Demand Gen Isn’t just some Regular Ol' Campaign. It’s a Crazy Cool Campaign, Yo!

Demand Gen is Google’s all-in-one immersive visual network campaign. It is the ideal way to reach users across YouTube, the Discover Network, Gmail and Google Display. For advertisers who also run Meta Ads, Demand Gen is an extremely valuable tool to leverage to reach users across the Google Network in a similar fashion.

Demand Gen also has some features that make it particularly unique when targeting users across YouTube.  Within Demand Gen campaigns you can create lookalike audiences - which are not available within a YouTube campaign.  You can also optimize for conversions - which Google recently took away when it migrated all YouTube for Action campaigns to Demand Gen. 

In addition to this, Demand Gen campaigns can run alongside a product feed, showcasing your top sellers with a highlighted video.

One of the main features of Demand Gen campaigns is its ability to connect with users across YouTube Shorts, In-Stream Ads (skippable and non-skippable), In-Feed and the YouTube Home Feed.  With this in mind you want to make sure you are using a wide variety of vertical (9:16) and horizontal (16:9) video assets following YouTube’s best practices.  Keeping in mind that the user can skip an in-stream skippable ad after 5 seconds. 

The Discover Feed is probably the most difficult to explain to those unfamiliar with the product itself.  This is a feed found either within the Google app, on your Android phone or tablet when you are on google.com or on some devices if you swipe right.  This feed wants to give you articles to read that have been customized to your liking for optimal engagement.  According to this article, Google uses information from your device and other Google products to know what to show in Discover.  These personalised stories will be interspersed with advertisements from Demand Gen campaigns.

Within Gmail, advertisements can apply within the Social or Promotion tabs. 

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Creating Your First Demand Gen Campaign in Google Ads

When you create a campaign, you will be asked to choose an objective.  You will want to choose sales, leads, website traffic or “create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.”  After this, select the campaign type “Demand Gen.”  Make sure you remove any conversion goals that are not helpful for your objective before continuing.  

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From here, you will get a popup that will ask you if you’d like to create  a new campaign or finish a saved draft.  If you have already started a previous Demand Gen campaign, you can select it here, otherwise select “start new.” 

On the next screen, you will be able to name your campaign, select a product feed (if you plan to use one) and choose which conversion action you’d like to utilize. 

From here, you will again confirm your conversion goals and select if you’d like to optimize for view-through conversions. Then set a budget and start date, customer acquisition settings, and make sure to include Brand Guidelines if you’d like to use specific colors or fonts within your ads.

Then, set your location and language as well as set up the campaign to only target specific devices. This could be valuable if you have users who are primarily only going to be purchasing or filling out a lead form on a computer, as opposed to a mobile device or if you have a product that is only compatible with a certain type of mobile device.

Once you’ve completed this part, you will notice that the UI now looks different.  You will see the campaign name and ad group creation on the left hand side.

It’s important to note that you can also set your language and location targeting on the ad group level with a Demand Gen campaign. This is helpful if you want to target multiple locations with different ad copy in the same campaign.

Optimized targeting will automatically be set up within the campaign, but if you are wanting to only target the audience you create, be sure to uncheck that box. 

Another important step at the ad group level is determining which channels you’d like to show ads on.  For instance, you may have only a static image ad and you only want to target the Google Display Network with this ad.  Likewise, you could have a YouTube Short and only want to target that network.

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In Demand Gen campaigns, in particular, the real magic happens in audience and ad creation. 

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Audience Creation:

When you create an audience in Demand Gen, you can target custom segments, remarketing lists, lookalike segments (created from a seed customer list), interests & detailed demographics (think In-Market or Affinity Audiences) and demographic targeting.  You can also add exclusions here.  This is especially important for strategy, as you do not want to target users who have already completed the desired action on your website.

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Ad Creation

There are three types of ad formats in Demand Gen and they change slightly depending on if you have a product feed or not.  

If you are running without a product feed and primarily concerned about lead generation, your three options will be a single image ad (with the option to upload a display ad), a video ad or a carousel image ad.

If you have a product feed, your options will be an image & products ad, video and products ad or a products only ad.

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I highly recommend you create all three ad formats available so your campaign will have the most amount of reach and visibility.

When it comes to strategy, we like to create two Demand Gen campaigns in each account.  One targets a Brand Awareness audience that removes any existing site visitors or converters from the target audience while the other serves as a remarketing component for users who have visited the site and not converted.

‍Optimizing Demand Gen

I recommend starting Demand Gen campaigns off on Maximize Conversions.  One of the first things you can optimize for is a tCPA target.  However, you will want to wait a couple of weeks before setting it.  The exception would be if the campaign is spending like crazy with no conversions in the first week.

tCPA targets are one of the ways you can optimize Demand Gen.  Your main levers will be budget, tCPA targets, updating/testing new audiences, ad formats and networks included in targeting, and ad creatives.

As this campaign type can utilize your product feed, any feed optimizations will assist in performance as well.

Demand Gen Insights

Demand Gen will, however, give you information as to where your ads are showing.  Here, you have the option to add content exclusions.  Go to the “when and where ads showed,” section and select “where ads showed.”  From here you can exclude content from your ad group or campaign.  You cannot exclude the entire site youtube.com, but you can exclude certain channels within youtube.com. You can also add account level content exclusions and brand safety guardrails that will impact Demand Gen campaigns within the Tools menu, under “Content Suitability.”

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Device Performance

As another means for optimization as well as additional insight is device performance.  As device targeting is available at the campaign level of a Demand Gen campaign, if you see a device that is underperforming, you can remove it from being targeted.

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Matched Locations

‍ Within the “when and where ads showed,” section, you can also see matched locations where the ads were served.  If there is a city or state that is performing poorly, you can exclude it.

Ad Format Report

Another great report will give you the ability to view how your video ad performed based on what ad format it was shown in.  Go to the campaigns tab and segment by ad format.

This can also show you opportunities where you could add additional ad formats to engage with a wider audience. 

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Demand Gen is a powerful and flexible campaign type that allows e-commerce brands to leverage Google’s immersive visual network across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail with unique targeting capabilities like lookalike audiences. By implementing the recommended strategy of using two campaigns (one for brand awareness and one for remarketing), you can effectively target users who have and have not yet visited your site. Remember that the "real magic happens in audience and ad creation", and continuous optimization using levers like tCPA targets, audience testing, and reviewing device and ad format reports will be key to maximizing conversions and ensuring your Demand Gen campaigns drive success for your e-commerce brand.

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