Demand Gen campaign is a recently launched AI-powered campaign type from Google Ads team. Google introduced this campaign as one that is ideal for social advertisers who want to serve visuals in multi-format ads across Google’s platforms. Given this campaign ads are shown to audiences on YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Gmail and Discover, the campaign sits under brand awareness campaign types, and next to Google Display Network (GDN) campaign. On Google Ads platform the campaign also appears under ‘Awareness and Consideration’ objectives.
According to Google, YouTube is 2X more likely than other video services and social media platforms to be used for researching products and brands, and viewers rated YouTube ads 16% more trustworthy, credible and honest than ads on other video and social media platforms. Google also provided some stats, similar to claims we have seen from the dominant paid social platforms such as Meta, that point out that 1 in 3 consumers say that they have purchased something on Google feeds that they weren’t originally shopping for, and 63% of consumers discover new products or brands on Google feeds, among those 91% took action immediately.
In the world of paid media advertising, we have had a few months to test the Demand Gen campaign and investigate how it performs:
In one of our accounts at Mediatative, we are running this campaign in parallel with a GDN campaign. In this particular case the campaign hasn’t generated any conversions/purchases during the testing phase but has created a good interaction rate at 5.9%, which is close to the GDN interaction rate of 5.3%. The clicks that the Demand Gen campaign has delivered to the website is so far 86% higher than the GDN campaign and cost per click is 58% lower. These metrics are all positive in terms of increasing our brand exposure and consideration whilst our buying power for traffic has also increased.
There are other stories I hear from colleagues in the industry. For example, another Demand Gen campaign is being tested for a different advertiser. This one generated a high volume of conversions which on the surface made everyone happy but a deeper look at data from other sources outside the Google platform and from the advertiser’s CRM didn’t show any increase in leads coming from Google Ads. So, the only way they could describe the situation was that Google Ads attribution has changed hence the high conversion numbers, as the actual business data didn’t support the same level of success.
Demand Gen campaigns are without a doubt a strong competition for brands advertising on social media and Google clearly have a wealth of content, platforms and AI technology to turn this campaign type into another successful one in Google Ads. Given what we have seen in the initial testing period, I think the campaign needs some time to ‘learn’ and improve its results before I can – with confidence – advise my performance-based clients to invest heavily in the area. I see this as a new round of innovation from Google Ads, like Dynamic Search Ads or Pmax campaigns in previous years, which were ultimately effective in terms of performance. So, this is just a matter of When, and not If, Demand Gen campaigns results pick up.