Google Ads account structure for maritime services

The default Google Ads account most maritime businesses inherit from a generalist agency looks like this: one campaign called “Search”, three ad groups called “Brand”, “Services” and “Generic”. Forty keywords in each ad group on broad match. It spends, it reports clicks and it tells you almost nothing about which parts of your offer are working.

A maritime services account needs a structure that respects how technical superintendents, fleet directors and procurement leads actually search. They search by vessel type, by region, by class society and by very specific service language (“ballast water treatment retrofit”, not “marine equipment”).

Campaign-level splits that actually matter

Three splits explain most of the structural decisions in a well-built maritime account.

• Service line. Technical management, crewing, drydock project management, retrofit engineering, surveying, equipment supply. These are different buyers with different cycles. They should not share a budget pool.
• Vessel segment. Tanker, bulker, container, offshore support, gas, ferries, yachts. The CPCs vary by a factor of three or more across these. A blended bid strategy will systematically over-spend on the cheap segments and under-bid on the expensive ones.
• Geography, where it changes the offer. Singapore, Rotterdam, Piraeus, Houston, Dubai. If you operate from one yard or one office, geography is a setting on the campaign. If you operate from several with genuinely different capabilities, it is its own campaign.

A mid-sized ship management business covering tanker and bulker tonnage from two regional offices typically ends up with eight to fourteen search campaigns. Not three, not forty. A marine equipment manufacturer with five product families serving newbuild and aftermarket tends to land closer to twenty.

Ad group construction

Inside each campaign, ad groups should map to buyer intent, not keyword variants.

For a technical management campaign on tanker tonnage, useful ad groups look like this:

• Crude tanker technical management
• Product tanker technical management
• Chemical tanker technical management
• VLCC technical management
• Suezmax technical management

Each of those ad groups holds five to fifteen exact and phrase match keywords. Each one has an ad copy block that mentions the vessel type explicitly. Each one points at a landing page section that addresses that segment’s class issues, trading patterns and typical pain points.

Generic “tanker” or “shipping” ad groups should not exist in a serious maritime account. The volumes are too noisy and the conversion intent is too thin.

What to put at the account level

• Negative keyword lists, applied across every campaign. Maritime accounts need three of them: career and employment terms, academic and journalism terms and irrelevant industry terms. We have written about the specifics elsewhere.
• Conversion actions, defined once and tagged with values. Form fills, qualified leads (after sales review), shortlist invitations, RFQs received. Not just “form submission”.
• Audience signals from your CRM, uploaded as customer match lists. Existing customers, lost deals, prospect lists. These feed both targeting and exclusion.

What to keep out of the structure

Performance Max sitting alongside a tightly built search account will eat into the search campaigns and report inflated returns from queries that would have come through search anyway. Most maritime accounts under £15,000 monthly spend should not run Performance Max at all. The volumes do not justify the loss of query-level visibility.

Similarly, Display network expansion on search campaigns (“include Google Display partners”) should be off by default. The display inventory available to maritime buyers is mostly the same banner farms that serve every B2B sector and the conversion rates do not survive the click prices.

Why structure compounds

A clean account structure is the difference between a paid media programme that compounds learning every quarter and one that resets every time someone new looks at it. Build it for the way maritime buyers actually search, not the way Google’s onboarding wizard suggests.