As we announced in January and again in March, existing and future Smart Shopping campaigns (SSC) will automatically upgrade to Performance Max campaigns between July and September 2022. The self-upgrade started in April 2022. The automatic upgrade has commenced (related blog post) and should complete by September 30, 2022. This blog post adds details for our API developers.
Starting July 25, 2022, accounts without active or paused SSCs (including new accounts) will no longer be able to create SSCs.
Once an account with active or paused SSCs has been automatically upgraded from SSC to Performance Max, no new SSC creation will be permitted in any surface including the UI, the API, Google Ads Scripts or Google Ads Editor.
The Google Ads API v11 included a new UpgradeSmartShoppingCampaignToPerformanceMaxRecommendation recommendation type to allow developers to upgrade a given SSC to a Performance Max campaign. This can still be applied to an account that has not yet automatically upgraded.
As mentioned in the January blog post, Local campaigns will also be automatically upgraded to Performance Max. An upcoming release of the Google Ads API will include a new recommendation type to allow developers to upgrade an eligible Local campaign to a Performance Max campaign.
Additional information
If you have any questions or need additional help, contact us via the forum.
David Wihl, Google Ads API Team