rather daunting, but in my experience, I’ve had more success and fewer headaches when we have scrapped the mess and started over with a neatly organized AdWords account structure and a lot more simplicity.

Here are 3 reasons why you should consider building out a new AdWords account from scratch and walking away from the current mess of a situation that you are trying to navigate.

#1: It’ll be easier to manage

Just think about it. If you have 10 campaigns, 100 ad groups, and hundreds of thousands of keywords (this might be a bit dramatic for some, but it’ll get the point across), that means you have to look at each of these elements to decide what optimization steps to take in your account. Daily tactics include questioning which of the hundreds of thousands keyword bids should be changed, which match types are working well, which ads should be optimized, and overall just where to even begin.

With an abundance of campaigns and ad groups, there is often overlap in the account, keywords competing against each other, and a whole lot of keywords that aren’t even seeing any performance and yet are taking up space and cluttering the account.

I often see misspellings, different match types, and even just the plural version of a keyword located in different ad groups. It feels confusing to even try to explain this, so imagine trying to manage an account with a structure that doesn’t allow you to easily locate specific items. Having too much clutter makes it too hard to take action, especially if you have not been deeply involved in the setup and continued growth of the account.

Starting over will most likely allow you to cut down on the number of keywords, ad groups, and campaigns necessary to advertise your specific product or service offering. Often a product/service can be communicated in only a handful of semantically related keywords rather than hundreds of overlapping keywords. If you start from a fresh slate, this will allow you to not only acquire a sense of organization, but you will be able to easily locate keywords and themes within the account, make changes to a smaller number of keywords during a normal workflow for optimization, and gain control in targeting and communicating to your potential searchers.