If you’re like most modern-day marketers, then you probably think of campaign types within Google Ads (e.g., paid search, display, video, etc.) as being siloed or independent of each other. For example, you have a budget for paid search and a separate budget for display campaigns, and you may even sell these services as individual parts of an overall media plan with their own fees and optimization guardrails.

What if we told you that this approach is starting to become an antiquated way of buying media through Google Ads and that Google is starting to put less emphasis on individual campaign types and more on overall marketing objectives?

Well, that’s exactly what’s happening right now with some of the recent and upcoming changes being made by Google. Once you’re through reading this article, you’ll be better equipped to embrace the future of how campaigns are purchased and optimized in Google Ads.

How Are Google Campaigns Changing?

The good news is there really aren’t too many changes in terms of the available Google media placements that marketers will be able to purchase. Ads can still be purchased and placed on the Google Search and Display Networks, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Discovery, and Shopping feeds. The main difference is how the campaigns are created to appear on these various placements.

Historically, marketers would simply log in to Google Ads, create a campaign, decide what media placement they wanted to run media on, and follow the steps to complete targeting and creative variables. Once the campaign was published, insights were fairly transparent and able to be segmented however suited the marketer and the goals of the campaign.

Happening now, and likely continuing into the near future, however, is the inability to select individual placements to run on. For example, last year, Google made it no longer possible to create Gmail-only campaigns and, instead, lumped the placement into its Discovery campaigns. Discovery campaigns feature a combination of YouTube Home, Discover and Gmail placements without the ability for advertisers to deselect a placement or optimize for one particular placement. Gmail has also been added to Google’s Local campaigns, which contain placements on Gmail, Google Maps, Google Display Network, Google Search Partners and YouTube.

This change all leads to the ultimate all-in-one Google campaign called Performance Max. Performance Max campaigns, which launched at the 2021 Google Marketing Live event and are now widely available for marketers, allow for ads to serve across all Google Ads inventory without the need to create a campaign for each media type. This offering gives extensive targeting, creative and optimization freedom to Google as marketers simply provide a slew of display and search assets and desired goals, all at the cost of transparency behind how exactly each individual placement performs.

How Should Google Ads Be Purchased Now?

There’s no doubt that having various media types under one campaign objective with little ability to break out or segment performance creates the need to rethink how Google media is purchased, but how exactly should that thinking start to shift?

First, it’s wise to start seeing media that is purchased on Google Ads less in the way of “display OR paid search OR video OR shopping OR …” and rather more like “display AND paid search AND video AND shopping AND …” This statement may seem like a small shift in thinking, but it really is revolutionary. If somebody is used to thinking of buying media on Google as being “a la carte” or purchased in silos, then they can easily get left behind when Google inevitably moves all its campaign types to be what Performance Max offers. Rather than selling individual packages of media like paid search OR display, it should be thought of that if any campaign is running on Google Ads, then that campaign is just as likely to be able to have media purchased on any of the Google-owned properties.

To help with this shift in thinking, it’ll help to ask the question “How can my message be conveyed across all Google media with the goal of all placements to be achieving the business goal or objective?” rather than “How can display or search or video be leveraged above all other media to achieve the business goal or objective?” Start thinking about all pieces of Google working together to reach a particular audience to achieve a desired outcome.

Next, it’ll be helpful to start putting less emphasis on individual campaign metrics and start focusing on KPIs related to the overall goal of the Google Ads account. Google is making it harder to see what exact keywords or audiences are driving traditionally monitored metrics like clicks, cost per click, click-through rate, etc., so it’ll be imperative to focus on the bigger picture. This shift doesn’t mean, though, that accounts should be “set and forget” in nature. Making optimizations to the accounts are still needed where Google allows (e.g., creative differentiation, overall messaging, etc.). Marketers will simply have to step back and focus on the macro rather than the micro.

What’s Next?

It’s of no surprise that Google would be making these changes as its systems evolve and the marketing landscape continues to change. As with every change made by Google or any other big martech company, marketers will adapt, and businesses will continue to grow with the times. The question is, which marketers will be the first to embrace the change and adopt their media buying procedures to stay ahead of the curve and which ones will remain stagnant and have campaign performance falter as a result?