Right now your Google Ads account probably feels more like a junk drawer than a system.

Maybe you inherited it. Maybe you built it yourself over a few years, adding layers each time something felt broken. Either way, you've ended up with five hundred to fifteen hundred keywords sprayed across dozens of ad groups, multiple match types for the same term living in different places, and long-tail campaigns that were supposed to unlock hidden intent but mostly just steal traffic from your main campaigns.

Broad match is its own special anxiety. Either it burns your budget on curiosity traffic and you spend the month explaining CPAs to a client, or it scares you enough that you avoid it entirely and wonder if you're leaving volume on the table.

Every month the same patterns show up. A fifth of your spend goes to keywords that never quite prove themselves. Your long-tail and "smart" layers don't obviously add volume, but they definitely add confusion. Search terms you love keep showing up in the wrong campaign, or fighting your other campaigns for the same budget. And when performance wobbles, you're genuinely not sure which lever to pull. Do you pause keywords? Merge campaigns? Split more? Kill broad? Add more broad?

Most days you're reacting to noise instead of operating a system you actually trust.

And then there's the client problem. Somewhere along the way, clients and bosses started equating "lots of keywords" and "complex structure" with expertise. So when you do want to simplify, you worry they'll think you're doing less work or dumbing things down. You end up maintaining structures you no longer believe in, just to avoid the conversation.

The frustrating part is that you already know something is wrong. You can feel it in the way the account resists your changes, or the way you hesitate before touching anything. What's harder to see is exactly what to do instead.

Here's what it looks like when it works.

You open an account and immediately see how the whole thing fits together. Not seven overlapping campaigns with mystery layers you're afraid to touch. Instead, a small intentional set of campaigns, each with a clear job. Ad groups built around tight intent themes rather than random keyword piles. A deliberate place for brand, non-brand, competitor, discovery, and whatever role you've decided DSA or PMax should play. A structure you could sketch on a napkin and have a client understand in two minutes.

You can point to exactly where new volume is supposed to come from and where efficiency is supposed to be protected. You can say with confidence: these twelve keywords are doing real work, these two hundred are optional, and those three hundred need to go.

When performance dips, you're not randomly poking at bids and budgets hoping something improves. You're asking a real diagnostic question: is this a signal problem (tracking, conversion quality, data volume), a structure problem (cannibalization, thin ad groups), or just normal variance? And you know what to do in each case.

The account feels signal-rich instead of clutter-rich. Smart bidding actually has enough data to learn, instead of chasing ghosts across fifteen underfed campaigns. You still do detailed, thoughtful work, but it lives where it actually matters now: positioning, conversion definitions, negatives and routing, creative and landing pages. The structure becomes a quiet asset that supports your decisions instead of a constant source of anxiety.

The difference between that account and the one you're managing right now isn't access to better tools or a bigger budget. It's a mental model. A clear way to think about what belongs where, why campaigns exist, and how the machine learning underneath it all actually works.

That's what Signal-Rich Structures is about.

It's a free, self-paced course for freelance Google Ads managers and in-house PPCs who are done with spray-and-pray structures and want a modern, ML-compatible way to think about campaigns, keywords, and match types.

The course starts with how Google Ads actually routes queries today, which turns out to be quite different from the mental model most people are still using. You'll understand why over-segmentation quietly kills smart bidding performance, and when splitting campaigns is actually the right call. You'll get three reference architectures you can use as starting points for local lead gen, B2B lead gen, and simple ecom accounts. And you'll work through a practical process for refactoring inherited SKAG and phrase-soup accounts into a small number of signal-rich campaigns without tanking performance in the process.

By the end, you'll be able to open any account and see what's working, what's redundant, what's actively fragmenting your data, and what a cleaner version would look like. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a concrete set of changes you could start making next week.

No guru hacks, no fluff. Just a modern, reality-checked way to architect Google Ads so both you and the algorithm can do your jobs.