In May of 2026, Google announced that standalone Display campaigns are being absorbed into Demand Gen campaigns. The Google Display Network (GDN) itself isn’t going anywhere and isn’t changing substantially, but the way advertisers are able to purchase ad inventory on it will.

In this post, I’m going to cover what’s changing and when, talk about why this change is taking place, then get into the tactical changes you should be making and understand what you should expect from this shift.

• What’s changing
• Timeline of shift from Display to Demand Gen
• What to expect with this change
• What advertisers should do now to prepare

When you create a new campaign in Google Ads, the first thing you do is select a campaign objective.

If you select “create a campaign without a goal’s guidance,” you can see all of the available campaign types.

Moving forward, the display option will no longer be available.

To clarify, this does not mean that the Google Display Network is going away. Not even close. Google generates far too much revenue from the GDN.

Instead, the most direct path to the GDN will be Demand Gen.

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The announcement was made in May of 2026, but it will take until January of 2027 for the ability to create standalone Google Display campaigns to go away. That’s seven months, including the ever-coveted holiday season for you to get your accounts ready.

After that time, all remaining Display campaigns will be automatically migrated to Demand Gen campaigns, but Google has yet to give a date for that shift.

Everyone’s experience will be different, but here are the broad strokes of what we’re seeing and what could happen for your account.

Demand Gen campaigns rely on more automation from Google, which can mean a few things.

First, performance may be a bit better with more data points being fed into Google’s machine learning. There may be better audience expansion and creative optimization compared to previous Display campaigns.

But there will also be less manual control and greater volatility in performance. Many of the controls from traditional Display campaigns are being carried over, but some will go away. There are going to be fewer levers to pull in Demand Gen, but on top of that, the lean into automation means there may be bigger swings taken by the bidding algorithms. It could take longer for the system to get its bearings and return the results you’re needing.

Demand Gen is more creative-driven than a traditional display campaign is. There are more visuals that can be leveraged and more placements they can show in.

Here’s a quick view of some spacing options for YouTube placements just on mobile. Not to mention the desktop variants plus the other four networks you can target with Demand Gen (Discover, Gmail, Maps, & GDN), that’s a ton of different formats your ads can take.

Be sure you’re putting effort into making strong creatives that will stand out on all Google platforms to see the best results.

While there is a decent amount of time between now and January, I expect it will come sooner than you think. So it’s in your best interest to begin planning and making moves in your account as soon as possible.

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One of my favorite things about the Google Ads platform is that you can create all sorts of draft campaigns, tinker with settings, and get a general understanding of a campaign without ever having to launch it.

If you’ve not used a Demand Gen campaign until now…this is your time to start tinkering.

Head into the platform, create a new campaign, and don’t use a goal’s guidance. This will offer you the most settings in later stages. (If you eventually want to use a goal’s guidance for your campaigns, that’s totally fine. This is just a learning phase.)

From there, familiarize yourself with all aspects of Demand Gen campaigns.

Here are some key things to pay attention to as you’re tinkering:

• Understanding how your campaign goal will impact your bidding options.
• Take note of your current conversion performance and what that means for available campaign goals.
• Note that audiences are made of combinations of custom segments, remarketing lists, Lookalike audiences, interests, and different options for demographics.
• Content targeting like placements, topics, and keywords lives in the Content section of the left hand navigation at the ad group level and isn’t found in the campaign builder process. This is also the section where you’ll exclude placements you want to avoid.
• Ad groups house the network targeting, not the campaign level, and by default new ad groups are opted into “All Google Channels” but do NOT include the Google Display Network.
• Ad creatives can have different formats like single image, single video, and carousel. They include text, images, and videos along with logos and calls to action and have quite a few more moving pieces than regular Responsive Display Ads and banners.

Needless to say, Demand Gen campaigns are quite a different beast than Display campaigns, so it’s good that you know where all of the controls are before you start spending funds.

If you’ve been running Display campaigns for a long time, you’ve likely added at least a few negative placements to keep your ads from showing on sites that don’t perform well or aren’t aligned with your brand. Additionally, maybe you’ve found some specific placements, audiences, in-market segments, or something else that does perform well that you want to make sure you retain with this changeover.

Make an inventory of all the learnings you have from your existing campaigns, whether positive or negatives, then use your new knowledge of Demand Gen campaigns that you definitely gained from the previous step and find how to employ those learnings.

The smallest step you can take with this changeover is to turn your existing Display campaigns into a Demand Gen type, but still have almost all the same targeting, ads, etc.

For this step, you can either create a new campaign from scratch, or you can test out Google’s new migration tool. You can do this from the Campaigns tab by checking the box next to the campaign you want to update, click Edit, then select Update to Demand Gen. This will remove your existing Display campaign and create a new Demand Gen campaign that uses the previous campaign’s data and settings.

I recommend starting with a low-stakes campaign to start, test how the process works and make sure you don’t find any errors, then begin updating your higher-value Display campaigns if this is the route you want to take.

For those of you doing this manually and not using the migration tool, you’ll have more work to do, but you can retain your existing Display campaign and adjust its spending to accommodate the new Demand Gen version and slowly lower the budget over time in favor of Demand Gen once you’ve got your feet under you.

Just be sure to pay attention to the network settings at the ad group level. Here’s where you’ll get to choose which platforms you want to leverage. To only replicate a previous Display campaign, choose the “Let me choose” option, then check the box next to GDN only. Leave all others blank.

Once your new campaign has been running for a while and you’re seeing good results, it might make sense to expand into some of the other features of Demand Gen.

The one that comes to mind first is network coverage. Google has lots of inventory available through Demand Gen campaigns, not just the Google Display Network. Check the box next to a few of these on your top-performing campaigns and see if you can get more incremental results at a decent rate.

With placements, targeting, creatives, bidding, and other factors all being different, it’s going to be tough to compare these campaigns to Display in the long run.

Instead, I would encourage you to develop a new set of KPIs to benchmark against and improve upon. If you’re beating your old Display campaign KPIs with Demand Gen, then that’s wonderful. But if you’re not, don’t assume Demand Gen can’t work for you. Evaluate where you’re falling short, test and iterate, and work on getting back to levels you’re happy with and seeing success from.

Google transitioning Display campaigns into Demand Gen isn’t a surprise. Just like many of the other changes they’ve made in the past, this will likely frustrate those who have been advertising for a long time and are set in their ways. For the most part, you’ll be able to replicate your Display strategy within a Demand Gen campaign, so start with that. Then, if you feel comfortable, maybe take the rest of the Demand Gen features for a stroll and see how you do. You might be pleasantly surprised by the results you get.

For more ways to maximize your campaign results during this transition, see how our solutions can help!