Budget Optimizer and Conversion Optimizer Sunset in AdWords

What’s happening?
In March 2017, we will stop supporting the Budget Optimizer and Conversion Optimizer bidding strategies in AdWords. These strategies have long been unavailable for user opt in. We will migrate existing campaigns that use these legacy strategies to use their replacement counterparts which offer identical features: There will be no change in performance after the migration.

What do I need to do?
If you are satisfied with your current Budget Optimizer or Conversion Optimizer setup, then you don't need to do anything to your existing campaigns -- Google will automatically migrate them for you.

If you prefer manually migrating your campaigns before the automatic migration begins, you may refer to the automatic migration steps below. Refer to our bidding guide and help center articles on target CPA and target spend strategies to learn more about the new bidding strategies.

What will the automatic migration do for Conversion Optimizer campaigns?
  • Convert the campaign's bidding strategy to standard target CPA.
  • Identify all ad groups of the campaign and their CPA bids, calculate the most common CPA bid value, and set the campaign's target CPA value to this value. If no CPA bids exist, Google sets the campaign's target CPA to the minimum billable unit.
  • Pause any ad groups that do not have a CPA bid. This prevents previously inactive ad groups from inheriting the campaign's new target CPA value and inadvertently serving.
What will the automatic migration do for Budget Optimizer campaigns?
  • If no ad group level bidding strategy overrides exist, update the campaign’s bidding strategy to a standard target spend strategy. If the enhancedCpcEnabled field is set to true for the budget optimizer strategy, set it for the target spend strategy also.
  • If some--but not all--ad groups have overrides, update the the campaign’s bidding strategy to a new portfolio target spend strategy. This preserves the ad group level bidding strategy overrides.
  • In the rare case that all ad groups have overrides, update the campaign’s bidding strategy to standard manual CPC. The campaign level bidding strategy doesn’t matter in this case since all the ad groups have overrides. However, changing the campaign’s bidding strategy to manual CPC helps us avoid creating portfolio target spend strategies for each ad group in the campaign.
As always, if you have any questions about this change or other API features, please post on the forum.