
In May, Google graced the platform of Google Marketing Live 2023, revealing its intentions to revolutionize and enhance Google Ads throughout the upcoming year. The event was full of insight on what's to come with improvements to Google Ads.
New search encounters, advancements in AI capabilities, measurement techniques, and innovative ad creative solutions. Amidst this array of revelations, one announcement captured singular attention—the unveiling of an innovative campaign category termed "Demand Gen campaigns."
The inception of Demand Gen campaigns was driven by the objective of assisting businesses in engaging with consumers beyond the text-centric search engine results page, venturing into visually captivating environments such as YouTube, Discovery, and Gmail.
Given the expansive user base of more than 3 billion individuals on these platforms owned by Google, they have emerged as potent arenas for influencing potential customers even prior to their initial search endeavors. According to Google's findings, a significant 91% of consumers have taken actionable steps subsequent to discovering new brands within these digital domains.
After a period of anticipation, Google has recently revealed the commencement of an open beta phase for its novel Demand Gen campaigns, catering to advertisers. However, a notable revelation accompanies this news—Demand Gen campaigns are set to supplant Google Discovery Ads, a transition slated to take effect later this year.
So. What Are Demand Generation Ads? Let's Talk About It.
In contrast to its primary search ads, Demand Gen campaigns are strategically fashioned to connect with users even before the notion of actively seeking out a specific brand comes to mind. Google's Demand Gen campaigns are purposefully constructed to engage novel audiences and stimulate curiosity within the realms of Google's visually immersive and engaging digital properties. The scope of these campaigns encompasses the dissemination of advertisements throughout the Google Discovery Feed, Gmail, and YouTube, encompassing the YouTube feed, In-Stream content, and Shorts—all seamlessly unified within a single campaign.
For those versed in the tactics of social marketing, this novel Demand Gen campaign category appears as an organic extension, drawing parallels to the use of analogous visual creatives and audience targeting methodologies prevalent on platforms like Facebook ads or TikTok ads. It's worth noting, however, that Google has already introduced and garnered success with a comparable campaign type known as Discovery Ads.
What's The Difference Between Google Demand Gen And Discovery Ads?
Google's freshly introduced Demand Gen Ads resemble Discovery Ads. Both campaign types share the objective of engaging untapped audiences across platforms such as Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Discovery Feed. Notably, they both showcase visually captivating advertisements that emulate the familiar traits of prevalent social ad formats, incorporating interactive swiping, engaging visuals, and relatable behaviors.
Since their inception in the middle of 2020, numerous advertisers have harnessed Google Discovery Ads as an economical means to connect with and convert a substantial audience by utilizing their pre-existing social-oriented creatives across the spectrum of Google's digital domains.
What prompted Google to supplant its already proven Discovery Ads with the novel Demand Gen campaigns? Google's Decision to introduce Demand Gen campaigns stems from several notable enhancements they offer:

1. Expanded reach on YouTube
Google Discovery Ads currently reach users across the Discovery Feed, Gmail, and parts of YouTube, such as the Home Page and YouTube Feed. That’s impressive on its own—but Google Discovery Ads miss the biggest opportunity on YouTube: within its massive video content.
Demand Gen campaigns include all the reach of Google Discovery Ads as well as YouTube In-Stream and YouTube Shorts. This additional mix of both short-form and long-form video ad content will significantly increase the reach of these campaigns across YouTube.
2. More video ad formats
Within Google Discovery Ads, advertisers could feature either product images or custom image ads across Gmail, YouTube, and Discovery. But Demand Gen campaigns adding reach across YouTube video content means advertisers can now also include up to five videos within their campaigns, in addition to multiple images, headlines, descriptions, logos, and calls to action.
These videos will be shown throughout current Google Discovery and YouTube formats. These video ad formats will show different assets and act differently across Google’s different properties and screen sizes, so be sure to include varying lengths and aspect ratios so that your videos can fit in natively across all the new video inventory.

3. New ad creative experiments and tools
Many campaigns allow advertisers to preview how their different text, image, and video assets might look across different ad placements. But since Google’s new Demand Gen campaigns are designed to promote your business across the most visual and immersive content in Google’s ecosystem, Google has introduced a new ad preview tool specifically for Demand Gen campaigns, which allows advertisers to freely preview how different creatives will look across different screens and placements.
Beyond just previewing how your assets will look before you launch your campaigns, advertisers can also create A/B experiments to test different image and video creatives in their Demand Gen campaigns. This will help you gain insight into what kinds of assets perform better for your targeted audiences and continue to improve upon results.
4. Additional bidding options
Google’s Discovery campaigns were designed to help advertisers reach and convert new audiences. As such, they worked best with enhanced conversion tracking and only supported smart-bidding options such as “maximize conversions” or “maximize conversion value” that come with the ability to either set a target CPA or ROAS goal.
Meanwhile, Demand Gen offers the same smart-bidding options, but also allows advertisers to use “maximize clicks” as a bid strategy. This may be more appropriate for advertisers who might have longer or more complicated conversion paths, aim to drive offline sales, or simply just promote more traffic to their website.

5. More reporting options
Demand Gen campaigns are designed to drive direct action and conversions—but they’re capable of more than just that. Advertisers have seen countless times that after they’ve launched ads to a new audience across Display, YouTube, or Social, they soon notice an increase in searches and conversions from their brand campaigns. Google’s Demand Gen campaigns offer more insight into this uplift with their Brand Lift, Search Lift, and Conversion Lift reports.
6. New audience targeting
Google Ads finally sunset its popular Similar Audiences targeting recently for all campaign types—but Demand Gen campaigns offer something very…similar.
Demand Gen campaigns will have access to a special lookalike audience segment. Lookalike segments are audiences that share similar characteristics and behaviors as those from one of your existing first-party audience segments (such as a remarketing list or customer list). Advertisers can refine these lookalike audiences to be:
Narrow: Reaching the 5% of users in your target location that are most similar to your original seed list.
Balanced: Reaching the 5% of users in your target location that are most similar to your original seed list. Google defaults to a balanced lookalike segment unless it’s otherwise adjusted.
Broad: Reaching the 10% of users in your target location that are most similar to your original seed list.
Google’s lookalike audiences should feel similar to other social advertising platforms’ audiences, such as Facebook’s lookalike audiences which similarly allows advertisers to customize their reach based on how closely users resemble their original seed audience.

When Will Google Make The Change To Demand Generation Ads?
If the prospect of diving into the realm of Demand Gen campaigns fills you with anticipation, you can secure early access to the beta program by signing up here. Google will need a few weeks to review your submission and subsequently provide you with access within your account. Once enrolled in the beta, any ongoing Discovery campaigns will seamlessly transition to become Demand Gen campaigns. While your historical data and insights will remain intact, the management approach for your Discovery Ads will no longer apply.
Google has divulged that come October 2023, all advertisers will be granted the ability to craft fresh Demand Gen campaigns. Furthermore, advertisers will be presented with the option to upgrade their existing Discovery campaigns to the new Demand Gen format.
Looking ahead to January 2024, all remaining Discovery campaigns will undergo an automated upgrade, transforming them into Demand Gen campaigns. This migration is anticipated to be completed for all Discovery campaigns by the culmination of March 2024. Throughout this transition, advertisers need not take any action, as campaigns will continue to run smoothly, with historical data and insights preserved.

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