Why campaign structure is the foundation of control over Bol ads

Short description: No control over your bids. No idea which product is burning through budget. No overview of what is actually advertising. That is the reality for most Bol sellers. And it all starts with a poor campaign structure. In this article, we explain how to fix it, step by step.

If you feel like your ads are going in all directions, that you are adjusting your bids but nothing seems to change, or that you simply have no idea which products are burning through budget, then there is a good chance the problem is not your bids. It is your structure.

Many sellers who come to us for a baseline assessment show the same pattern. A pile of automatic campaigns, a handful of manual ones, multiple products mixed together in one ad group, and no clear naming convention. The result: a dashboard full of data you can do little with.

In this article, we explain why campaign structure is the foundation of everything you do afterward, how to set it up properly, and what it delivers.

What goes wrong with a poor structure

The most common mistake is putting multiple products into one campaign or ad group. That may seem organized, but structurally it turns out badly.

The first problem is that you completely lose control over your bids. Suppose you have five products in one campaign. You increase the bid on a keyword by 20%. That then applies immediately to all five products at once. While product A has an ACOS of 10% on that keyword and product B has an ACOS of 30%. One product you want to scale up, the other you want to slow down. But you cannot manage them separately.

The second problem is that Bol does not technically show you which clicks belong to which product when they are in the same campaign. You know what is being spent in total and what is being sold in total. Everything in between is a blind spot.

And in that blind spot are products that have been losing money month after month, without you noticing.

The right structure: one product, one campaign

The structure we use is clear: one campaign per product. Every keyword in that campaign belongs to that product. Every click, every euro, and every result is directly traceable to one product.

That sounds like more work. But it gives you something back that you will never have with a messy structure: control. You know exactly what is happening per product, where the money is going, and where you can scale or need to intervene.

Naming is not a detail

Give campaigns a consistent, clear name. Use the EAN number or an internal SKU reference, combined with the product group name. That way you can filter quickly in the Bol dashboard. Looking for all campaigns around one product category? Type one word into the search bar and you see everything at once. No searching, no doubt.

This also makes it transferable. You do not need to explain it to a colleague or an agency. The structure speaks for itself.

Ad groups for maximum control

Within a campaign, you use ad groups to separate the different ways of advertising. Each placement type gets its own ad group, so that you can scale up, scale down, and analyze per type.

By separating these four, you can immediately see where traffic comes from and what each placement delivers. You no longer optimize by feel, but based on data per channel.

Two campaign models: what suits you?

There are two ways to set up the structure, depending on the size of your assortment and how detailed you want to manage.

Model 1: By product group with ad groups per variant

You create one overarching campaign per product group, for example "Headsets". Within that campaign, you create ad groups per variant: red headset, blue headset, white headset. This works well if variants are comparable and you want to analyze them as a whole.

Model 2: By EAN with ad groups per placement type

You create one campaign per individual product based on the EAN number. Within that campaign, you create ad groups based on the match type or placement type as described above. This gives the most control and is the model we use ourselves.

The Netherlands and Belgium: split or not?

If you sell in both countries, you have the choice to separate campaigns by country or let everything run combined.

If you want to scale more aggressively in one country without affecting the other, you need to make that split. One campaign for the Netherlands, one for Belgium. That way you can use a different bidding strategy per market.

Want to keep the data separated purely without creating extra campaigns? In Adyard, you can see performance per country and per device type side by side at campaign level. The differences in ACOS and conversion rate between those segments are often larger than you expect. Desktop converts differently from mobile. A Monday in the Netherlands looks different from a Saturday in Belgium. You miss that nuance if you lump everything together.

Automatic campaigns: useful but limited

Automatic campaigns are often dismissed as something you should not want. That is too simplistic. They are good at finding keywords you would miss yourself, the long-tail combinations with low search volume that stay under the radar in manual keyword research.

But the downside is real: you have no control over your bids. The only thing you can set is a general target. One day you are served, the next day you are not. You advertise on your own brand name without realizing it. You cannot adjust up or down per placement.

The smart approach is to use both, but each for its own purpose.

Keyword harvesting: the best of both worlds

That is exactly why we built keyword harvesting within Adyard. You create a campaign at product level and automatically get two campaigns: one automatic and one manual.

The automatic campaign tests and collects keywords. The keywords that perform within your own set criteria are automatically transferred to the manual campaign, without you having to do anything.

That way, you benefit from the breadth of an automatic campaign while keeping full control over bids on the keywords that actually perform. The outcomes of the automatic campaign become the building blocks of your manual structure.

The catch-all campaign

A tactic we also often use for clients is a continuous automatic campaign with an extremely low ACOS target, around 2 to 3 percent, and a corresponding low bid of around 10 cents. This campaign fills the gaps left by others when competitors run out of budget or do not cover certain time slots. The traffic is not always the most relevant, but it is profitable and inexpensive. A good way to stay active at all times without bidding unnecessarily high.

What a good campaign structure delivers

A poor campaign structure is not something you will fix later. It is the reason you currently have no control over your bids, no product-level insight, and cannot scale without the risk of scaling the wrong things.

Set the structure up properly once and you will immediately notice the difference:

Per product you can see what is being spent and what it delivers. You can adjust bids for exactly the product and keyword that need it. You can identify more quickly which products perform and which ones waste budget. You report faster and more clearly, internally and externally. And you build a structure that is scalable, even as your assortment grows.

Advertising on Bol does not start with bids. It starts with structure.

Want to see how Adyard helps you set up and manage this structure automatically? Start a free trial or schedule a demo with our team.