Google campaign brief

This page is a workbook. Fill it in top to bottom before anything is built in Google Ads. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown explaining what the section is for. The dropdowns explain the thinking; the decision is yours.

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Setup

Concept review: Setup

The product row is what lets a report answer “what did we spend on Analytics Pro?” without someone reading campaign names and guessing. It is filled from the product catalog rather than typed, because a product identifier invented here is a value no dictionary recognizes and no report can group by.The two account rows exist for a narrower reason. A shared budget or a portfolio bid strategy set at account level silently overrides what this brief says about budget and bidding, and the override is invisible from inside the campaign. Recording that none apply takes a moment; discovering one applies after two weeks of unexplained pacing takes considerably longer.

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Campaign type

Which Google campaign type, and why this one? Google campaign types, as of 7 August 2026:

Concept review: Campaign type

Campaign type is the largest decision in this brief, because it sets what the campaign can be optimized toward, which assets it needs, and which report it can be compared against. A Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign chasing the same conversion action are not two versions of one thing; they buy different demand at different points and will not produce comparable cost per result.The “why this type” line is what keeps the choice reviewable. Performance Max in particular gets picked because it is the default recommendation rather than because the campaign has the asset coverage and conversion volume it needs, and that reasoning is invisible three months later unless someone wrote it down.

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Conversion goal

What counts as a result, and which goal is the campaign optimizing toward?

Concept review: Conversion goal

Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever is marked primary. That makes the primary and secondary split the single most consequential tracking decision in a Google campaign, and it is set in a place most people never open.Naming the conversion action against the event tracking plan is what keeps Google’s reported conversions reconcilable with your analytics. Google counts conversions by click date and applies its own attribution model, so the numbers will not match your dashboard exactly. They should still be explainable, and that is only possible when both sides agree on what the event is.

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Budget and bid strategy

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How Google spends a daily budget

Google treats the daily budget as an average, not a cap, and the arithmetic catches people out at exactly the moment they check spend for the first time.

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Conversion volume a bid strategy needs

A target strategy set below these thresholds does not throw an error. It delivers erratically, which reads as a targeting or creative problem rather than a bidding one. Google’s guidance, as of 7 August 2026: If the budget cannot buy that volume: E.g. Launch on Maximize conversions, review at 30 days, switch to Target CPA once the campaign clears 30 conversions in a rolling 30-day window. Google bid strategies, as of 7 August 2026:

Concept review: Budget and bid strategy

A target-based strategy needs conversion volume to work with. Set a target on a campaign that converts a handful of times a month and the system has too little signal to bid against, which shows up as erratic delivery rather than as an obvious error. Starting on a maximize strategy and moving to a target once volume is steady is the usual sequence, and worth writing down as a plan rather than leaving to be noticed later.The thresholds above are the reason the budget and the bid strategy have to be decided together rather than in sequence. A budget is not “enough” in the abstract; it is enough for a particular target CPA and a particular strategy, and the same number can clear the bar at one CPA and fall well short at another. Running the multiplication before launch is what turns “we have $5,000” into a decision about which strategy the campaign can actually support.Budget and bid strategy also interact after launch. A campaign that is budget-limited behaves differently from one that is target-limited, and the two get diagnosed differently. Recording both values here means the next person can tell which constraint was actually binding.Where there is no history to set a target from, and no control to test against, the spend is buying information rather than results. That is a pilot, and it wants a read date and a kill or scale rule set in advance rather than a target it has no basis for.

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Campaign structure

What ad groups or asset groups does this campaign contain, and what is each one for? One row per group. The name and the utm_content value are filled in here, not at build time, because every group getting the same tag is the most common way a campaign organized around three groups reports as one.

Concept review: Campaign structure

On Search, an ad group is a promise that the keywords inside it are close enough in intent to share one set of ads. Groups that drift wide force the ads to be generic, which weakens both relevance and the landing page match.On Performance Max and Demand Gen the equivalent unit is the asset group, and the same logic applies to audience signals and creative rather than keywords. In both cases the “what it proves” column keeps a group accountable to a stated purpose instead of surviving on habit.The utm_content column sits in this table rather than in the tracking section for a practical reason: it is the only place where every group is listed at once, which is where a duplicate or a missing value is actually visible. Filling it in three sections later, one group at a time, is how three ad groups end up sharing one tag.

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Targeting

Match type policy (Search and Shopping): E.g. Exact and phrase only. Broad off until CPA is stable for two consecutive months. Audience signals (Performance Max and Demand Gen): E.g. Customer Match list plus site visitors 180d, used as a signal not a restriction. Negative keyword lists applied: E.g. “DL standing negatives” (account-level shared list, owned by Tom Reyes) plus a campaign-level list for competitor terms.

Concept review: Targeting

Match type is a spend-control decision as much as a targeting one, which is why it belongs in a brief that gets reviewed. Broad match with a target-based bid strategy can work well and can also spend a budget on queries nobody would have chosen, and which of those happens depends on conversion signal quality rather than on the setting alone.Audience signals on Performance Max and Demand Gen are not the same as targeting. They tell the system where to start looking, and it will go beyond them. Writing down which they are prevents the common misreading that a signal has restricted delivery when it has not.Negatives are named here as lists rather than as keywords for a reason worth stating. A negative typed into one campaign protects one campaign; the same term typed into four campaigns by four people, spelled three ways, protects none of them reliably and cannot be audited. A shared list applied by name is one object to maintain and one row to check. See campaign structure best practices for the working default.

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Assets, creative, and copy

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Responsive search ads

Concept review: Responsive search ads

Pinning trades performance for control. Google rates ad strength partly on how many combinations it can test, so every pinned position narrows that set, and the rating drops. That trade is often worth making and sometimes has to be made, which is why the field asks for the reason rather than just the position.The link to legal review is the part that is easy to miss. A claim approved on the condition that a qualifier runs alongside it is not approved if the qualifier can be dropped from the combination, and nothing in the platform will flag that. Where an approval carries a condition, the pin is what implements it.How many ads a group runs is a media buying decision, not a framework one. What the brief pins down is that the number was chosen, that each ad has a name that follows the convention, and that each filled template was filed. Three copies of one template with no names is how an ad ends up in a report that nobody can trace to an approved document.

Concept review: Assets, creative, and copy

Performance Max and Demand Gen judge a campaign partly on asset coverage. Missing a ratio or a logo size does not produce an error; it produces a campaign that cannot serve on the placements those assets would have unlocked, which reads as weak performance rather than as a missing file.Search has the opposite failure mode. Its assets are cheap to produce, so the risk is headlines written at the keyboard during setup rather than briefed and approved. Both routes end with copy that never went through the copy brief, and both show up later as ads nobody can trace to a decision.

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Naming and tracking

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UTMs

Build these from the UTM standards before any URL goes anywhere. Values come from the names above, not from a fresh description of the campaign. Full tagged URL, one per ad group: https://doughnutlabs.com/lp/fresh-batch-trial?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid_search&utm_campaign=Google-FBS-Search-Trial-tCPA-DAPRO-TOFU&utm_content=20260401-KW-REPORTAUTO&utm_term={keyword}

Concept review: Naming and tracking

Google auto-tagging adds a gclid that links a click to Google Ads reporting. It does not populate the utm_source and utm_medium fields your own analytics groups by, which is why most accounts run both. Recording the decision here prevents the recurring argument about whether manual tags are redundant.The three naming levels do the same job on Google as anywhere else: they let a report group spend by product, offer, funnel position, or creative type rather than only by the campaign it sat in.Auto-applied recommendations sit in this section because of what they do to everything above it. Left on, Google can rewrite ad copy, add keywords, and change the bid strategy without anyone approving the change, which means the value in this brief and the value running in the account quietly stop matching. Which recommendations are on is the media buyer’s call and is out of scope for this framework to decide. Whether anyone knows is not: an unrecorded answer is how a reviewed brief becomes a description of a campaign that no longer exists.

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Experiment

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Measurement

Where this campaign is reported: E.g. Paid media dashboard, rolled into the weekly report

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Post-launch

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Related resources

• Launching a Google campaign The process this brief runs on.
• Search theme brief One per ad group on Search, filled in after this brief fixes the structure.
• Google pre-launch checklist The pass to run before setting live.
• Marketing campaign brief The parent brief this one sits under.
• Image and video specs and the Google copy templates.
• Event tracking plan Where the conversion action is defined.
• Campaign library Where this brief is filed.