After many phone calls from Adwords certified companies telling us our Adwords accounts were not set up in a cost effective way, it made me finally put down the organic SEO and grab PPC with both hands. Throughout my findings I decided because we rank no. 1 for a lot of our main keywords naturally, we would focus on exact match keywords to filter the rubbish and just catch the juicy relevance searchers. We also ensured the conversion tracking was set up to maintain our cost per clicks and ROI. And so I started to delve deep into the reporting produced from the previous year of activated keywords…and I'm glad I started looking.

Not only were there keywords which I didn’t even know existed, but I started to notice search trends. Many people recommended running many different Ad Groups for each specific keyword and more ads within that group to narrow the search results, creating an even more specific result for the customer. That also meant cheaper CPC and a higher quality score for us. Great stuff!

However, I came across a slight problem. I found I was creating many keywords and different variations of these keywords all set to exact match. When I went to upload these keywords and make changes to the campaign, I came across an error message. My external Adwords editor was not happy that I was trying to submit so many keywords and ad groups! I contacted Adwords to explain my problem and as a courtesy they told me they had increased the account limit and that I was to try again.

I still had the same issue, so I started to root around the Internet to try and find out what the limitations to the account were. However, I couldn’t find the information anywhere (which is the reason for this post).

Finally I came across what I was looking for, so here it is in all its glory. The AdWords account structure has 3 levels - campaigns, ad groups and ads. You can have up to 100 ad groups in a campaign and up to 25 campaigns in an AdWords account. In each ad group, you can have up to 50 ads of any format and up to 2000 keywords. See this Adwords help page for more info. This is the standard structure, but after reading a few blog posts it seems that each account can have different limitations and that you can request increased limits by contacting the Google Support Team.

So after manipulating my keywords into even more specific ad groups we had success! Now I have an easy to monitor account with complete conversion tracking set up. Plus on average the CPC has gone down from 25p to 8p.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it can be useful to others who have experienced the same problem.