Back in the early part of the year, advertisers received an email from Google Ads stating that they will not be able to create any new standalone Gmail campaigns or edit existing ones beginning July 1, 2021. Even with this change, advertisers will still have the ability to pause or delete Gmail campaigns.
Once July rolls around, advertisers will need to create a Discovery campaign if they want ads to appear on Gmail.
Google Ads recommends that you migrate Gmail campaigns to Discovery campaigns, and here are the steps they recommend:
- Budget: The budget of your Discovery ads campaigns should be greater than the budget of your Gmail ads campaign. We recommend allocating double the budget of your Gmail ads campaign to your Discovery ads campaign to account for the incremental reach achieved with Discovery ads.`
- Bidding: Start your Discovery ads campaign on Target CPA (tCPA) bidding. Select an appropriate campaign target CPA using the suggested bid during campaign construction, or by taking your average CPA over the past 30 days on Gmail ads and increasing it by 20%. You can decrease the tCPA over time as your Discovery ads improve in performance over time by way of machine learning.
- Targeting: For your Discovery ads, select audiences that closely mirror your Gmail ads audience targeting. If you’ve been targeting keywords in your Gmail ads, then create a custom audience for your Discovery campaign based on your top converting keywords from your Gmail ads campaign.