How to Change Google Ad Type

Created a Google Ads campaign but quickly realized it’s not the right type for your goals? Don't worry, it's a common situation. This guide will walk you through exactly what you can - and can't - do to change your campaign type, the right way to make the switch, and when it makes strategic sense to do so.

First, a Quick Primer on Google Ad Types

Before we jump into the how, let’s quickly cover the fundamentals. Google Ads offers several campaign types, each designed for a different goal and to be shown in different places. The type you choose fundamentally changes your targeting options, ad formats, and bidding strategies.

Here are the primary campaign types you’ll encounter:

• Search Campaigns: These are the classic text-based ads that appear on Google search results pages when someone types in a query. They are fantastic for capturing high-intent traffic because you're reaching people who are actively looking for a solution you provide.
• Display Campaigns: These are visual ads (images, banners, GIFs) that appear across the Google Display Network, a collection of over two million websites, videos, and apps. They’re excellent for building brand awareness and for remarketing to people who have already visited your site.
• Video Campaigns: These are video ads that primarily run on YouTube, as either in-stream ads (before, during, or after videos), in-feed ads, or Shorts ads. Video is a powerful medium for storytelling and engaging new audiences at the top of the sales funnel.
• Shopping Campaigns: If you're an e-commerce business, these are for you. Shopping ads showcase your products directly in search results with an image, title, price, and store name. They are highly effective for driving online sales.
• Performance Max (PMax) Campaigns: PMax is Google's all-in-one, AI-powered campaign type. You provide assets (text, images, videos) and goals, and Google's machine learning automatically serves your ads across all of its channels - Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps - to find you more converting customers.
• App Campaigns: Specifically designed to drive downloads and in-app actions for your mobile app across Google’s properties.
• Local Campaigns: Aimed at driving foot traffic to your physical store locations, showing ads across Search, Maps, YouTube, and the Display Network to nearby customers.

The Big Question: Can You Directly Change an Existing Ad Campaign Type?

Let's get straight to the point: No, you cannot directly edit an active campaign and change its fundamental type. For example, you can't open a Search campaign's settings and flip a switch to turn it into a Video campaign.

You might be wondering why not. The reason is that each campaign type is built on an entirely different foundation. The settings, ad formats, bidding strategies, and targeting options are so distinct that converting from one to another would be like trying to convert a bicycle into a boat - they're just engineered differently from the ground up.

• A Search campaign is built around keywords, text ads, and search terms.
• A Display campaign relies on audience targeting, demographics, and visual ads.
• A Video campaign needs video assets and focuses on metrics like views and engagement.

Because they're so different, Google requires you to create a new campaign from scratch when you want to use a new campaign type. But that doesn't mean you have to start over completely.

The Right Way to "Change" Your Ad Type: Recreate and Relaunch

The standard and correct procedure for "changing" your ad type is to create a new campaign with the type you want, pull over any relevant information from the old one, and then pause the original campaign once the new one is live. It’s less of an "edit" and more of a "rebuild."

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to handle this like a pro.

Step 1: Audit and Save Key Elements from Your Old Campaign

Before you do anything else, go into your existing campaign and identify what's worth keeping. You don't want to lose the learnings or work you've already put in. Depending on the campaign, here’s what you might want to save:

• High-Performing Ad Copy: Copy and paste the headlines and descriptions from your best-performing text ads into a separate document. This content can be repurposed or used as inspiration for your new campaign's ads.
• Keyword Lists: If you’re moving from one type of Search campaign to another, you’ll definitely want to export your keyword list. You can do this at the Ad Group level.
• Negative Keyword Lists: This is a crucial one. Your negative keyword lists prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant queries and save you a lot of money. You can apply existing negative keyword lists to new campaigns, so make sure you know which lists are in use.
• Audience Segments: Note which specific in-market, affinity, or custom remarketing audiences have performed well. You can often reuse these in your new campaign, especially for Display, Video, or PMax.
• Targeting Settings Info: Make a note of the locations, languages, and any specific demographic data points that worked well in your previous campaign.

Step 2: Create a Brand New Campaign

With your key elements saved, it's time to build your new campaign. Navigate to the main "Campaigns" view in your Google Ads dashboard.

1. Click the blue “+” icon and select “New campaign.”
2. Choose Your Objective: Google will ask for your marketing objective (e.g., Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Brand awareness and reach). This choice will help guide you toward the campaign types best suited for your goal.
3. Select a Conversion Goal: Tell Google which specific conversion actions you want to track, like purchases or form submissions. This is vital for the AI to optimize your campaign effectively.
4. Select Your Campaign Type: This is the most important step! Based on your objective, Google will present the eligible campaign types. This is where you select the new type you want to use - Search, Performance Max, Display, Shopping, etc.
5. Configure Basic Settings: Proceed through the setup process. You’ll be asked to set your budget, bidding strategy, target locations, and languages. Refer to the notes you took in Step 1 to keep things consistent where it makes sense.

Step 3: Build Your New Ad Groups and Ads

Now you'll set up the guts of your campaign. This is where you’ll put the elements you saved to work.

• For a new Search campaign, create your ad groups and paste in your saved keywords and negative keywords. Write new text ads, using your high-performing copy from Step 1 as a foundation.
• For a new Display or Video campaign, you'll need new creative assets. Create ad groups targeting the audiences you identified as successful previously. Upload your images or videos and write compelling copy to accompany them.
• For a new Performance Max campaign, you’ll provide an “asset group,” which includes a collection of text headlines, images, logos, and videos. This is where pieces of your previous ad copy can be adapted and dropped in.

Step 4: Launch the New Campaign and Pause the Old One

Once you are happy with your new campaign's setup, submit it for review and launch it. For a seamless transition, you need to turn off the old one. Go back to your campaigns list, find the original campaign, and click the green dot next to its name. Select "Pause" from the dropdown menu.

Why pause instead of delete? Pausing preserves all the historical data from that campaign. You might want to refer back to it later for performance insights. Deleting (or "removing") it makes that data much harder to reference.

The Exception: Upgrading to Performance Max

There is one significant exception to the "rebuild from scratch" rule: upgrading certain campaigns to Performance Max.

Google has been actively pushing advertisers towards PMax because it leverages its most advanced AI and automation. For a period, Google automatically upgraded all Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max. Now, you might see prompts in your Google Ads account recommending you "upgrade" a standard Shopping or other campaign type to PMax.

This is typically a one-click process found in the "Recommendations" tab of your account. When you accept the recommendation, Google uses your existing campaign's information to create a new PMax campaign. It's more of a guided migration than a direct edit, and it’s a one-way street - once you upgrade to PMax, you can't revert back to the old campaign type.

When Does it Make Sense to Change Ad Types?

Changing your campaign type is a strategic decision. Here are a few common scenarios where it makes a lot of sense:

1. Your business goals have shifted. Maybe you initially focused on building brand awareness with a Video campaign, but now your primary goal is driving immediate leads. Creating a new Search campaign is the right move to capture that bottom-of-funnel intent.
2. You’re expanding up or down the funnel. If you've been having fantastic success with a Search campaign converting active searchers, you might want to start building a larger audience. Creating a Display or Video campaign can introduce your brand to potential customers earlier in their journey.
3. An existing campaign is underperforming. If your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) on a broad Display campaign is hurting your budget, you could pilot a highly-targeted Search campaign focused on a smaller set of high-intent keywords to see if you can achieve a better ROI.
4. You want to test new channels. Curious if PMax can really outperform your standard Search or Shopping campaigns? The only way to know for sure is to create a new campaign and test it. Let the data tell you what works best for your business.

Final Thoughts

While you can’t simply flip a switch to change a Google Ads campaign type, the process of recreating it gives you a perfect opportunity to refine your strategy. By building a new campaign with purpose, you can incorporate all your past learnings to create something even more effective while pausing old campaigns that no longer serve your goals.

As you build out campaigns in Search, Display, PMax, and beyond, tracking what's working becomes increasingly complex. At Graphed, we plug directly into your Google Ads account to make this easy. You can use natural language to instantly assess performance, build dashboards comparing your Search ROI against your new PMax test, and get real-time answers without getting lost in spreadsheets. It automates away the reporting headaches, so you can spend less time pulling data and more time acting on it.