Why Your PPC Structure Should Mirror Your Business Model via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

A lot of PPC accounts are built from the bottom up. You start with keyword research, group them by themes or match types, maybe throw in some location targeting, and go from there.

But then reporting becomes messy. Budget allocation feels random or reactive.

Then, when leadership asks for performance broken out by product line or region, you’re left pulling together a spreadsheet patchwork that still doesn’t tell the full story.

That’s because your PPC account structure doesn’t match how the business actually operates.

When your campaigns mirror your business model, everything starts working together.

You’re not just optimizing for clicks or conversions, you’re aligning with how revenue is made, who’s responsible for what, and how success is measured across the company.

This article will walk through how to shift from a keyword-centric approach to a business-aligned strategy.

Additionally, you’ll leave with practical advice for both restructuring existing accounts and building new ones the right way.

Why Structure Is More Than Just A Clean Campaign View

Let’s be honest: Campaign structure is rarely the most exciting part of PPC. But it’s one of the most important.

The way your account is structured affects everything from how you manage budgets to how clearly you can report on performance.

And yet, too many accounts are still structured around what’s easiest to set up, not what makes the most sense for the business.

If you’ve ever found yourself duplicating reports just to slice performance by business line, or struggled to isolate budgets by region, chances are the issue isn’t performance. It’s how your PPC campaigns are structured.

Well-structured accounts give you clarity, not just control. They help you:

• Allocate budget where it matters most.
• Tie campaign results back to business outcomes.
• Make faster decisions with cleaner data.
• Align with sales and finance teams instead of operating in a silo.

When your PPC structure reflects how your company makes money, your campaigns do more than drive leads or sales. They’re taking it a step further to support actual business growth.

Rethink The Starting Point By Beginning With The Business Model

Most marketers are taught to start with keyword research. But when you begin with the business model instead, you’re already thinking strategically.

Now, for agencies, this can be harder to manage because you’ve likely got someone trying to win the business, and then a completely different team going to execute on what’s agreed upon.

If you’re still in the discovery phase with a client, start by asking some of these questions:

• What are the core revenue drivers for the business?
• Are there different business units, product lines, or services with unique goals?
• Do some offerings have higher margins, longer sales cycles, or different audiences?
• Are there geographic differences in how the business operates or sells?

These answers should directly inform how your campaigns are structured.

Let’s say you’re managing PPC for a multi-location financial services brand.

Their retail checking accounts, home loans, and business banking products each serve different customers, generate revenue differently, and likely have different internal stakeholders.

Instead of grouping all financial keywords into one campaign, each of those lines should have its own campaign with distinct goals, budgets, and creative.

You can then track performance in a way that lines up with internal reporting and make adjustments based on real business priorities, not just ad metrics.

A Better Framework For Structuring Your Account

Once you have a clear picture of how the business operates, use that to inform a top-down PPC campaign structure.

Here are three starting points that typically work well.

1. Mirror The Business Unit Or P&L

If the business tracks revenue separately for each product or service line, your campaigns should reflect that.

Not only does this make budgeting easier, but it also keeps reporting clean and relevant for internal teams.

You can speak the same language as your stakeholders and clearly show how paid media supports each part of the business.

Here’s an example breakdown:

• Campaign A: “Personal Loans | Search | US”
• Campaign B: “Student Banking | PMax | Northeast”
• Campaign C: “Small Business Lending | Search | Canada”

Each one can then be built with appropriate audience targeting, bidding strategies, and conversion goals.

2. Segment By Funnel Stage Or Intent

Not all keywords or users are created equal. Think about structuring campaigns around the user’s stage in the journey.

Some examples include:

• Branded campaigns (warm leads and returning users).
• Non-branded high-intent campaigns (ready to convert).
• Informational or research-stage campaigns (top-of-funnel).
• Competitor-focused campaigns (comparison shoppers).
• Awareness-driving campaigns (creating demand).

This lets you tailor bid strategy, messaging, and landing pages to match the level of intent and measure success more appropriately.

3. Separate Testing From Scaling

Every account needs room for experimentation. But, testing new keywords, assets, or audiences shouldn’t get in the way of scaling what already works.

A good PPC structure separates out:

• Evergreen campaigns that consistently drive results.
• Test campaigns with new targeting, creative, or offers.
• Seasonal or geo-specific initiatives that need short-term budget support.

This makes it easier to measure impact, allocate budget, and avoid letting unproven elements tank your top-performing campaigns.

For Existing Accounts: When To Rethink Your PPC Structure

If your campaigns have been live for a while, restructuring might feel daunting. But, sometimes a reset is the only way to make your account work smarter.

Here are a few signs it might be time to make a change:

• You can’t easily map campaign performance back to business priorities.
• You’re constantly building workaround reports for internal teams.
• Budget shifts feel reactive instead of strategic.
• Performance has plateaued, but it’s unclear why.

Before making big changes, start with an audit. Compare how the business is structured vs. how your campaigns are organized.

Are your campaigns aligned with revenue-driving units? Do you have enough control over budgets, bids, and assets for key areas?

If not, consider starting small. Choose one business unit or region and restructure those campaigns first.

Document what you changed, how it aligns with the business, and what you’re measuring. Then, repeat the process for other areas as needed.

If You’re Setting Up A New PPC Account, Here’s Where To Start

New accounts are a blank slate and a great opportunity to get it right from the beginning.

Here’s a simple approach to building a structure around your business model:

1. Outline your revenue centers. Products, services, regions, etc. Whatever makes sense for the business.
2. Group campaigns around these core units. Each campaign should have its own budget, goals, and audience strategy.
3. Map audience intent to campaign type. Use ad groups or asset groups to segment further by funnel stage or user behavior.
4. Plan for scale. Use a naming convention that can grow with the business and makes sense to anyone reviewing the account.
5. Set conversion tracking and bidding by campaign type. Not everything should optimize toward the same goal.

This setup makes it easier to scale, test new ideas, and keep everyone from marketing to finance on the same page.

Why Alignment With Sales & Finance Is A Must

When your campaigns align with the business model, it’s easier to speak the language of the teams around you.

Sales wants to know where leads are coming from and how qualified they are. Finance wants to understand return on investment (ROI) by product line or geography.

Executives want to know if paid media is supporting growth in the right areas.

If your campaign structure mirrors the way they already think, the reporting becomes instantly more useful. You’ll spend less time explaining what a campaign does and more time discussing what it’s driving.

When performance is strong, it’s much easier to justify additional investment if you can show that spend ties directly to core business units or revenue goals.

Supporting PPC Structure With The Right Tools And Workflow

Having a smart structure on paper only goes so far. To actually execute and manage it day to day, you need systems that support clarity and consistency.

First, start with naming conventions. A standardized way of naming campaigns, ad groups, and assets helps everyone understand what each item is meant to do.

Include details like business unit, funnel stage, and region to keep things clean and scalable.

Then, align your conversion tracking setup with how the business defines success.

If you’re managing multiple product lines or customer types, don’t lump everything under one conversion goal. Set up separate conversion actions for each key area so you can measure impact more precisely.

Reporting also needs to reflect this structure. Build dashboards that slice performance by business unit, product, geography, or intent stage.

Whether you’re using Looker Studio or a different reporting suite, make sure the views match the way leadership wants to see results.

Don’t forget workflow tools and collaboration. Use shared documents or project management platforms to track which campaigns map to which business outcomes.

Make sure your internal stakeholders understand what each campaign is doing and why. This keeps cross-functional teams aligned and eliminates confusion about what paid media is actually delivering.

Finally, plan regular check-ins to ensure your structure still fits the evolving business.

As product lines shift or priorities change, your campaigns need to reflect that. Structure is not a “set it and forget it” task. Your PPC structure should evolve alongside your business.

It’s Time To Move Past Legacy Structures

Old habits die hard, especially if you’ve been in PPC for years. But, if your campaigns are still organized by match type or broad themes, you’re probably limiting what you can learn and what you can improve.

Campaigns should be built to reflect what matters most to the business.

If you’re not sure where to begin, talk to your sales or finance counterparts. They’ll give you a clearer picture of how the company thinks about performance, and you can structure campaigns to match.

This doesn’t mean throwing out everything you’ve built. But, it does mean stepping back and asking, “Does this structure actually help us measure success and allocate resources in a way that reflects how the business operates?”

If the answer is no, then it’s worth rethinking your setup.

When you take a top-down approach to structuring your campaigns, your PPC program becomes more than just a lead or sales generator. It becomes a strategic driver for the business.

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How CMOs Can Use Conversion Tracking & Attribution For Smarter Paid Media Strategy via @sejournal, @MenachemAni

For chief marketing officers of retail brands and businesses, knowing which channels and campaigns deserve the marketing budget can directly impact the success and length of their tenure.

But in today’s omnichannel environment of walled gardens, customers engage with your campaigns (and other assets) multiple times before converting.

Since there is no perfect conversion tracking or attribution, you need a system to decide where to spend your money.

Too many marketers still rely on outdated or overly complex attribution models, incomplete data, or pure guesswork.

Common side effects include over-investing in either the upper or lower funnel, while underfunding channels and campaigns that balance demand generation and demand capture.

In this article, we’ll break down how CMOs and marketing leaders can use conversion tracking and attribution data to:

• Understand true channel performance.
• Make better budget decisions.
• Improve full-funnel efficiency.

Conversion Tracking In Google Ads: Limitations & Blind Spots

Running a Google Ads or paid media campaign without native conversion tracking is asking for trouble.

Not only will your account operate with blinders that prevent the system from finding improvements and patterns, but you won’t also have any in-platform metrics to measure your own database against.

I also see some accounts can take several weeks for reporting data to be attributed fully, primarily because of the click-to-purchase duration.

Google may not be fully accurate with all metrics, but you want it to understand what actions are meaningful to your business.

Lead Generation

• Online conversion actions: form fill, chat, phone call.
• Offline conversion stages: qualified lead, converted lead.
• Support tools: WhatConverts, HubSpot, or other CRM to track lead data + Zapier for connectivity.

With leads, there is a challenge in terms of reconciling what is recorded online and what happens outside of the Google ecosystem.

Google’s system knows it got you a certain number of form fills, chats, or calls. It needs to know how many of those were good quality leads. How many of those went on to become actual sales?

That would lead you to create a “next step” in the process, such as qualified leads, and feed this back into Google. You can also then bid against those or use them as observations, but they will be in the system as a positive funnel event.

Read more: Building A Lead Generation Plan

Ecommerce

• Online conversion actions: purchase, add to cart.
• Offline conversion stages: subscriber, repeat buyer.
• Support tools: Shopify to track returns, exchanges, etc.

For ecommerce, it’s typically a lot simpler to track the right events, but it’s trickier to rate their value to the business.

Google can record purchase transactions as an event, but it lacks your backend data on which locations have the fewest returns or exchanges, which products lead to higher rates of subscription and repeat purchases, and what each product’s margin is.

If you’re using Shopify, they have a Google and YouTube app that does pretty much all the heavy lifting you need to do to link the two platforms and track ecommerce sales.

How To Use Performance Data To Fuel Better Marketing Investments

“I know which channels and campaigns are providing the best ROI” is verbal gold for a CMO.

Being able to quantify the impact of where they spend their marketing budget positions them to make smarter decisions and increase their value to the business that employs them.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Here are some ways to think through the more common hurdles that get in your way as a marketing leader.

Thinking Through In-Platform Attribution

Once you set up tracking and make sure you’re getting good performance data in, you can use it to inform attribution and omnichannel strategy.

My methodology is different from how many marketers approach this. I’m of the mind that attribution is not something that can be fully solved, and over-relying on third-party tools will set you in the wrong direction because they all have different biases.

Certain tools can’t see the actual power of YouTube, for example.

One study by Haus showed that YouTube in-platform reporting is three times less than what they see. So many third-party attribution tools can’t see view-through or engagement data for YouTube, so they end up with a higher-than-ideal margin of error on the reporting.

Some other tools can see the click and view attribution for Meta, but only click attribution for Google. What I like to do is optimize each campaign in-platform based on that platform’s data.

Handling Conflicting Attribution Data

When we come across situations where different platforms show us conflicting attribution data, we use overall sales reports and tools like TripleWhale or Northbeam to help validate that data.

This helps us understand directionally, if we put another 20% of our budget into a specific campaign type, how does that impact the overall revenue?

It’s really about looking at blended numbers – some people call it media efficiency rate (MER) or blended return on ad spend (ROAS) – to see how that data changes over time with different campaign and marketing changes.

We use this to allocate budget according to what really moves the needle as far as revenue and profit are concerned. This is much better than just relying on what a platform tells you.

With lead generation, this is less of a problem because most lead form fills happen pretty quickly after the initial click.

If the user submits the form on the same page they landed on, you will very likely capture UTM and GCLID parameters.

For lead gen, we typically look to verify that the number of leads in the customer relationship management (CRM) is within 10% of what Google attributes to itself.

Point Of Diminishing Returns: Why All Growth Stalls

One thing many people forget is that with visibility and success in digital advertising, you pay a price in terms of incremental headroom.

In other words, you have much more untapped opportunity at 30% impression share than you do at 85%. Getting from 30% to 85% is going to probably be much less expensive than going from 85% to 90%.

If you look at Google Ads’ own attribution, there’s a finite amount of headroom with Search and Shopping.

Once you hit the top of that, it usually tapers off somewhere between 70-80%, and you’ve got to start finding other campaigns/platforms to start feeding the funnel. That could be other Google properties (like YouTube) or channels like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Fortunately, Google is now starting the rollout to show you this data for Performance Max in addition to Search and Shopping. This means you can take advantage of benefits like finding new advertising opportunities while still applying optimization tactics that you’re used to.

The other thing that’s really important, especially for newer advertisers, is not to expect the same performance from every campaign type.

People who have been around the block in PPC know, for example, that a 5x ROAS on branded search is realistic, but for YouTube, it might be 1x or even less.

You need to be okay with that, as long as you can get all the numbers to line up in terms of your total costs versus total revenue and margin.

Good Strategy Is Always Built On Clear Business Goals

Conversion tracking and attribution are essential parts of the CMO toolkit, but they mean little without the skill and literacy to interpret performance data in the context of a business.

If we were to sum up the most important part of this thought process, it would be:

• Native platform tracking is crucial, but it’s only one part of the puzzle. Feed meaningful business outcomes back to the ad platforms to improve performance over time.
• No attribution model is perfect. Treat attribution as directional rather than as an absolute, and be cautious about over-relying on third-party insights as they have their own blind spots.
• Use blended metrics and cross-platform validation to make strategic choices based on actual business needs and financial goals, not just the metrics that one channel reports.
• Recognize diminishing returns as you scale inside one platform and diversify intelligently across multiple channels to maintain growth.

Ultimately, your ability to optimize campaigns hinges on a central, unbiased source of truth that isn’t influenced by the incentives of any single ad platform.

Google or Meta are businesses built to serve their own business objectives and those of their shareholders, which don’t always align with those of your business.

By owning your data and attribution strategy, you set your brand up to make smarter, more confident marketing investments instead of pinning all your hopes on a long shot that’s rarely (if ever) accurate.

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Why Brand Advertising Matters For Paid Media Performance via @sejournal, @iambenwood

The twin forces of disrupted attribution and changing user behavior are reshaping how audiences discover brands.

Google’s mass rollout of AI Overviews and its experimental AI Mode are not surface-level UX tweaks; they represent a fundamental transformation of the search experience – one that compresses the journey from query to answer.

PPC is now a more competitive, constrained, and less predictable environment.

If Google is effectively skipping traditional landing pages in certain query classes, by serving direct answers, the margin for interrupting or influencing a user shrinks dramatically.

If you are not building a brand that people proactively seek out – or that AI systems actively reference – you are playing an increasingly expensive, inefficient game.

Brand Advertising Isn’t Brand Bidding

First, let’s define the terms clearly, as this distinction is often misunderstood in performance marketing circles.

Brand advertising refers to any paid activity designed to build awareness, familiarity, and positive association with your brand.

The primary objective isn’t immediate conversion; it’s to create a demand and a pipeline that your lower-funnel activities can later capture.

By contrast, brand bidding occurs when someone already knows your brand and actively searches for it.

Bidding on your own brand terms in Google Ads or Bing ensures you’re visible when that existing demand materialises – but it’s harvesting, not creating demand.

Brand advertising builds the mental availability that ensures your brand is considered when a user enters a buying journey. Brand bidding simply captures people who were already predisposed to choose you.

Both are important, but confusing the two leads to systemic underinvestment in activities that generate future growth.

In longer buying cycles, particularly in B2B, high-ticket B2C, and considered-purchase categories, persistent brand presence is critical.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute consistently shows that memory structures built over time have a powerful impact on future buying decisions.

Furthermore, research points to the fact that if you’re not already on someone’s shortlist before they start looking for a solution, you’re unlikely to be chosen vs. those brands who are.

Image from author (research by Google x Bain Consulting), April 2025

When the balance between brand and performance activity is right, each amplifies the other, creating what is called the Multiplier Effect, a virtuous cycle where brand-driven demand lowers cost-per-acquisition (CPA), improves Quality Scores, and enhances overall media efficiency.

The Advertising ‘Doom Loop’

Despite its proven impact, brand advertising remains chronically underfunded in performance-led organisations. Why?

In part, because it doesn’t fit neatly into short-term attribution models. Brand activity often influences outcomes weeks or months later, in ways that are difficult to measure through traditional last-click frameworks.

This measurement gap creates what WARC calls the “Advertising Doom Loop.” Here’s how it unfolds:

1. Advertisers focus disproportionately on easily measurable performance channels, such as paid search.
2. Brand-building budgets are cut because they lack immediate, attributable return on investment (ROI) in platforms like Google Analytics 4.
3. As brand equity erodes, acquisition costs rise and conversion rates fall.
4. To compensate, advertisers double down on short-term tactics, further starving brand investment.
5. The cycle repeats, gradually eroding long-term growth potential.

This loop is not theoretical. It’s been observed repeatedly across sectors and is backed by large-scale research studies and documented in a recent WARC study.

The brands that escape the doom loop understand that marketing is interconnected.

Short-term sales activation delivers immediate returns, but brand building provides compound growth over time, lowering customer acquisition costs (CACs), increasing customer loyalty, and insulating against category volatility.

Ignoring brand advertising might look efficient quarter-to-quarter, but over a multi-year horizon, it is a recipe for brand decline.

Why Brand Interest Is Your Most Defensible Asset

In a world of AI-curated answers and zero-click behavior, one channel remains relatively stable: branded search interest.

When a user types your name, your product, or your branded category term into Google, you control the narrative. These searches are:

• Cheaper than competitive generic terms.
• Higher converting, often by a factor of 2x or more.
• Less vulnerable to displacement by AI Overviews, as of current observation (which still reference brand entities prominently).

At Hallam, we’ve seen this play out across multiple paid search accounts.

Brands with stronger brand search volumes and higher unaided awareness consistently achieve lower CPAs, better Quality Scores, and more efficient media performance across both search and display.

The impact of running brand advertising campaigns on search demand and clicks for one of our clients (Image from author, April 2025)

This shows the compounding value that brand equity brings to lower-funnel paid media campaigns.

Measurement Solutions

One of the biggest challenges performance marketers face today is how to measure the impact of brand campaigns.

Marketers must treat brand search volume, direct traffic trends, and assisted conversions as leading indicators of paid media effectiveness.

If your top-of-funnel strategy includes YouTube, connected TV, or programmatic display, shifts in these upstream metrics are early signals of success, even before conversions materialize.

For example, metrics that directly track interest in your brand, such as share of search, have been proven to be leading indicators of market share.

Moreover, investment in econometric modeling, brand uplift studies, and incrementality testing will become critical tools for understanding the true impact of marketing spend and providing a holistic view of performance as we move into the future.

When And How To Get Started

If paid search is becoming more competitive and less reliable for visibility, the logical response is to rebalance your media mix, and that starts with brand.

1. Run Paid Media To Uplift Brand Search Volume

Don’t just optimize for direct conversions. Optimize for subsequent branded search. YouTube, connected TV, and upper-funnel Meta campaigns can all drive brand interest that pays off later through more efficient search activity.

Tracking this means looking beyond last-click. Use view-through conversions, uplift studies, and brand search volume trends to measure the impact.

2. Invest In Non-Google Surfaces

A diversified paid media strategy is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential. That includes:

• YouTube Shorts and creator content to build brand relevance.
• Programmatic display and native ads on publisher sites may support discoverability
• Paid partnerships and sponsorships that build reputation across the web.

These touchpoints feed awareness, and could also contribute to the knowledge graph and large language models (LLMs).

3. Align PPC With SEO To Influence AI Outputs

Yes, SEO still plays a role, but performance marketers should work alongside organic teams to ensure:

• Branded pages are structured correctly for AI inclusion.
• Top-performing PPC assets (e.g., headlines, product descriptions) are reflected in organic content.
• Messaging consistency across paid and organic channels supports brand memorability.

Final Thoughts

Clicks are now harder to win. Impressions are becoming more expensive. And digital attribution data is increasingly unreliable.

In this environment, the brands that thrive will be the ones that people search for by name, that AI references unprompted, and that exist in the user’s mind long before they type anything at all.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when paid media stops acting like a demand-harvesting function and starts behaving like a brand growth engine.

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