Manage your Discovery campaigns: budget, targeting & reporting

Discovery campaigns let you share your brand's story with people across Google's feeds when they're open to discovering new products and services.

• Expansive reach: Reach up to 3 billion customers across the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover*, and the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs using a single campaign.
• Rich and relevant creative: Inspire consumers as you showcase your brand or products in visually engaging images, rendered natively across Google properties.
• Drive action with the right audience: Combine this incredible reach and powerful creative canvas with Google’s understanding of intent to anticipate what your customers want and drive results.

This article explains how to manage Discovery campaigns. Learn more about Discovery campaigns

*Discover is currently unavailable for consumers in Australia, France, and Germany.

After you create your Discovery campaign, make sure you’re managing it for optimal performance and results. For more tips on driving better performance, see our best practices guide.

Allow ramp-up time

Once your assets and message are in place, give campaigns time to ramp up. Set a budget that drives volume, but that you’re still comfortable running for at least two weeks. We recommend one that’s 10 times the value of your target CPA bid since our models perform better as they collect more data. As a good general rule, wait 40 conversions before making changes to your campaign.

Use automatic targeting in Discovery ads

Automatic targeting can help you reach new and relevant audiences that are likely to convert. Optimized targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audience segments that you may have missed to improve the campaign’s performance. Learn more here.

To change your automatic targeting settings in existing campaigns:

1. In Google Ads, find your campaign and select it.
2. Click on the ad group you’d like to adjust targeting for.
3. In the page menu on the left, select Settings.
4. Within "Settings", expand the Optimized targeting section
5. Select the checkbox  to turn optimized targeting on or off.
6. Select Save.

Understand your Discovery campaign reporting

Reporting for your Discovery campaigns reflects ad performance across multiple Google properties with different ad interactions depending on how and where people see your ads. Therefore, your reporting columns will reflect a combination of ad interactions as follows:

• Engagements: The first click on your ad in Gmail, for which you are charged.
  • Engagement rate: Reflects the number of times people first clicked on your ad in Gmail, divided by the number of times your ad was shown.
• Clicks: Clicks that send users to your website.
  • Clickthrough rate (CTR): Reflects the number of clicks on your ad that lead to your website, divided by the number of times your ad was shown.
  • Average cost-per-click (CPC): This reflects the total cost of the campaign, divided by the number of clicks on your ad that lead to your website.
• Interactions: The combination of all paid clicks on your Discovery ad. This reflects clicks directly on your ads within YouTube and Discover, and the first click on your ad in Gmail.
• Interaction rate: Reflects the number of interactions with your ad divided by the number of times your ad was shown. For Gmail, this column reflects the first click on your ad.
• Average cost: Reflects the true cost average for paid interactions with your ad.

Related links

• Create Discovery campaigns
• Best Practices Guide: Grow your business with Discovery campaigns
• About asset reporting for Discovery ads