Marketing & GrowthFree
Google Ads Account Restructure Plan Template
Every campaign maps to its replacement carrying twelve months of cost and conversions, so the new structure arrives with a target rather than a guess.
Every restructure guide gives you a phase calendar. None of them tell you whether the structure you are proposing can be measured at all. On Halverton Fire and Security's inherited account, 34 Search campaigns held $1,290,500 and 4,861 conversions across twelve months, and only three of them cleared thirty conversions in a month. Twenty produced fewer than ten. That is 74.0% of the spend sitting in campaigns nobody could ever evaluate, which is the actual case for rebuilding.
The mapping is the artifact. Every current campaign gets a row: where it goes, what it cost, how many conversions it produced, and the CPA that becomes the new campaign's opening target. Then each proposed destination is tested against the conversion volume it inherits. Two of the eight in the first draft could not reach thirty conversions in a month, so they were merged rather than launched, and the merged campaign clears at 30.7. Both rejected splits stay in the document with the numbers that rejected them.
Written for whoever inherited an account they did not build, and for the agency that has to defend the rebuild to a client who has heard that restructuring resets everything. Run the account audit first if you have not yet, and the search term and negative keyword review alongside, since misplaced queries are usually what makes a structure look broken. The cross-platform paid report pack is where the new structure has to keep reporting.
What actually resets, and what does not
The objection is always that the rebuild destroys Quality Score. Google's own documentation says it is a diagnostic tool and not an input in the ad auction, scored from historical impressions on exact searches of the keyword, which is why changing match type does not move it. Consolidation went the other way here. 412 broad keywords reported no score at all because they sat in broad-only ad groups, and 289 of them gain an exact-match sibling in the new ad groups and start reporting one.
The bidding objection needs splitting in two. Smart Bidding's models train across the account. The eligibility floor for Target ROAS on Search is fifteen conversions in thirty days at the conversion tracking level, not per campaign, so splitting one campaign into six does not multiply it. What is genuinely per-campaign is evaluation. Google recommends judging a Target CPA strategy over thirty days including at least thirty conversions, and that clock starts on each new campaign.
So the timetable is computable rather than quoted. At the volumes each destination inherits, the six new campaigns reach thirty conversions in 5, 11, 18, 25, 28 and 30 days, so the slowest is measurable inside a month. Under the old structure the median campaign needed 124 days and 22 of the 34 needed more than 90. The real loss is reporting continuity: 173 ad groups stop existing, and the mapping sheet is the only thing that lets next year compare to this one.
How it works
Send the export
Twelve months of campaign and ad group performance, plus what you need the new structure to do.
Map every row
Each current campaign gets a destination and carries its cost, conversions and CPA into it.
Test each destination
Any proposed campaign that cannot reach thirty conversions in a month is merged rather than launched.
Price the move
What resets, what does not, what the pauses release, and how long each campaign takes to become measurable.
What you get
- One row per current campaign showing its destination and the cost and conversions that travel with it.
- Every proposed campaign tested against the conversion volume it inherits, before anybody builds it.
- An opening target CPA per new campaign, taken from what the mapped-in campaigns actually did.
- The days each new campaign needs to reach thirty conversions, computed from its own inherited rate.
- What gets paused, what that releases in budget, and what it costs in conversions.
- A before and after structure diagram, and the Sheet that keeps year-on-year reporting joinable.
Common questions
Doesn't moving keywords reset their history?
The reporting rows stay in the account, but they stop rolling up under the old campaign, which is what breaks year-on-year comparison. That is the loss worth naming, and the mapping sheet is the fix. Quality Score is a separate question: Google scores it from exact-search history, so a match type change does not move it.
How few campaigns should we end up with?
As few as the conversion volume allows, and that is arithmetic rather than taste. Thirty conversions a month is the floor for a campaign you can evaluate. Halverton's first draft had eight; two of them ran at 18.9 and 11.8 a month, so they merged into one that clears at 30.7.
Why not collapse everything into one campaign?
Because one target then has to serve every line in it. The six destinations here inherited CPAs from $42 to $415, a 9.8 times spread. A single target near the $242 those six blend to would starve the compliance work while overpaying for brand. Consolidate until each campaign is measurable, then stop.
What if the client will not accept any performance dip?
Then phase it, and say what phasing costs. Google Ads can save a bid strategy change as an experiment rather than applying it, which buys a controlled comparison at the price of a slower rollout. The cheaper first move is usually the pause list: here it released $130,800 of annual spend and gave up 78 conversions at $1,677 each.
How do you decide what to pause rather than move?
By what it costs per conversion against the rest of the account. Five campaigns here produced 78 conversions on $130,800, a $1,677 CPA against $265 blended, so pausing them gave up 1.6% of conversions for 10.1% of spend. The search term review usually explains why they were that expensive.
Does this work for Shopping or Performance Max?
The mapping does, because it is arithmetic on cost and conversions and does not care about campaign type. The evaluability floor changes: the conversion requirements Google publishes differ by campaign type and by bid strategy, so the test runs against the one that applies to each destination rather than a single number.
What actually gets delivered?
A Sheet with one row per current campaign, its destination, and the cost, conversions and CPA it carries. A Doc with the proposed structure, what pauses and why, and what resets against what does not. A before and after diagram. Page-side leaks stay in the funnel review.
Google Ads Account Restructure Plan Template
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