Google Ads will Combine Smart and Standard Display Campaign into a Unified Campaign

Standard and smart display will now combine into 1

Google has announced recently that they will combine Standard Display campaigns and Smart Display campaigns into a single option, called Display campaign. So now advertisers will no longer have the option to choose between standard or smart display campaigns moving forward, making display campaign advertising much simpler and streamlined.

“Standard Display campaigns and Smart Display campaigns are now available as one campaign type. You no longer have to manually choose between either campaign type when building a Display campaign. Targeting expansion features for standard Display campaigns and automated targeting features in Smart Display campaigns are now found in the optimized targeting feature.” – Google.

“No action is needed: Existing Smart & Standard Display campaigns aren’t affected by this change at this time. Once this update is rolled out in your account, you’ll see the new Display campaign type option and workflow when you create a new campaign,”- Ginny Marvin, Google’s ads product liaison, recently mentioned on Twitter.

In the light of this update, they have introduced optimized targeting – a targeting feature that allows both manual and automated inputs into reaching your audiences. Optimized targeting combines the best of both worlds, the previous Standard display, where advertisers manually chose which audiences and placements to show ads on, and Smart display, leveraging machine learning algorithms to automatically choose the best audience and placements for our ads. Optimized targeting allows you to do both now – in a single campaign.

We have promptly preempted this news with a blog post published more than 2 months ago, called Unified Display Campaign and Optimized Targeting, when we notice some of our clients’ accounts have been updated in the system. Today is just the “official” news release by Google. We have covered thoroughly the changes and if you are interested to read more it can be found here.

Why is this important?

If we look at the trend that Google is moving, they are clearly in favor of integration over segregation. Examples over the recent years were Smart Shopping Campaigns which powers both prospecting and remarketing in one. Advising advertisers to combine all shopping products into a single ad group unless there is a clear ROAS goal difference. And Responsive Search Ads in place of having many individual text ads, the much sensational removal of ETA entirely by June 2022.

Clearly in our current age of advertising, with machine learning and AI taking precedence, we may see less need to over-segment out our campaigns and trust the machines by inputting clean data into the systems.