Fresh approaches to using Google Demand Gen to boost performance
Use the most recent Demand Gen upgrades to improve your performance. Discover the new tools that will help you generate and convert demand on Google’s and YouTube’s visual surfaces.
Customers look to visual-first content for inspiration and ideas across platforms in today’s complicated digital environment. Brands must be present when and where their audience cares about them in order to be relevant. Compared to traditional social media, YouTube, for example, encourages deeper interactions. In fact, 61% of Gen Zers concur that they feel more connected to the creators they watch on YouTube than on other platforms, and Gen Z viewers identify YouTube as their top choice when it comes to feeling like they’re spending their time in a meaningful way. Strong outcomes follow from this: according to a Nielsen investigation, YouTube generates 2.3 times the long-term ROAS of commercial social media.
Google started Demand Gen campaigns in 2023 to assist companies in increasing online sales and leads while fostering closer relationships with prospective clients. When customers aren’t looking for you, Demand Gen helps you generate and convert demand on the most visually appealing and engaging surfaces on Google and YouTube. It provides AI-driven capabilities with adaptable controls to match your company with the ideal clients at any stage of their purchasing process.
Google is launching new features today to help you improve your Google Demand Gen campaigns, such as enhanced product and in-store details in your advertisements, new creative updates, and greater capabilities to tailor campaigns for particular channels. It also provides you an update on when your Video Action Campaigns will be upgraded to Demand Gen.
Manage the locations of your advertisements
Many of you have informed us that AI-powered campaign optimisation requires flexible controls. Starting in March, it is extending channel controls to all available ad surfaces in Demand Gen globally, building on the success of creative preferences and an early experiment. Everyone will have access to channel settings in beta, which will let you to customise your Google Demand Gen campaigns to run exclusively on YouTube Shorts and determine exactly where your ads show up on YouTube, Discover, and Gmail.
Furthermore, it is integrating Google Display inventory into Demand Gen to help you stay at the forefront of more consumers’ minds wherever they browse content. This will reach over 90% of the world’s internet users across over 3 million websites and applications.
Google urges all advertisers to utilise the entire inventory in Demand Gen to seamlessly optimise across channels in order to optimise reach.
Increase the impact of your creativity
Successful campaigns are fuelled by compelling creatives. To ensure that you can be there when it counts, you need a wide range of assets that satisfy the requirements of various inventory and formats and that speak to the various needs and interests of your clients. Google is adding new options to adapt your assets to various displays and formats so you can create stronger ad creatives:
- Demand Gen provides a range of image and video formats to assist you in creating original brand narratives for YouTube. To offer a more immersive, full-screen experience, you can also start running 9:16 vertical image ads on Shorts in late February.
- It introduced video upgrades in Google Demand Gen in November, which let you flip your original video and make new ones with other aspect ratios. It will be launching a new service in the upcoming weeks to assist you in producing shorter versions of your videos on a large scale.
Additionally, Google Demand Gen offers an enhanced ad creation flow. To make the most of the variety of your video assets, you will now be able to choose which particular kinds of video upgrades you want to use in your advertisements. You have the option to manually alter your movies in the flow if necessary. Additionally, in order to streamline the approval and feedback process, you may now share ad previews with your creative stakeholders outside of Google Ads.
Increase sales by providing a smoother shopping experience
Next, it is launching new tools designed especially for businesses to help you increase sales at every stage of the buying process and make the transition from online to offline purchasing easier:
In a few weeks, Google will launch a new Google Demand Gen experience with product feeds for advertisers who have a Google Merchant Centre account, enabling more in-depth product discovery. Consumers can easily navigate between product details pages and obtain complete product details straight from your advertisements.
Utilise product feeds to enhance demand generation experiences and obtain complete product details straight from your advertisements.
You may connect online customers with your physical shopfronts and direct them to nearby store locations by displaying real-time local product availability with local offers for Google Demand Gen with product feeds. Next, make the most of your omnichannel strategy by using omnichannel bidding to optimise for both in-store and online sales.
To find out more about the beta for both services, get in touch with your Google account team right now.
Examine performance on various platforms
Finally, to help you better understand how Demand Gen campaigns compare to your sponsored social efforts and how they influence budget decisions, it is adding additional reporting columns to Google Ads. View-through conversions will be included in these columns, which have begun to be distributed to advertisers worldwide this month in order to correspond with the success metrics used by social media advertising platforms. In order to give a more comparative perspective across channels, they will also separate the effects of Google Demand Gen from those of other Google initiatives.
View significant Video Action Campaigns update milestones
In order to give advertisers access to the same and even more new features through Demand Gen, Google stated last year that Video Action Campaigns would be upgraded. After switching to Demand Gen, many marketers are already experiencing improved results. According to a Nielsen investigation, Demand Gen typically yields a ROAS that is 58% higher than that of Video Action Campaigns. Google is taking the next measures to help streamline the upgrade process because of this.
Here are some significant upgrade milestones and responses to frequently asked questions if you currently use Video Action Campaigns:
- You won’t be allowed to build new Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads and Display & Video 360 platforms after channel limits were introduced in April. To keep complete control over your campaigns, it advises you to begin the Google Demand Gen update yourself prior to the automated upgrade taking place in July.
- Apply your previous settings and lessons learnt from Video Action Campaigns to your new Demand Gen campaigns by using the upgrade tool, which will be available in March. This enables you to improve while preserving your current approach and achieving steady results. Until you change the parameters, your new Google Demand Gen campaigns will only run on YouTube and Google video partners (if you have chosen to do so). You can continue to serve just on YouTube, exactly like you can now with Video Action Campaigns, even though Demand Gen’s channel controls will be made available as a beta in March.
- Google advises using the copy-and-paste tool to upgrade now or establishing new Demand Gen campaigns to quickly access new and extended capabilities including a variety of inventory and lookalike segments.
- Any leftover Video Action Campaigns in Google Ads will be automatically upgraded starting in July. Not every account will be upgraded at the same time, and the process could take several months to finish.
- To assist you maintain consistent success, you will apply the lessons you learnt in the past about Video Action Campaigns to your new Demand Gen campaigns. Until you change the settings, your inventory settings will be maintained, guaranteeing that your advertisements will only appear on YouTube and Google video partners (if you have consented).
- Global apparel and home goods retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S) has had great success using Google Demand Gen to improve outcomes. M&S tested Demand Gen in collaboration with Incubeta and achieved a 66% reduced CPA while exceeding their projected ROAS by 186%. Additionally, the campaign outperformed their paid social media ads.