• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 10, 2023

Google introduced Demand Gen campaigns earlier this year to help capture the interest of billions of users as they spend time on YouTube and Google’s visual immersive platforms. Now the company is rolling it out to all Google Ads customers worldwide starting today.

Consumers expect to engage with their favorite content and creators in multiple formats, whether watching NFL highlights on YouTube or scrolling through 60-second Shorts.

“Users are turning to places where they can engage with creators they trust the most,” Vidhya Srinivasan, VP & GM in Google Ads, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. “YouTube, for instance, is over twice as likely to be used when it comes to catching up on content from creators compared to other traditional social platforms.”

Demand Gen campaigns leverage artificial intelligence (AI). The campaigns work across YouTube Shorts, YouTube in-stream, YouTube in-feed, Discover, and Gmail.

Demand Gen is the next generation of Discover campaigns. Since Google announced the product, several features have been added such as inventory insights, and improved ad creation flow. Discover ads upgrades will rollout beginning this week through early 2024, and become available to all advertisers in Google Ads and Discovery campaigns.

Srinivasan explains that Demand Gen offers a variety of formats to help brands build stories, from short-form videos to carousels.

The way consumers discover products has shifted. Decisions are made throughout the funnel. Compared to traditional social sites, online users are 61% more likely to use YouTube or Google to research products or brands, and 67% more likely to buy a product after seeing it in an ad on YouTube, according to a Google and Ipsos July 2023 online survey.

Naranja X, a fintech company based in Argentina, used a mix of videos and images to test Demand Gen to increase website traffic. When compared to paid social campaigns, Demand Gen achieved 3X higher click-through rates, at a 61% lower cost per action (CPA).

Retailers can add product feeds to create tailored experiences by combining videos with images and text from catalogs, showing shoppers items based on their interests and intent. The reporting user interface was improved to use creative insights and drive better engagement.

Marketers can now segment performance by formats and identify where to focus creative optimization efforts.

The post also gives other examples. Samsung Germany using Maximize Clicks bidding managed to scale site traffic and drove 400% uplift in clickthrough rates compared with their benchmarks in April 2023.

Agencies like PHD Media also used Demand Gen to scale campaign performance beyond social media platforms. Rogelio Rodriguez, Digital Activation at PHD Media, told Google the agency found and engaged with new customers and, after testing new Lookalike segments, saw stronger results compared with its paid social benchmarks.