Starting from October, Demand Gen campaigns will be available to all advertisers in Google Ads and your Discovery campaigns will be eligible for upgrades. Contact your Google account team to upgrade your Discovery campaigns on your behalf. If you don’t currently have a Google account team, your Discovery campaigns will be automatically upgraded by November.
Once upgraded, all of your historical data and learnings from your Discovery campaigns will be seamlessly carried over to your new Demand Gen campaigns, so you can take full advantage of the newly redesigned UI and start optimising your campaigns with new performance-enhancing features.
Learn more about upgrading from Discovery ads to Demand Gen.
You can use Discovery campaigns to help reach up to 3 billion customers across Google's feeds to achieve your performance goals in Google Ads. Thanks to Google's audience and customer intent signals, this campaign type helps you deliver highly visual, inspiring personalized ad experiences to people who are ready to discover and engage with your brand—all through a single Google Ads campaign.
This article gives you an overview of Discovery campaigns. To get started, go to Create a Discovery campaign.
Benefits
Reach your ideal customer at scale with a single campaign. You enter the building blocks for your ads—like headlines, high quality inspirational images, and logos—and we'll show your ads to highly interested customers using the bid goal and budget that you set.
Discovery campaigns include the following features:
- Reach more of Google with a single ad campaign.With the ability to reach up to 3 billion people monthly on the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discoverand the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs, you can now reach more potential customers as they browse everything from the latest fashion trends to new cooking recipe videos on popular Google properties.
- Drive engagement with richer, more relevant ads. Thanks to Google's unique understanding of customer intent, you'll be able to show more relevant, meaningful ads to people when they're most interested to learn more about your products and services.
- Visually rich ads rendered natively across Google properties at scale. Designed for discovery as consumers browse their favorite content and feed-based experiences, our ad layouts rely on Google's AI to build and showcase your assets seamlessly across devices—helping you spark customer interest and action with less effort and time.
- Automated bidding options to meet your media performance goals. You can use Maximize conversions bidding, Target CPA, or Target ROAS to optimize your campaign bids to meet your media marketing objectives. You can also benefit Google’s AI when it comes to audience performance by opting into optimized targeting.
When to use
Discovery campaigns may be a good choice for you if:
- You want to drive conversions with your media at scale (through a supported marketing objective): For example, you can use Discovery ads to drive sales, newsletter signups, or more website visits.
- You want to reach new customers with your media: By sharing visually rich, inspiring brand creative across feeds on Google properties, Discovery campaigns can help you drive interest from potential customers when they're open to trying new brands. For example, you can extend a successful audience strategy for social or video campaigns to new audiences on Google's feeds.
- You want to reconnect with your most valuable customers: As consumers return over time to find content they enjoy on Google's feeds, Discovery campaigns give you more opportunities to drive action from people who know your brand best and are most likely to engage with it again — whether they've previously made a purchase, engaged with your YouTube channel, or visited your website.
To be eligible to set up a Discovery campaign, you'll need to meet the following requirements:
- You comply with our Personalized advertising policies and Google Ads policies.
- Sitewide tagging is enabled in the account.
Campaign settings
Several campaign settings, like bidding and targeting, are automated for Discovery campaigns to save you time and help your campaign deliver optimal performance based on the marketing objective, bid, and budget that you choose. In addition, there are some features that aren't supported by this campaign type. When using Discovery campaigns, you won't be able to adjust the following settings:
- Manual bid strategies
- Delivery method
- Device targeting
- Placement targeting (including exclusions)
- Frequency capping
- Ad rotation
- Contextual targeting
Content exclusion
Google takes brand safety very seriously. The placement of Discovery ads is determined by the topics that a user is actively interested in, based on signals such as videos the user watches on YouTube or content the user follows on Discover.
Discovery campaigns automatically apply exclusions to help ensure your ads appear next to advertiser-friendly content. For example, Discovery ads won’t show next to content with repeated strong profanity, strong sexual content, or graphic violence.
