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Historically, ad groups in Display campaigns have not served until you added at least one positive ad group targeting criterion, such as Placement or CriterionUserList. This behavior worked well if your goal was to target specific criteria on Display, but not if your goal was to target as broad an audience as possible.

What's changing
Starting January 11, 2017, a Display ad group will be eligible to serve ads as soon as its status is set to ENABLED and it has a bid, a budget, and an approved ad. If the ad group does not have any ad group level positive targeting criteria, then the ad group will target the entire Display network, subject to exclusions and campaign-level targeting settings (such as geo, language, etc.), with the potential to quickly exhaust your campaign budget.

This change only impacts campaigns with AdvertisingChannelType of DISPLAY or VIDEO.

Before this feature is enabled on your account, any existing Display ad groups without ad group level positive targeting criteria will be set to PAUSED.

What you should do
For existing Display campaigns and ad groups:

• If you want to target the entire Display network (subject to exclusions and campaign-level targeting settings), then after the feature is enabled, make sure you set those ad groups to ENABLED, since they will be in the PAUSED state.
• Otherwise, add the desired positive targeting criteria to each ad group, and then set it to ENABLED.

For new Display campaigns and ad groups, review your application's ad group creation workflow to ensure that it does the following:

• Sets the AdGroup status field to PAUSED when creating a new ad group via AdGroupService.mutate and an ADD operation.
• Only sets the AdGroup status to ENABLED after adding targeting criteria (if desired). You can update the status of your AdGroup via AdGroupService.mutate and a SET operation.

In addition, if your application adds and removes targeting criteria from existing Display ad groups, make sure that it will also properly update the the ad group's status to PAUSED or ENABLED if the intended side-effect of criterion addition or removal is to pause or start serving. This is particularly important when removing the only positive criterion for an ad group, since this will change its reach from very narrow to very broad.

If you have any questions, please post on the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.
- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team

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We previously announced that we are removing the ability to set contentBid for “Display Network only” campaigns in the AdWords API on February 18th, 2014. However, based on developer feedback, we are moving this date to March 3, 2014.

If your application modifies ad group bids for Display-only campaigns, then your application may be affected by this change.

To make sure your applications and scripts work properly, you should make the following changes to your application code before March 3, 2014:

• Modify your code to set the default ad group bid instead of contentBid for “Display Only Campaigns”.
• Clear out the contentBid field for “Display Only Campaigns” by setting it to zero so that AdWords will start using the default ad group bid when serving your ads.
• If you store campaigns in a local data store, re-sync your data store with AdWords to pick up the updated default bid values.

If you have any questions about this change or the AdWords API in general, you can post them on our developer forum. You can also follow our Google+ page for updates about the AdWords API.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

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As previously announced, we are removing the ability to set contentBid for “Display Network only” campaigns in the AdWords API on February 18th, 2014. Once this change happens, you will start receiving a ReadOnlyError.READ_ONLY error for all versions of the API if you set contentBid for a “Display Network only” campaign. You can use the fieldPath of the ApiError object to identify the operation triggering the error.

To make sure your applications and scripts work properly, you should make the following changes to your application code before February 18th, 2014:

• modify your code to set the default ad group bid instead of contentBid for “Display Only Campaigns”
• clear out the contentBid field for “Display Only Campaigns” so that AdWords will start using the default ad group bid when serving your ads
• if you store campaigns in a local data store, re-sync your data store with AdWords to pick up the updated default bid values

If you have any questions about this change or the AdWords API in general, you can post them on our developer forum. You can also follow our Google+ page for updates about the AdWords API.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

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[Update 2/17/2014: Based on developer feedback, we have moved the date of this change back to March 3, 2014.]

We're making a change to how the contentBid setting works in “Display Network Only” campaigns. Here's some background on the change and how it might affect you.

Currently, if you have a campaign that targets only the Display Network, then you can use a CpcBid at the adgroup level to specify a default bid and a display network bid override for content networks. In the past, we've allowed users to specify a contentBid in a "Display Network Only" campaign type, even though contentBid is useful only for "Search & Display Networks" campaign type. This allowed users to switch between "Search & Display Networks" and “Display Network only” campaign types without modifying their bids.

Since display campaigns have become so much more specialized over time, we've recently removed support for switching “Display Network only” campaigns to other campaign types. This makes contentBid setting obsolete for “Display Network only” campaigns, so we are removing the ability to set contentBid for “Display Network only” campaigns in AdWords API. The default bid value will be used for serving your ads on Google Display Network.

What this means for you

If you do not set contentBid at the adgroup level for a “Display Network only” campaign, this change will not affect you.

Starting on February 18th, 2014, if you set contentBid for a “Display Network only” campaign, then you will start receiving a ReadOnlyError.READ_ONLY error for all versions of the API. You can use the fieldPath of the ApiError object to identify the operation triggering the error.

To avoid getting errors, you should:

• modify your code to set the default adgroup bid instead of contentBid
• clear out the contentBid field to make sure that AdWords will start using the default adgroup bid when serving your ads
• if you store campaigns in a local data store, re-sync your data store with AdWords to pick up the updated default bid values

If you're still using contentBid to set ad group display bids in “Display Network only” campaigns within a few days of February 18th, 2014, we plan to do a one-time migration of those bids to become your ad group default bid. This migration is intended to ensure your ads serve with the correct bid; you must still make sure your code is able to handle ad group bids on the Display Network properly.

If you have any questions about this change or the AdWords API in general, you can post them on our developer forum. You can also follow our Google+ page for updates about the AdWords API.

Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

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Since February 2013 advertisers have been able to explicitly set the Content Bid Dimension in the API. In the meantime, we’ve also been automatically setting the Content Bid Dimension for advertisers using older versions of the API, and for those using v201302 that did not explicitly specify a bid dimension. The automatic setting followed the logic described in this blog post.

Once v201209 is deprecated and all legacy campaigns are auto-migrated to Enhanced Campaigns and Powerful Bidding (July 22, 2013), we’ll stop setting the Content Bid Dimension implicitly for ad groups (new and existing). As announced back in March, advertisers wanting to override the ad group default bid with criteria-level bids from a given content dimension will need to explicitly set the contentBidCriterionTypeGroup to the desired CriterionTypeGroup.

Existing ad groups will keep their Content Bid Dimension setting, regardless of whether it has been set implicitly or explicitly. No changes are needed if you want to preserve the same Content Bid Dimension. After July 22, if you create a new ad group or want to change the bid dimension of an existing one, you’ll have to explicitly set the Content Bid Dimension.

You can verify the content bid dimension using AdGroupService.AdGroup#contentBidCriterionTypeGroup

If you have any questions or need help with migration, please contact us on the forum. You can also reach out to us on Google+ page.

- The AdWords API Team

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We’re changing the way that bidding works for the display network, by removing implicit ordering and introducing something more simplistic. You can migrate your AdGroups now or allow them to be automatically migrated for you. But before we can explain the new system, let’s take a look at what we’ve got now.

Historically, bidding on the display network has relied on implicit priority orders to determine how to use the criteria added to an AdGroup.

In the current system, criteria-level bid overrides an AdGroup default bid. But since the display network supports up to 6 dimensions of targeting, we often need to pick one of many possible bids to use for a given impression. To do so, we use the following order:

• Placement (most specific)
• Age
• Gender
• Topic
• Interests and remarketing list
• Display Network (AdGroup-level)
• Keyword
• Default AdGroup Bid (least specific)

to choose which value to use. If a matching placement has a bid, we use that. If not, we look for a matching Age bid, etc. If we get to User Lists/Interests and still have not found a bid override, we look for an AdGroup-level “Display Network Bid”. If that also doesn’t exist, then we take a Keyword bid if there is one. Finally, if we still haven’t found a bid to use, we use the default AdGroup bid.

For further information, see how bids are used on the display network.

Explicit Content Bid Dimension
We will be replacing the implicit order with a single display bid override dimension per AdGroup. Ads serving on the display network will honor bids from that dimension and ignore any bids that may exist on other dimensions. We will use this same override dimension for URL overrides - serving will honor urls from the display override dimension, and ignore urls from any other dimension.

In the new implementation, you will be able to explicitly specify which bid dimension will be used per AdGroup. You can set this by using the new object: BiddingStrategyConfiguration, and the new attribute on the AdGroup object: contentBidCriterionType, both are modified through the AdGroupService. For more information on the new implemenation, please see this guide on Bidding.

Migration
With the introduction of AdWords API version v201302 you’ll be able to manually migrate your AdGroups to take effect as you have been used to with the existing implementation. If you chose not to set these on existing AdGroups, however, for the duration of the migration period, things will continue with the existing order. After the migration period, we will automatically select the most appropriate dimension for each of your AdGroups.

To manually migrate your AdGroups, or to configure new AdGroups, you need to set the contentBidCriterionTypeGroup to the desired CriterionTypeGroup. You can then add new Bids using the BiddingStrategyConfiguration, that can then be selected at a later time.

Please note, by setting the contentBidCriterionType, the AdGroup will be marked as migrated.

Once the manual migration period has ended, those AdGroups that have not been migrated will be automatically migrated to the new structure. The automatic migration will select the contentBidCriterionTypeGroup, for un-migrated AdGroups, based on the existing method of prioritization. All automatically migrated AdGroups can continue to be edited through the API.

Once the automatic migration is complete, the old system of bidding will be retired and all AdGroups will honour the new bid dimension system. Also, once an AdGroup has a contentBidCriterionType, all subsequent changes to the effective bid dimension should be done through the same field.

Reports
With these changes, comes a new report, the PLACEMENT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT which will contain all the information about manual placements. We strongly recommend using this report for queries regarding placement performance, moving forward.

There will also be changes to the AUTOMATIC_PLACEMENTS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT and URL_PERFORMANCE_REPORT to better match the AdWords website.

 - Paul Matthews, AdWords API Team