Skip to main content
This page is a workbook. Fill it in top to bottom before anything is built in Google Ads. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown explaining what the section is for. The dropdowns explain the thinking; the decision is yours.
This brief sits between the marketing campaign brief, which covers strategy across every channel, and Google Ads, where the campaign is built. One marketing campaign usually generates several platform briefs.Grayed E.g. text is a placeholder. Delete it and replace it with your own. Examples use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology.
Record the decision and the reason, not the click path. This brief fixes campaign type, conversion goal, budget, bid strategy, and structure so they can be reviewed before spend starts. Everything below that line, which keywords to add or negate, when to adjust a target, how to rotate assets, stays with the media buyer.

​
Setup

​
Campaign type

Which Google campaign type, and why this one? Google campaign types, as of 7 August 2026:
Standalone Display campaigns are being migrated into Demand Gen. Google began rolling out the migration tool in June 2026, and creating new standalone Display campaigns is being phased out. For a new visual campaign, brief it as Demand Gen. The Display creative specs still apply to responsive display assets served through Demand Gen.
Campaign type is the largest decision in this brief, because it sets what the campaign can be optimized toward, which assets it needs, and which report it can be compared against. A Search campaign and a Performance Max campaign chasing the same conversion action are not two versions of one thing; they buy different demand at different points and will not produce comparable cost per result.The “why this type” line is what keeps the choice reviewable. Performance Max in particular gets picked because it is the default recommendation rather than because the campaign has the asset coverage and conversion volume it needs, and that reasoning is invisible three months later unless someone wrote it down.

​
Conversion goal

What counts as a result, and which goal is the campaign optimizing toward?
Confirm which conversion actions are set as primary for this campaign. A campaign inheriting account-default goals will optimize toward every primary action in the account, including ones that have nothing to do with this campaign’s objective.
Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever is marked primary. That makes the primary and secondary split the single most consequential tracking decision in a Google campaign, and it is set in a place most people never open.Naming the conversion action against the event tracking plan is what keeps Google’s reported conversions reconcilable with your analytics. Google counts conversions by click date and applies its own attribution model, so the numbers will not match your dashboard exactly. They should still be explainable, and that is only possible when both sides agree on what the event is.

​
Budget and bid strategy

Google bid strategies, as of 7 August 2026:
Google relabelled “Maximize conversions with a target CPA” as Target CPA and “Maximize conversion value with a target ROAS” as Target ROAS from June 2026. The bidding behavior did not change, only the label. Older documents and benchmarks may use either name.
A target-based strategy needs conversion volume to work with. Set a target on a campaign that converts a handful of times a month and the system has too little signal to bid against, which shows up as erratic delivery rather than as an obvious error. Starting on a maximize strategy and moving to a target once volume is steady is the usual sequence, and worth writing down as a plan rather than leaving to be noticed later.Budget and bid strategy also interact. A campaign that is budget-limited behaves differently from one that is target-limited, and the two get diagnosed differently. Recording both values here means the next person can tell which constraint was actually binding.

​
Campaign structure

What ad groups or asset groups does this campaign contain, and what is each one for?
On Search, an ad group is a promise that the keywords inside it are close enough in intent to share one set of ads. Groups that drift wide force the ads to be generic, which weakens both relevance and the landing page match.On Performance Max and Demand Gen the equivalent unit is the asset group, and the same logic applies to audience signals and creative rather than keywords. In both cases the last column keeps a group accountable to a stated purpose instead of surviving on habit.

​
Targeting

Keywords, match types, and negatives (Search and Shopping): E.g. Exact and phrase only. Broad off until CPA is stable. Standing negative list applied. Audience signals (Performance Max and Demand Gen): E.g. Customer Match list plus site visitors 180d, used as a signal not a restriction.
Match type is a spend-control decision as much as a targeting one, which is why it belongs in a brief that gets reviewed. Broad match with a target-based bid strategy can work well and can also spend a budget on queries nobody would have chosen, and which of those happens depends on conversion signal quality rather than on the setting alone.Audience signals on Performance Max and Demand Gen are not the same as targeting. They tell the system where to start looking, and it will go beyond them. Writing down which they are prevents the common misreading that a signal has restricted delivery when it has not.

​
Assets, creative, and copy

Copy templates by campaign type: Search, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Display, YouTube, App. Creative specs by campaign type: Performance Max, Display, Search, Demand Gen and uploaded display, YouTube.
Performance Max and Demand Gen judge a campaign partly on asset coverage. Missing a ratio or a logo size does not produce an error; it produces a campaign that cannot serve on the placements those assets would have unlocked, which reads as weak performance rather than as a missing file.Search has the opposite failure mode. Its assets are cheap to produce, so the risk is headlines written at the keyboard during setup rather than briefed and approved. Both routes end with copy that never went through the copy brief, and both show up later as ads nobody can trace to a decision.

​
Naming and tracking

Google auto-tagging adds a gclid that links a click to Google Ads reporting. It does not populate the utm_source and utm_medium fields your own analytics groups by, which is why most accounts run both. Recording the decision here prevents the recurring argument about whether manual tags are redundant.The three naming levels do the same job on Google as anywhere else: they let a report group spend by offer, funnel position, or creative type rather than only by the campaign it sat in.

​
Experiment

Optional: fill this in only if part of this campaign is a controlled test.

​
Measurement

Where this campaign is reported: E.g. Paid media dashboard, rolled into the weekly report

​
Post-launch

Platform settings on this page were checked on 7 August 2026. Google renames bid strategies and retires campaign types regularly, and changed how budget-limited campaigns bid in August 2026. Confirm the current options in Google Ads before filling in a brief, and update this page when they move.
Last modified on August 10, 2026