There is a version of this migration where nothing much happens. You click a button, the campaign changes type, performance wobbles for a few days and settles.
There is another version where you lose your seasonality adjustments without noticing, your combined audiences quietly stop existing, your HTML5 creative stops serving, your Brand Lift study has nowhere to report to, and every ad in the campaign goes back into review at the worst possible moment.
Which version you get depends almost entirely on what you check before you press the button.
Google announced on 26 May 2026 that Google Display Ads is no longer a standalone campaign type. The Google Display Network is moving into Demand Gen as one channel among several. The migration tool began a phased rollout in June 2026, new Display campaigns will eventually only be creatable inside Demand Gen, and remaining eligible campaigns will be migrated automatically whether or not anyone at your company has looked at them.
This guide covers the whole thing: what actually changes, what silently disappears, the nine errors that will block your migration, how to prepare, how to use the tool, and how to judge whether it worked afterwards.
It is long because the feature-by-feature detail is where the money is. If you only read one section, read the audit checklist and the feature availability breakdown.
Part 1: What is actually happening
The announcement in plain terms
Google Display Ads campaigns are being folded into Demand Gen, where the Google Display Network becomes a selectable channel rather than a campaign type of its own.
The network itself is unchanged. You still reach the same inventory across more than two million sites and apps. What changes is the container you manage it from, and the container comes with a different set of features, a different bidding menu, different creative options and different reporting.
Google’s own framing is that advertisers who only want Display can continue buying Display only, while advertisers who want more can access GDN alongside YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps in a single campaign.
Both halves of that are true. The second half is the reason this is not simply an administrative change.
The key dates
June 2026. Phased rollout of the migration tool. Eligible advertisers can move existing Display campaigns into Demand Gen from inside their Google Ads account.
Coming later. New Google Display Ads campaigns can only be created within Demand Gen. Existing Display campaigns remain accessible and editable until they are migrated.
Coming later. Remaining eligible Display campaigns are migrated automatically, with no advertiser action required.
Google has not published a hard date on the last two in its Help Centre, though industry reporting points to a manual migration window closing in January 2027 and the overall transition completing through 2027. Google says you will receive account notifications as key dates approach.
The practical read: you have months rather than years, and the difference between migrating deliberately and being migrated automatically is entirely about whether anyone reviewed the campaign first.
Why this is not a like-for-like swap
The single most useful thing to understand before you start is that Demand Gen is not Display with a new name.
The targeting logic is broader. The placements extend well beyond the Display Network. The creative formats are different. Several features you may be relying on do not exist in Demand Gen at all.
Treat it as a straight swap and you will see performance disruption, and you will spend weeks trying to work out why.
Part 2: The inventory difference
This is the clearest way to see what you are actually moving into.
| Placement | Google Display Ads | GDN in Demand Gen |
|---|---|---|
| Google Display Network | Yes | Yes |
| Gmail | Yes | Yes |
| YouTube (image) | Yes | Yes |
| YouTube (video) | No | Yes |
| YouTube Shorts | No | Yes |
| Discover | No | Yes |
| Google Maps | No | Yes (Beta) |
Four new surfaces. That is the upside of the migration and it is genuine, particularly Maps for any business with a physical catchment and Shorts for anything visual.
It is also the risk. If you migrate and then start switching channels on without a plan, you are no longer running the campaign you were running. You are running a different campaign with the same name and the same budget, and comparing its performance to the old one will tell you very little.
Google’s own migration best practice is to keep GDN-only selected in channel controls during migration so the campaign settings transfer properly. Add other channels afterwards, deliberately, one at a time, with a read on each.
That advice is worth following even if you fully intend to expand later.
Part 3: Before you touch anything
Everything in this section is reversible only if you do it first. Once a campaign is migrated, the original is set to Removed.
Export these seven things
1. Placement exclusions. Your full list of excluded placements and apps, at every level they exist. This list represents years of accumulated learning about where your ads should not appear, and rebuilding it from scratch is genuinely painful. Export it before anything else.
2. Managed placements. If you are running on specific hand-picked placements, record those separately from your broader targeting, because they serve a different purpose and are easy to conflate in an export.
3. Audience configuration. Every remarketing list, customer match list, custom segment and combined audience attached to the campaign, and which ad group each is on. Note which are set to Targeting and which to Observation, because that distinction matters later.
4. Ad group structure and bid modifiers. Any ad group level bid modifiers or exclusions need recording, because they will need removing before migration and you will want to know what you removed.
5. Creative inventory. Every asset, including formats. Specifically flag any HTML5 uploads and any third-party ads, because both matter for timing.
6. Conversion goals and attribution settings. Campaign-specific goals, attribution model, and current conversion window.
7. A performance baseline. Thirty days minimum, ideally ninety, at campaign and ad group level: spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, cost per conversion, conversion value. You cannot judge whether migration hurt or helped without a number to compare against, and after migration your original campaign is Removed.
Find every Display campaign in the account
Google’s own method, and it catches campaigns people forget exist:
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the filter button above the campaigns table, then open the Attributes dropdown
- Select Campaign type, tick Display, and select Apply
- Add a Status filter and select everything except Removed
The row count under the table gives you the total. If it reads “1 to 57 of 57,” you have 57 Display campaigns to account for.
Worth knowing which of those will actually move: Removed campaigns will not be migrated. Paused and Enabled campaigns may be migrated, depending on how recently they have accrued spend in the account.
That means a paused campaign you abandoned eighteen months ago could reappear as an enabled-status Demand Gen campaign if it spent recently enough. Check your paused campaigns now rather than discovering them later.
Fix the account fundamentals first
If your conversion tracking is unreliable, migrating will not fix it and will make diagnosis harder, because you will have a campaign change to blame every anomaly on.
We have written at length about why this matters. In our own accounts we found that a single misconfigured conversion action distorted a headline benchmark by 5x, and separately that seven of our ten Target CPA campaigns lacked the conversion volume that strategy requires. Both are the kind of problem that a campaign type change will amplify rather than reveal.
If you want a structured way through it, the 9 Pillars framework sets out the order, and the 9-Pillar Google Ads Scorecard will tell you which pillar is weakest in about ten minutes.
Migrate on a sound foundation. Migrating on a broken one just relocates the problem.
Part 4: The nine errors that will block your migration
Google publishes the eligibility errors you may hit, and each one has a specific fix. Work through these before you attempt the migration rather than discovering them mid-batch.
1. Responsive Display Ad with a disclaimer. Error: current disclaimer format not supported. Fix: pause the campaign, remove the disclaimers, migrate, then add them back in the new format and resume.
2. Responsive Display Ad missing a logo. Error: RDA missing a logo. Fix: add one. The migration flow will help you do it. A business logo is mandatory in Demand Gen, and if you do not supply one, Google generates a placeholder image so the migration can complete. That placeholder will then serve in your ads until somebody replaces it, which is exactly the kind of thing nobody notices for three weeks.
3. Custom promo text. Error: custom promo text not supported. Fix: remove the price prefix or custom promo text, migrate, then rebuild using Demand Gen’s supported promo text options.
4. Click-to-call asset. Error: click-to-call assets not supported. Fix: add an additional call to action so the campaign can serve in Demand Gen. Worth noting for lead gen accounts that lean on call assets, since the call-to-action mechanics differ.
5. Lead form asset. Error: lead form assets not supported. Fix: remove the lead form asset before migrating. If lead forms are a meaningful part of how that campaign generates leads, plan where those leads will come from instead before you remove anything.
6. Ad group bid modifier. Error: ad group bid modifiers not currently supported. Fix: remove them before migrating.
7. Product filter. Error: product filters not supported. Fix: remove the filters, migrate, then use Demand Gen’s product scopes or listing groups instead.
8. Shared budget. Error: campaigns with shared budgets not supported. Fix: set up a dedicated budget for the campaign before migrating. If you use shared budgets across a Display portfolio, this is a structural change that needs planning rather than a quick fix, because you are about to lose whatever budget flexibility that shared pool was providing.
9. Ad group exclusions. Error: some ad group exclusions are not supported. Fix: remove ad group level bid modifiers or exclusions before migrating.
You may also see errors for features that are simply not supported yet. Those campaigns will not migrate via the tool, no action is needed, and support is expected to arrive later.
Part 5: The two ways to migrate
Option A: the migration tool (recommended)
The tool moves live campaigns and carries performance history across, dating back 42 days. That matters more than it sounds: it reduces the learning period to roughly one to two days and avoids a cold start.
One thing to know before you start: migrated campaigns will have Google Display Network opted in by default, and you cannot unselect it during migration. Other channels can be added afterwards. This is deliberate on Google’s part, since keeping GDN-only during the move is what allows the settings to transfer cleanly.
The steps:
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the filter button above the campaigns table, then the Attributes dropdown
- Select Campaign type, tick Display, select Apply
- Tick the box next to each campaign you want to migrate
- Open the Edit dropdown and select Upgrade to Demand Gen
- Read the alert. It confirms that settings and learning transfer, and that your budget transfers but same-day spend before migration is not counted
- Select Apply
Migration takes a few minutes. You can do several campaigns at once, but Google does not recommend migrating more than 100 campaigns in a single batch.
One important exception: if you are running any lift measurement, such as a Conversion Lift study, and you are mid-study, do not use the migration tool. The converted campaign will not be automatically associated with the study, and you will lose the read.
Option B: manual budget transition
Rather than converting the campaign, you build the Demand Gen campaign yourself and shift budget across gradually, decreasing the Display campaign’s budget while proportionally increasing the Demand Gen one.
This gives you a clean build with no inherited settings, which is appealing if the original campaign has accumulated a decade of decisions nobody can explain.
The cost is real, though. Google is explicit that if you create an identical copy of a Display campaign in Demand Gen, the new campaign may struggle to ramp because the original retains the advantage of historical performance data. You are starting cold while competing against yourself.
Our view: use the tool for anything with meaningful performance history, and build manually only where the existing campaign is genuinely a mess you want to be rid of. The 42 days of transferred learning is worth more than the tidiness of a fresh build in almost every case.
Verify what actually moved
After migration, check the results rather than assuming.
Go to All bulk actions within the Tools menu. You will see who initiated the migration, the status, and a description. Select View changed campaigns in the Actions column, then View campaigns.
You can also verify in the campaigns table. Migrated campaigns are renamed “[Original campaign name] #2” and show Demand Gen under Campaign type. Google also applies labels, either “Pasted as Demand Gen” or “Pasted as Demand Gen on [Date],” which you can filter by after adding the Label column.
That naming convention is worth acting on straight away. If you migrate thirty campaigns, you now have thirty campaigns with “#2” on the end, and six months from now nobody will remember why.
Part 6: What transfers, what changes, what disappears
This is the section that decides whether your migration is uneventful. Google publishes a full feature availability list, and several entries deserve attention before rather than after.
Bidding
| Feature | Status | Alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Target CPA | Supported | |
| Maximise Conversions | Supported | |
| Maximise Conversion Value | Supported | |
| Target ROAS | Supported | |
| Maximise Clicks | Supported | |
| Manual CPC | Not supported | Target CPC |
| Viewable Impressions | Not supported | Maximise Clicks |
| Pay for conversions | Not supported | Target CPA |
| Bid adjustments | Not supported | |
| Seasonality adjustments | Not supported | |
| Portfolio bidding | Not supported |
Four of these deserve comment.
Manual CPC is gone. If you have been running Display on manual bids for control, that control does not exist in Demand Gen. Target CPC is the nearest equivalent and it is not the same thing.
Pay for conversions is gone, and the migration tool handles it automatically by switching those campaigns to pay for clicks while continuing to optimise toward your Target CPA. That is a significant change to your risk profile. You were paying only when a conversion happened. Now you are paying for clicks and trusting the target. Watch those campaigns closely in the first fortnight.
Seasonality adjustments do not exist in Demand Gen. If you use them, and we have written about when they are worth using and when they cause harm, you need a different plan for short promotional windows on this campaign type. Budget and target changes become your only levers.
Portfolio bidding is gone, which combines badly with the loss of shared budgets. If you were pooling conversion data across several small Display campaigns to make target-based bidding viable, that route is closed. Consolidation becomes the answer instead, which we come back to below.
On the upside, Demand Gen adds Target CPC and flighted campaign total budgets, the latter being genuinely useful for fixed-window promotions.
If you are unsure which strategy the migrated campaign should use, our Bid Strategy Selector walks the decision, and the sequencing logic is set out in our Target CPA threshold study.
Audiences
| Feature | Status | Alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Remarketing lists | Supported | |
| First-party Customer Match | Supported | |
| Custom audiences | Supported | |
| Contextual targeting | Supported | |
| Placement exclusions | Supported | |
| Topic exclusions | Supported | |
| Lookalike audiences | Supported | |
| New Customer Acquisition | Supported | |
| Combined audiences | Not supported | Define in Audience builder |
| Observation setting for non-demographics | Not supported | Define in Audience builder |
Two things to plan for.
Combined audiences do not carry over. If your targeting logic depends on intersecting or excluding audiences in combination, you need to rebuild that in Demand Gen’s Audience builder. Know what those combinations were before you migrate, which is why the audience export in Part 3 matters.
Observation for non-demographic audiences is gone. This one is easy to underestimate. Plenty of accounts run audiences on Observation purely to gather insight without restricting reach. That reporting layer disappears, and with it a source of intelligence you may have been using to inform audience signals elsewhere in the account, including for Performance Max.
The compensation is Lookalike segments, the successor to Similar Audiences, which are genuinely useful if you have real first-party lists to seed them from.
Ad formats
| Format | Status |
|---|---|
| Responsive Display Ads | Supported |
| Uploaded Display Ads (static image) | Supported |
| Carousel ads | Supported |
| Product feeds | Partially supported. Business Data Feeds not yet available. |
| RDA Select (Beta) | Supported |
| Uploaded Display Ads (HTML5) | Coming late 2026 |
| Third-party ads | Coming late 2026 |
HTML5 is the one to plan around. If a meaningful share of your Display creative is HTML5, migrating now means those assets cannot serve until support lands, which Google currently plans for late 2026. That is a genuine reason to sequence your migration: move the campaigns that do not depend on HTML5 first, and hold the ones that do until support arrives or until you have replacement creative built.
The same applies to third-party ads if you serve through an ad server.
Business Data Feeds are not yet supported, which matters for any non-retail feed-driven campaign such as hotels, travel or local inventory.
Creative tools, reporting and measurement
Creative tooling improves. Sharable previews, Generated Asset Creator, image enhancements and Image to Video are all supported.
Reporting improves too. Placement reporting continues via the Where Ads Showed report, channel reporting is available, and you gain format segmentation reporting broken out by In-Feed, Skippable In-Stream and Shorts.
Measurement is where you lose something. Conversion Lift is supported. Brand Lift and Search Lift are not supported for GDN in Demand Gen. If brand or search lift studies are part of how you justify upper-funnel spend to a board, that evidence source disappears for this campaign type and you will need to plan around it.
Demand Gen experiments are supported, which partially compensates.
Part 7: What happens in the first 24 hours
Your campaigns get renamed. “[Original campaign name] #2.” Rename them properly the same day.
Your ads go back into review. This one catches people out. Google is explicit that migrated ads are treated as newly created ads regardless of migration method, so they must be submitted for approval again. If something gets disapproved, there is a self-service appeal in the ads tab.
This is the strongest single argument for migrating early rather than at the deadline. A disapproval in a quiet week is an inconvenience. The same disapproval the week before Black Friday is a different conversation.
Your budget resets for the day. Spend from earlier the same day is not recognised by the new campaign. If your Display campaign spent $10 of a $50 daily budget before migrating, the Demand Gen campaign starts with a fresh $50 for the remainder of that day. Google notes temporary underdelivery or overdelivery is possible in the first 24 hours.
Do not migrate a campaign that is tightly budget-constrained on the same day something important is happening. And if you are frequently hitting your caps, limited by budget is worth reading before you add a migration on top.
Performance will fluctuate for several days. Google says so directly. With the migration tool the learning period should be roughly one to two days rather than a full cold start, but fluctuation in the first week is expected and is not a verdict.
Your campaign status carries over. Paused stays paused, enabled stays enabled. The original Display campaign is marked Removed.
Your history is preserved. Original campaigns remain in the account for reporting for up to five years under Google’s standard retention. You have not lost your baseline, it has just moved.
Part 8: What to do in the first week after
Review every setting rather than trusting the transfer
Google’s own best practice says to review your updated settings and confirm everything matches your preference. That is worth taking literally.
Check the bid strategy, particularly on anything that was on Manual CPC, Viewable Impressions or Pay for Conversions. Check the conversion goals. Check the audiences, especially anything that was a combined audience. Check the placement and topic exclusions actually came across. Check the logo is yours and not a Google-generated placeholder.
Set the conversion window to more than 28 days
Google’s migration guidance recommends setting the conversion attribution window to greater than 28 days. Demand Gen operates further up the funnel than a typical Display remarketing campaign, and a short window will systematically under-credit it.
Do not optimise aggressively
Google’s guidance is specific: limit bid changes to plus or minus 15%, and wait a week between changes.
That is unusually concrete advice from Google and it is worth following. The campaign has inherited 42 days of learning. Yanking targets around in week one wastes exactly the thing the migration tool was designed to preserve.
Expand assets deliberately
Google recommends expanding your asset count, including a business logo and video assets, so ads can serve across the widest range of inventory slots.
That is sound, with one caveat: if you add video and then switch on YouTube channels, you have changed the campaign materially. Do it as a deliberate test with its own read, not as housekeeping in the same week as the migration.
Consider consolidating ad groups
Google’s guidance here lines up exactly with everything we have published on structure: consolidate ad groups by combining similar audience themes, and consider merging ad groups with fewer than roughly 30 conversions in 30 days.
That 30-conversion threshold is the same one that governs Target CPA viability. It is not a coincidence. Below it, automated bidding does not have enough examples to find a pattern.
This matters more now than it did before, because with portfolio bidding and shared budgets both unavailable, consolidation is the main remaining route to giving each campaign enough data to work with.
When we ran this check across our own accounts we found that every single one of our 24 Search campaigns sat below the learning threshold, which was not a number we expected. If you have never run the equivalent check on your Display campaigns, the migration is a reasonable moment to do it. Our Campaign Structure Recommender will give you a second opinion on whether a set of campaigns should be merged.
Agree how you will judge it
Google’s guidance says to evaluate against campaign-specific KPIs aligned to your goals and bid strategy, and to make sure there is clear alignment on goals, ramp time and budget.
Translated: decide before you migrate what success looks like and how long you will wait. Otherwise somebody will look at week one, see fluctuation, and want to reverse a change that cannot be reversed.
Part 9: The other change happening at the same time
This is a separate change and it is important not to conflate the two.
On 16 June 2026, Google began notifying advertisers that Demand Gen campaigns using view-through conversion optimisation on Discover would move from CPC to CPM billing on 15 July 2026. The change applied automatically, with no advertiser action required.
Google’s stated rationale, as reported, is that CPM more accurately reflects the value being delivered for view-through conversion campaigns, because view-through conversions are triggered by impressions rather than clicks. The change was first surfaced publicly by Anthony Higman of ADSQUIRE and reported by Search Engine Land.
Two things follow.
If you already run Demand Gen with view-through optimisation on Discover, your budget maths changed on 15 July. You are now buying impressions rather than clicks on that slice. Your cost per click metric on those campaigns is a derived number rather than what you are actually paying for, and any bid logic built on CPC assumptions needs revisiting.
The direction of travel is toward impression-based billing. As Google unifies Display and Demand Gen and leans further into view-through and engaged-view optimisation, more of this format is likely to bill on attention rather than clicks.
The durable response is not to fight each change but to build measurement around incrementality, so that whichever billing model applies, you can still answer whether the spend produced business.
That is the same argument we make about judging Demand Gen properly, and it is the reason we set the measurement up before the spend rather than after.
Part 10: The mistakes we expect to see most
Waiting for the automatic migration. The automatic path exists so that Google can complete the transition, not so that your campaigns land well. Every decision you would have made deliberately gets made by default instead.
Migrating everything in one batch. Google recommends against more than 100 campaigns at a time, and there is no prize for doing it in a single afternoon. Migrate in waves, starting with lower-spend campaigns, and learn on the ones that matter least.
Migrating during a lift study. Mid-study migration breaks the association and you lose the read.
Not exporting placement exclusions first. This is the one that produces the most pain for the least reason.
Leaving the placeholder logo. If you had no logo, Google generated one. It is serving right now in your ads unless somebody replaced it.
Not renaming the “#2” campaigns. Trivial to fix on day one, permanently confusing if you do not.
Judging performance in week one. Fluctuation is expected and Google says so. Set the window before you migrate.
Switching on new channels immediately. YouTube, Discover and Maps are new inventory with different economics. Adding them the same week you migrate means you can never separate the effect of the migration from the effect of the expansion.
Assuming HTML5 creative will keep serving. It will not, until support arrives.
Forgetting that ads need re-approval. Migrate early, not at the deadline, and not before a peak trading period.
Treating this as an admin task rather than an audit opportunity. Display campaigns often carry years of accumulated decisions: audience exclusions, creative variations, placement settings, conversion goals, remarketing lists and budget splits built for workflows that no longer exist. This is the best excuse you will get to look at all of it.
Part 11: A migration plan you can actually follow
Weeks 1 to 2: audit and export. Find every Display campaign including paused ones. Export placement exclusions, managed placements, audience configuration, ad group structure, creative inventory, conversion settings and a 90-day performance baseline. Flag HTML5 and third-party creative. Flag shared budgets. Flag any campaign in a lift study.
Week 3: clear the blockers. Work through the nine eligibility errors. Remove lead form assets, ad group bid modifiers, product filters, custom promo text and unsupported disclaimers. Add missing logos properly rather than letting Google generate a placeholder. Split any shared budgets into dedicated ones.
Week 4: decide structure before you move. Which campaigns should survive as they are, which should merge, and which should not be migrated at all because they should have been switched off two years ago. Apply the 30-conversions-in-30-days test to ad groups. Decide bid strategy replacements for anything on Manual CPC, Viewable Impressions or Pay for Conversions.
Week 5: migrate a first wave. Lowest-spend campaigns first, in batches well under 100. Keep GDN-only in channel controls. Verify via bulk actions. Rename immediately. Check settings, audiences, exclusions and logos against your export.
Weeks 6 to 7: leave it alone. Monitor delivery and approvals. Fix disapprovals. No bid changes beyond plus or minus 15%, and no more than one change per week. Resist the urge to optimise.
Week 8 onward: migrate in waves, then expand. Move higher-spend campaigns once the first wave has a clean read. Only after that is stable, begin testing additional channels one at a time with defined budgets and defined reads.
Hold back: anything dependent on HTML5 creative, third-party ads, or Business Data Feeds until support arrives.
Frequently asked questions
Are Google Display campaigns being discontinued? Standalone Display campaigns are, yes. Google confirmed in May 2026 that Google Display Ads is no longer a standalone campaign type. The Google Display Network itself is unchanged and remains available as a channel inside Demand Gen, reaching the same two million-plus sites and apps.
When is the deadline to migrate? Google launched the migration tool in June 2026 and says new Display campaigns will eventually only be creatable in Demand Gen, with remaining eligible campaigns migrated automatically after that. Industry reporting points to the manual window closing in January 2027 and the transition completing through 2027. Google says you will receive account notifications as key dates approach.
Can I still run Display-only campaigns? Yes. Use channel controls inside a Demand Gen campaign to restrict delivery to the Google Display Network. The campaign shell is Demand Gen, the inventory is the same.
Should I use the migration tool or rebuild manually? The tool, in almost every case. It carries 42 days of performance history across, which cuts learning to roughly one to two days. Building manually means starting cold, and Google warns that a manual copy may struggle to ramp because the original campaign holds the historical data advantage.
Will I lose my historical data? No. Original Display campaigns are set to Removed but remain in the account for reporting for up to five years.
Will my ads need re-approval? Yes, regardless of how you migrate. Migrated ads count as newly created and go back through review. This is the main reason to migrate early rather than close to a deadline or a peak season.
What happens to my Pay for Conversions campaigns? The migration tool automatically switches them to pay for clicks while continuing to optimise toward your Target CPA. Your risk profile changes, so monitor those campaigns closely.
Do seasonality adjustments work in Demand Gen? No. Seasonality adjustments, bid adjustments and portfolio bidding are all unsupported. For short promotional windows you will need budget and target changes instead.
What happens to my combined audiences? They do not transfer. Rebuild the equivalent logic in Demand Gen’s Audience builder, which is why exporting your audience configuration beforehand matters.
Can I still upload HTML5 creative? Not yet. Google currently plans HTML5 support for GDN in Demand Gen in late 2026, along with third-party ads. Sequence your migration so HTML5-dependent campaigns move last.
How many campaigns can I migrate at once? Google recommends no more than 100 in a single batch. In practice we would go considerably smaller and migrate in waves.
Will my paused Display campaigns be migrated? Possibly. Removed campaigns will not be migrated, but paused and enabled campaigns may be, depending on how recently they accrued spend. Audit your paused campaigns now.
How long before I can judge performance? Expect fluctuation for several days. Give it a fortnight minimum before drawing conclusions, and change bids by no more than 15% with a week between changes.
Does this affect Performance Max? Not directly, but it is worth understanding how the campaign types now relate. Performance Max captures existing demand across Search and Shopping as well as visual surfaces. Demand Gen generates demand and does not serve on Search or Shopping. We cover the distinction in our guide to Performance Max segmentation.
What if my remarketing depends on Display? Remarketing continues to work, and remarketing lists, Customer Match and custom audiences are all supported. The strategy does not change even though the campaign shell does. Our approach to display and remarketing management covers how we structure it.
What we would actually do
If we inherited an account today with Display campaigns still running, the sequence would be: audit and export first, clear the eligibility blockers second, make the structural decisions third, and only then migrate in waves starting with the campaigns that matter least.
The migration itself is a button. Everything that determines whether it goes well happens before you press it.
The genuine opportunity here is not the four new placements, useful as Maps and Shorts are. It is that Google has handed every advertiser a legitimate reason to open up campaigns that nobody has properly examined in years, and to fix what they find while there is a deadline to justify the work.
Most accounts will not use it that way. They will wait, get migrated automatically, and spend Q1 2027 wondering why Display performance changed.
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