How campaigns, ad groups, and settings work together — the structural decisions that determine whether a Search account scales cleanly or becomes an unmanageable mess.
Campaign structure is the part of Google Ads that doesn't get enough attention until something goes wrong. I've inherited accounts where everything — all products, all locations, all audience types — was lumped into a single campaign with one ad group. The result is always the same: no budget control, no meaningful reporting, and Smart Bidding with nothing useful to work from. Getting structure right from the start is what separates accounts that are easy to scale from ones that need to be rebuilt from scratch. Here's what the exam tests on this topic, with the real reasoning behind each answer.
A foundational question that the exam uses to establish your understanding of how the platform is organised before testing more nuanced settings.
Correct answer: B. Account → Campaign → Ad Group → Ad
The hierarchy flows from Account at the top, down to Campaigns (where budget, bidding strategy, network, and location settings live), then Ad Groups (which group related keywords and ads together), and finally individual Ads. Understanding this structure matters practically because settings set at the campaign level apply to everything below it — a location targeting mistake at campaign level affects every ad group and every ad inside it.
This is a classic exam trap question — and a real-world mistake I see in almost every account I audit for the first time.
Correct answer: B. Google Display Network
When you create a Search campaign, Google opts you into the Display Network by default. This means your Search ads and budget can serve on Display placements unless you manually uncheck the option. I turn this off on every single Search campaign I set up. Search and Display have completely different intent signals, CPCs, and conversion patterns — mixing them makes it impossible to analyse performance accurately or allocate budget intelligently.
Location targeting has two distinct options that the exam tests precisely — and that matter enormously in local campaigns.
Correct answer: B. Presence — people in or regularly in your targeted location
Google's default location targeting option is "Presence or interest," which includes users who are searching about a location even if they're physically elsewhere. For a local business that can only serve customers in a specific city, this setting wastes budget on users who can never become customers. I always switch this to "Presence" for local campaigns — it's one of the first settings I check in any audit of a location-sensitive account.
Ad group organisation directly impacts Quality Score, ad relevance, and reporting clarity.
Correct answer: B. Group keywords by theme so that ads within the ad group are highly relevant to all keywords in that group
Tightly themed ad groups — where every keyword in the group is closely related and the ad copy speaks directly to that theme — consistently produce better Quality Scores and lower CPCs. When I restructure an account, I break large, mixed ad groups into smaller themed ones. The work takes time upfront but it pays off immediately in ad relevance scores and CTR, especially for RSAs where headline relevance to keywords matters.
A settings-level question that tests your understanding of where budget control actually lives in the account.
Correct answer: B. Daily budget
The daily budget is set at the campaign level and caps how much Google can spend on that campaign per day — though in practice Google can spend up to twice the daily budget on high-traffic days, balancing it out over the month so total spend doesn't exceed the monthly equivalent. This is why I always recommend setting campaigns up with separate budgets where goals differ — a branded campaign and a generic Search campaign should never share a budget, because the branded campaign will almost always win on efficiency and drain everything before the generic campaign gets a chance.
Is your campaign structure working against you? Poorly organised ad groups, mixed networks, and wrong location settings are some of the most common — and fixable — issues I find in account audits.
Request an Audit →