How do you structure campaigns for multiple products?

How do you structure campaigns for multiple products? Running ads for a store with 6 different product categories. Each category has its own margin, its own audience, its own search intent. Right now I have one campaign per category. Starting to wonder if this is the right approach or if I should consolidate.

Google's smart bidding supposedly works better with more data in one campaign. But mixing different product types with different CPAs feels wrong.
How do you structure accounts with multiple product lines? One campaign per product, one per category, or everything in one campaign with ad groups?

Fun_bitesX03 said:

How do you structure campaigns for multiple products? Running ads for a store with 6 different product categories. Each category has its own margin, its own audience, its own search intent. Right now I have one campaign per category. Starting to wonder if this is the right approach or if I should consolidate.

Google's smart bidding supposedly works better with more data in one campaign. But mixing different product types with different CPAs feels wrong.
How do you structure accounts with multiple product lines? One campaign per product, one per category, or everything in one campaign with ad groups?

Click to expand...

Don’t merge all 6 categories into one campaign just to give Smart Bidding more data.
It may get more volume, but it will optimize for the average result, not necessarily profit.

Best rule:

One campaign = one business objective / economics.

Click to expand...

Keep campaigns separate when categories have different:
margins
target CPA
target ROAS
budget priority
seasonality
search intent

Combine categories only when they have similar:

margins
product prices
CPA/ROAS
targetssearch intent
and each category alone has too little conversion volume

I’d avoid both extremes:

not 1 campaign per product
not everything in one campaign
A better setup is usually 2–4 campaign clusters:

1. High-margin / priority products
2. Core catalog / average margin
3. Low-margin / strict ROAS
4. New or test categories

Use ad groups or asset groups inside those campaigns for the individual categories.

Main idea: don’t mix products with very different margins under the same bidding strategy, unless you’re passing accurate conversion value or profit-based value into Google Ads.

A common approach is one campaign per category when products have different audiences, margins, or CPA targets. Consolidate only when goals and performance targets are similar enough to benefit from shared data. Keep campaign structure aligned with business objectives, not just automation.

I do different ad groups.

I usually keep separate campaigns for categories with different margins or CPA goals, and only combine them when the audience, search intent, and performance targets are very similar.

I usually create a separate campaign for each product. If the products are closely related, I’ll run them within the same campaign and use a different ad for each product.

I usually do one campaign per category, keeps CPA clean, and then use ad groups for each product. Lets smart bidding get enough data without mixing very different margins.

My suggestion is to structure campaigns around business goals, not product count. If categories need different ROAS targets, keep them separate.

keep them separate bro bcoz margins and cpas are totally different, smart bidding will mess up if u mix high and low margin items in one campaign

When running ads, if I have multiple products to promote, I usually separate them into different campaigns. This makes it easier to track performance and evaluate the effectiveness of each product individually.

I usually keep separate campaigns per category so I can control budget and CPA properly since mixing different products in one campaign makes results messy

Shechkov's answer covers the logic well. I'll add the practical side from running a lot of campaigns simultaneously.

your instinct is correct — don't consolidate when margins differ. Here's the reason it breaks in practice: when you put high-margin and low-margin categories in the same campaign, Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever converts easiest, not whatever makes you the most money. If your low-margin category has 3x the conversion volume of your high-margin one, the algorithm feeds budget there by default. You end up scaling your worst business.

the data poooling argument Google pushes (one big campaign gets smarter faster) only holds when your products have similar economics. If a $200 CPA is great for category A but terrible for category B, pooled data actively misleads the algorithm.

what actually works at scale: separate campaigns per margin band, not per product. So instead of 6 campaigns for 6 categories, you might end up with 3 — high margin, mid margin, low margin — with ad groups inside each for the specific categories. This gives Smart Bidding enough pooled data within each budget tier while keeping the economics clean.

the other thing worth knowing: if any individual campaign is below 30 conversions per month, Smart Bidding is basically guessing. In that case consolidating into margin bands helps because you hit the data threshold faster. Once you're above that threshold per campaign, split them back out.

structure follows economics, not product count.