Discovery is now Demand Gen, so check what your campaigns turned into
Google scheduled automatic upgrades of remaining Discovery campaigns to Demand Gen for January through March. Here is what to verify in your account and how to test the new format.
Google's published plan for Discovery campaigns was a staged move into Demand Gen. Advertisers who joined the Demand Gen beta in 2023 had active Discovery campaigns upgraded automatically, Demand Gen became available to all advertisers from October, and Google said all remaining Discovery campaigns would be upgraded automatically between January and March 2024. That window has just closed, which makes this a good week to check what is actually running in your account.
Know what you are now running
Demand Gen serves on YouTube, including Shorts, plus Discover and Gmail. One campaign can mix short-form video, carousels, and portrait and square images. Google's help page says historical data and learnings carry over when a Discovery campaign is upgraded, so the first check is simple: open your campaign list, filter by type, and confirm that nothing is still labeled Discovery and that nothing has quietly stopped delivering.
Then compare the first weeks after the upgrade against the last weeks before it. Look at spend, conversion volume, and cost per conversion, and watch for changes in which placements take the budget. A format that now includes YouTube Shorts can shift the mix of where your impressions land even when the campaign settings look the same.
What is new in the toolset
According to Google, the redesigned workflow includes ad previews across surfaces and A/B experimentation for placements. It also supports lookalike segments built from first-party data, such as past purchases, website or app activity and YouTube engagement. Bidding can optimize for conversions or conversion value, and Maximize Clicks is available for driving visits and actions. Google's help page does not cover lead form behavior, so if you used lead form extensions on Discovery, check the Help Center and your own campaigns for what changed rather than assuming parity.
Where it fits for an app advertiser
Demand Gen is a demand creation channel. It reaches people who are not searching for your category, in feeds where a video or image does the work of getting attention. We would judge it accordingly. It is unlikely to match a search campaign on last-click cost per install, and that is not its job. Set the question before you start: do you want it to find new users who later convert through other channels, or to produce direct installs at a target cost?
If the answer is direct response, then follow Google's own advice on bidding. Its help page for Target ROAS says Demand Gen campaigns need a minimum amount of recent conversion history, and recommends first bidding to a conversion goal and reporting values for four weeks or one to two conversion cycles, whichever is longer, before switching strategy. Start on conversion-based bidding, not value, until the campaign has the volume to support it.
A test design that gives a readable answer
Because the format combines many placements, a pooled number can hide where the money goes. A simple structure helps:
- Run one campaign with a video-led asset set and one with an image-led set, matching budget, geography and audience, so the creative is the variable.
- Give both enough budget to produce a meaningful number of conversions per week. If you cannot afford that, run one campaign rather than two thin ones.
- Use Google's experiment feature for placement and setting changes, not manual edits in the middle of a flight.
- Judge by a fixed window, not day to day. The bidder needs one to two conversion cycles to settle after a change.
Keep your first-party audience feeds clean as well. Lookalike segments built from poor seed data will reproduce its flaws, so upload only the users who match the behavior you want more of, such as paying subscribers rather than all installs.
Creative needs a plan too. Because one campaign can carry portrait video and portrait images alongside square ones, a single landscape asset leaves reach on the table. Brief a short vertical video that states the benefit in the first seconds, a carousel that walks through the product, and a static portrait image. Keep file naming consistent so you can tell, in asset reporting, which format carried the result.
Practical takeaway
Audit for leftover Discovery campaigns and for any that stalled after the move, rebuild your creative set for video and portrait formats, and start with a single well-funded test on conversion bidding. Decide in advance whether you are measuring reach into new audiences or direct response, because the two need different yardsticks.