Campaign Strategy

Campaign Strategy Campaign strategy is one of those things I think you can study endlessly and still find yourself staring at a dashboard that is not quite doing what you planned, and I will admit that has happened to me more times than I would like. These posts are my attempt to work through what I keep coming back to, and I hope something here helps you build campaigns that actually reflect the thinking behind them. What I find most interesting about campaign strategy in 2026 is how much the job has changed shape without actually becoming easier. The manual levers we used to pull have been replaced or automated away, smart bidding has absorbed the bid-setting work, match types no longer mean what their names say, and Performance Max has made it genuinely harder to know which part of the account is doing what. And yet the underlying strategic questions, which audiences deserve which investment, how do you separate upper funnel from lower funnel thinking, how do you know when you're scaling profitably versus just scaling, are the same questions they have always been. The tools changed. The thinking required hasn't. A lot of what gets called campaign strategy in our industry is really campaign structure, which is a related but different thing. Structure is how you organize campaigns, ad groups, asset groups, and budget allocations in the account. Strategy is the thinking underneath that, the why behind the what. The best-structured account in the world underperforms if the strategy driving it is wrong, and a strategically sound plan can survive imperfect structure better than a beautifully organized account can survive a flawed strategic foundation. We try to write about both here, because I think they're worth separating. We also try to be specific rather than general, because I've found that "it depends" is almost always true and almost never useful. The more interesting question is, what does it depend on, and how do you actually figure out which answer applies to your situation? That's the kind of writing I'm trying to do in these posts, working through the conditions under which one approach makes sense over another, rather than presenting a framework as if it works the same way for every account. Some of what you'll find here is evergreen thinking about how to approach campaign decisions. Some of it is more reactive, working through specific changes Google and Microsoft have made and what they actually mean for how you build and manage accounts. And some of it is genuinely exploratory, thinking out loud about where things seem to be heading and what that might mean for the work we do. I try to be clear about which is which, because they deserve to be read differently. Pull up a post that matches where you're stuck. That's what this section is for.