What are google Demand Gen ads?
Google Demand Gen ads are a new Campaign type being rolled out.
Demand Gen ads use video and image assets, so they’re highly visual, and are delivered across Google’s network of placements/feeds, predominantly entertainment channels like Youtube.
Google then uses AI to optimise your campaigns, using the best creative in the right locations targeting the right profile of person, for the best performance.
Replacing Discovery Ads
It’s worth noting that Demand Gen ads are replacing Discovery ads. The good news is, if you’re already running Discovery ads you can upgrade all these campaigns to Demand Gen.
Although this campaign type is brilliant for raising awareness of your ads and creatively getting your messages in front of potential customers, you can and definitely should use conversion goals for these ad types.
Not only will help with your own ROAS (return on advertising spend) tracking, but having these goals will help the AI optimise your ads.
How can your business benefit from Demand Gen ads?
The best aspect of Demand Gen ads is that they offer a two-pronged approach to your online marketing activity.
- Firstly, through the highly visual media and mass targeting, they can work for “top of funnel” raising awareness of your brand and building up positive associations. Online video is brilliant for this, and an excellent option if you don’t have the budget for TV or Video On Demand advertising.
- Secondly, you still have all the benefits of Google’s conversion features so your ads will not only be getting your name out there, but they’ll also be working hard to convert the demand you create into new leads.
Adding Demand Gen ads into your existing mix of Google activity
Demand Gen ads help “round out” the Google ad offering allowing you to bring in rich media and deliver similar sorts of ads that you would across other social and entertainment platforms like Meta and TikTok.
Google has always been a brilliant platform for capturing the demand in the market.
Now with Demand Gen ads, as the name suggests you have the opportunity to reach buyers at the start of their journey and actually start creating demand for your product or service.
Within Google, you have the following options giving you access to potential customers while they search for solutions and research products and services across a multitude of platforms:
- Search ads: Maximize performance across Google Search
- Performance Max: Maximize performance across all of Google’s channels and surfaces
- Demand Gen: Generate demand and deliver business results on Google’s most visual, entertaining surfaces
How can you capitalise on this opportunity?
Demand Gen ads are all about being creative.
But throwing up a random selection of ad content is a surefire way to waste budget and get poor returns.
Instead, we recommend bucketing your creative strategically and have a range of themed content.
Some suggestions include:
- Founder stories
- Editorial style ads
- Testimonials and social proof
- Brand story
- Podcast snippets
- Feature/benefit style ads
Once you have ad content from a few buckets running, you can keep an eye on what’s working best and iterate from there.
Our top three tips for making a successful Google Demand Gen Ad
As we mentioned earlier, Demand Gen ads offer you the opportunity to deliver branded ads combined with clear and persuasive CTA’s.
Usually, businesses keep these two objectives separate.
Combining them can be tricky, but it’s not impossible.
With developments in digital advertising and the more immersive video based ad placements, there’s definitely scope to experiment here and “kill two birds with one stone”.
The trick is to base your campaign around a strong insight and creative idea. Generic, safe, and category cliches are likely to fail here.
Once you have your creative idea you can build in the CTA’s.
With that said, here are our top three tips for creating successful Demand Gen ads:
- Heavily branded – people need to know it’s you, so feature your brand codes (things like colours, logo, characters etc) heavily in your ads.
- Capture attention instantly – people are bombarded with ads online all day, what’s going to make them stop and pay attention to your advert? Get creative here and don’t be afraid to take some risks or stand out from your industry norms.
- Make your offer clear – these ads can serve a dual purpose, so once you have people’s attention with your amazing (heavily branded) creative, make is super clear what your product is, how it will benefit them, and most importantly what’s the next step for them to take to get it.
FAQS
What is the difference between Google Discovery ads and demand generation?
Demand Gen ads are an evolution to Discovery ads, so they retain a lot of the core functionality. The differences – improvements – come in the form of new inventory types, better insights and improved ad creation workflow.
How do I set up a Demand Gen campaign?
The best thing to do is book a call with us 🙂 Other than that Google is rolling out the Demand Gen campaign format to Adwords accounts now. Once you have this campaign option you can follow the set-up wizard as with other ad formats. As we’ve touched upon in this article the key aspect of success with this ad format is the quality of your creative.
What Are Google Ai-Powered Ads?
Google is introducing AI optimisation into Demand Gen campaigns to help get your ads in front of the right people at the right time. This will work behind the scenes and be guided by your targeting options.
