If you’re running Demand Gen campaigns with tiny budgets…

There’s an important update coming.

Starting April 1, 2026, Google Ads will enforce a minimum daily budget of $5 (or local equivalent) for all Demand Gen campaigns via the API.

Why?

Because ultra-low budgets struggle in the “cold start” phase, and the system can’t learn or optimise properly.

Here’s what changes 👇

What’s new

Any Demand Gen campaign created or updated with a daily budget below $5 will trigger an error in the Google Ads API.

v21+ → You’ll get a BUDGET_BELOW_DAILY_MINIMUM error
v20 → It shows as UNKNOWN, but the internal error will read CampaignBudgetError.BUDGET_BELOW_DAILY_MINIMUM

This applies when you modify:

– Daily budgets
– Flighted (custom) budgets

Start or end dates that affect daily spend

What about existing campaigns?

They’ll continue running even if they’re below $5/day.

But the moment you edit the budget or duration, the new rule kicks in.

You’ll need to raise the budget to at least the minimum threshold.

Thanks for sharing Arpan Banerjee

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