Fewer Google Ads campaigns can actually give you more control
45 campaigns feels precise, until nobody knows why anymore
An account with 45 campaigns looks serious at first glance. Everything has its own name, its own budget, and its own slice of responsibility. Until you ask which campaign solves which problem. Then it goes quiet. Not because nobody is doing their job, but because the system has become too complex to steer sharply.
The source video uses an American Shopify case with a large revenue figure. I am deliberately not repeating that figure here as a promise. The interesting lesson lies elsewhere: the creator describes how a fragmented account was brought back to a simpler structure. That principle is also relevant for Dutch online stores and lead generation businesses. Just not as a copy-paste recipe.
Fragmentation feels like control
Many campaigns are created with good intentions. A separate campaign for brand terms. Logical. A separate campaign for non-brand. Also logical. Then a separate campaign for product group A, product group B, a test country, a margin group, a promotion, an old PMax, a new PMax, and a Shopping campaign nobody dares to turn off. Before you know it, everyone is steering from their own island.
The problem is not that segmentation is wrong. The problem is segmentation without a question. Every campaign must answer a question. Do I want to protect existing demand? Do I want to attract new demand? Do I want to test a product group? Do I want to steer on margin? If that question is missing, a campaign is mostly administration with a budget attached.
| Campaign type | Good question | Risk when noisy |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | How much existing demand are we capturing? | Brand traffic masks weak non-brand performance |
| Non-brand Search | Which purchase intent works outside our name? | Searching too broadly without a clear landing page |
| Performance Max | Which product group or customer value do I want to feed? | Everything in one bucket with no learning value |
| Standard Shopping | Which products do I want to test in a controlled way? | Loose test without feed discipline |
| International | Are language, margin, and logistics truly comparable? | Mixing countries because it is easy to set up |
Brand and non-brand need to be evaluated separately
Throwing brand and non-brand into one report is a classic way of flattering yourself. Brand traffic often converts better because someone already knows you. That is valuable, but it says little about your ability to generate new demand. When you combine everything, a healthy ROAS can hide the fact that you are mostly paying for people who were already searching for you.
That does not mean brand campaigns are unnecessary. Especially with competitor bidding, marketplaces, or comparison sites, brand protection can be worthwhile. But you need to report honestly. Brand is often about defending and capturing. Non-brand is more often about discovering, convincing, and taking risk. Two roles. Two measurement questions.
- Report brand and non-brand separately in revenue, costs, and margin.
- Check whether PMax is capturing a lot of brand traffic before treating the campaign as a growth engine.
- Use Search Console to compare brand search volume alongside ad performance.
- Verify that non-brand landing pages genuinely answer the search intent.
- Ask sales whether new leads already knew you before they clicked.
Merchant Center is revenue infrastructure
With Shopping and PMax, many business owners think about campaigns first. I usually look at Merchant Center first. Product titles, identifiers, images, availability, price, variants, and disapproval reasons largely determine which demand Google can match to your products. A sloppy feed makes a smart campaign dumber.
Google's product data specification is dry reading, but it matters. The title, description, brand data, and product identification help Google match your product to the right search query. Especially with many SKUs, variants, or margin differences, feed quality is not a technical task to handle later. It is part of your commercial strategy.
- Start by checking disapprovals and warnings in Merchant Center.
- Make product titles specific with brand, product type, variant, and key attribute.
- Split products where margin, price, or target audience differs significantly.
- Use search term data to improve titles, not to stuff them with keywords.
- Keep feed rules understandable so someone can still confidently edit them later.
From case study to audit: what you can actually borrow
You should not blindly copy the campaign names from a case like this. You can borrow the thinking sequence. Start with diagnosis. Where is budget leaking? Which campaigns share the same role? Which products appear in multiple PMax structures? Which product groups are getting too little data? And which revenue looks good on paper but carries too little margin?
Then simplify. Not because less is always better, but because simplicity learns faster. An account with six clear campaigns can be more manageable than an account with 45 small islands. Especially when budgets are fragmented and every campaign gets too little data to learn properly. That is not a trick. It is just tidying up with a commercial purpose.
For Funnel Adviseur, this is exactly the bridge between Ads, data, and Direction. You do not choose a campaign type first. You first choose which market, which product, and which value you want to steer. Then Google Ads gets a structure that supports that. For anyone still steering on standalone ROAS columns, that takes some adjustment. But it does bring clarity. Month 1: calm. Month 2: time. Month 4: better leads. Month 6: margin.
