Unlocking Growth
With Demand Gen

Catch the key takeaways

Demand Gen reaches high-value consumers during discovery, introduces a reason to consider the brand, and builds demand that can lead to future searches and conversions.

Our recent webinar with Google explored how first-party data, audience-specific creative, deliberate investment, and business-centered measurement work together.

Here are four takeaways for giving Demand Gen a clear role and evaluating its contribution to growth.

1. Demand Gen expands audience reach

Demand Gen reaches consumers across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover, Gmail, the Google Display Network, and Google Maps. These visual placements let brands introduce products and services while consumers are researching needs, exploring options, and forming consideration.

That role supports the demand captured through Search and Performance Max. Google reported that 68% of Demand Gen conversions came from users outside the brand’s search ad audience during the prior 30 days. That reach can bring new prospects into the path to conversion and give the full Google media program room to grow.

2. First-party data should shape the campaign

Demand Gen planning starts with signals that show who creates value for the business. CRM lists, converters, GA4 audiences, site engagement, purchasers, and high-value consumer segments can define the people a brand wants to influence.

That audience choice guides placement and creative decisions. Select inventory based on where consumers spend time and how location affects the decision. Address what they need to understand at that stage. Lookalike audiences can extend a strong first-party foundation to prospects who share useful traits with proven consumer groups.

3. Creative needs a specific audience and job

Demand Gen creative should introduce the brand, explain the need it addresses, and give the audience a reason to be interested. A direct promotion may suit a consumer who’s ready to act. Discovery-stage creative needs enough context to build familiarity and consideration before asking for a conversion.

Google recommends at least five videos at the account level, including one vertical video, to support varied placements and messages. Existing social and TV assets can work when the message fits the campaign’s role. Asset Studio and Google’s production services can adapt formats, lengths, images, and voiceovers within approval rules.

4. Measurement should connect platform activity to growth

Define the campaign’s job, audience, investment, and success measures before launch. During the first two weeks, reach, impressions, clicks, and platform-comparable conversions can show whether delivery is working as planned. Attributed brand search and assisted conversion reporting can then reveal how Demand Gen contributes to later searches and actions.

After one to two months, evaluate the full Google account and tied business outcomes, including new consumers, revenue, qualified leads, or applications. Exposed and unexposed audiences, matched markets, holdouts, and staggered rollouts can show whether the investment created incremental activity.

FAQs

Where does Demand Gen fit within a Google media strategy?

Use Demand Gen when the brand wants to reach high-value consumers during discovery and consideration. Search and Performance Max continue capturing active intent, and Demand Gen builds a pool of prospects who may search or convert later.

The campaign provides direct audience targeting and placement selection across YouTube and other Google-owned properties. Give it a defined job within the media plan, such as developing a priority consumer segment, introducing a product, or building consideration in markets with growth potential.

How should a brand set its Demand Gen investment?

Start with enough investment to support the audience, creative, bidding strategy, and learning period. Google has identified 7.5% to 20% of total Google Ads investment as the range where advertisers saw a clear contribution across account conversion volume, conversion value, and CPA.

Treat that range as a scaling goal after the campaign begins gathering data. Add the investment to the media plan while preserving effective Search and Performance Max activity. The right level depends on audience size, conversion volume, business goals, and the time required to reach a statistically meaningful result.

What creative assets does a Demand Gen campaign need?

Build creative around the target audience and the action that the campaign would like to influence. Use video and image assets that introduce the brand clearly, communicate a relevant benefit, and fit each placement. Include vertical video for Shorts and the appropriate sizes for in-stream, in-feed, Discover, Gmail, Display, and Maps inventory.

A strong account-level library includes at least five videos with distinct messages or formats. Existing assets can be resized, shortened, verticalized, or adapted through Asset Studio and Google’s production support. Brand-sensitive and regulated organizations should define content suitability, exclusions, rendering rules, and approval requirements before production and launch.

How should marketers measure Demand Gen performance?

Google’s conversion column includes click-through conversions and engaged-view conversions. View-through conversions appear in a separate reporting column. Platform-comparable conversions apply a shared definition across Google and social reporting, while attributed brand search connects a video impression with a later branded query.

Review attribution paths to see where Demand Gen assisted another Google campaign. Then connect those platform signals to the business KPI established before launch. Incrementality testing can determine whether the campaign produced new business activity and provide evidence for the next decision to scale, adjust, or stop.

Dive into the transcript

Introduction

Amanda Feld (00:13):

Welcome everybody. We’re going to give everyone a few minutes to join. Happy Monday, everybody. Good and give everyone a minute and we’ll be getting started soon. Okay, let’s get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to our Amsive and Google webinar on unlocking growth with Demand Gen. My name’s Amanda Feld. I am the strategic agency lead here at Google. I work with top Google partners such as Amsive and their clients, ensuring that everybody is up to date on the latest and greatest. And we are very excited to partner with you guys today on Demand Gen. Amsive is one of our top partners and we look forward to having this conversation with you all today. So let’s get started. I will pass it off first to Michael to get us. There we go, to get us started. Yep.

Michael Candullo (02:36):

Good afternoon everybody. Hi, I’m Michael Candullo, executive vice president of Amsive. I head up digital operations and really excited to be here this morning or this afternoon to talk to everybody about Demand Gen. We’ve been a partner with Google for a little over 20 years, which is pretty wild. 2006, a couple of years after Google went public, we became an agency partner. So we’ve been partners through all the evolutions that have happened over the years and really excited this morning to talk about some of the evolutions that are happening within digital. I’ll pass it off to Darren to introduce himself.

Darren Pan (03:21):

Everybody. My name’s Darren. I’m the regional product lead at Google, specifically for YouTube. So when we say YouTube, it’s everything video and we’re going to dive deeper into these conversations in regards to video. Prior to Google, I worked at a couple ad agencies, been in digital marketing for almost eight years now, so quite some time. Seen a lot of changes happen, been at Google for four years. So hoping to teach you guys a thing or two about video today. I’ll pass it over to Inna.

Inna Zeyger (03:48):

Hi, everybody. I’m Inna Zeyger, VP of Digital Media here at Amsive. I work across our media practice, helping clients connect audience, media, measurement strategy to drive growth. I remember when Google was just search, so I’m really excited to dig into how Demand Gen fits into measurement and growth today.

Why Demand Gen matters for growth

Michael Candullo (04:18):

And Amanda, I think you’ve introduced yourself. Okay, away we go. So Demand Gen, what are we really saying here? So most of the folks that are joining this afternoon, you guys are already capturing demand with search and performance max, so you’re cultivating those who are showing intent into customers. The other side of that or the next piece of that is how do we create demand? How do we reach and influence highly valued audiences before they search?

I remember, I think having done this for years, clients would always come to us as an agency and say, “Oh, our brand campaigns and search are doing really well. How do we get more brand? Can we just turn up the budget or turn up bids?” And no, it doesn’t necessarily work that way. You have to go out and create that demand. And if you do the right things out there in terms of Demand Gen, that brand search and that lift will happen.

So really today we’re going to talk about how do we go out there successfully and create demand to enhance what you guys are already doing in the marketplace with Google.

And then really there are four, I think, key pillars around Demand Gen and what you really need to make it successful. It all starts with audience because you’re looking to invest more of your budget into here’s how we should look at audience. How do I go out and find my next best customer based on data so that when I do invest dollars within the Demand Gen hemisphere, it will be to those people that I know have a more likely propensity to convert, a lot inside of that sentence, but really it’s about audience intelligence. So at Amsive, we like to use our client’s first party data because we believe there’s just a trove of information that we could use in terms of strategy to help make our clients’ Demand Gen efforts that much more effective. But really, we’ll take a first party audience and model it after our customers, current customers.

What are their interests? What are their aspirations? What are the values that they hold? Once we get that data, and if you’re able to build a really, really targeted audience for Demand Gen, that’s going to really inform your creative, which is really the second big piece of the pillar. How do we build that message for the audience?

Because in a lot of cases, we’re going to be targeting prospects that are not yet engaged with your brand. So how do we really convey the benefit? How do we connect them emotionally with the brand values? And how do we get that out, not only in messaging, but what do the images look like? What are the proof points that we’re putting inside our creative? All of this stuff really, really matters for us to be able to have an effective campaign. And by the way, video is, I think, one of the best places for that to happen because you could really tell your message in video and test a lot of different messaging within it.

So Darren’s going to talk more about that. YouTube obviously being a very big component of Demand Gen. Integration’s also important. We put this up there because a lot of marketers look at, oh, I know I kind of got to do Demand Gen, but if you’re out there and you’re looking at your performance and you’re still kind of trying to evaluate performance on last click measurement, I encourage everybody to think about this as an always on piece of the marketing mix.

The performance funnel is no longer bottom funnel search. We need to go out there and create more demand above what we’re doing with search and PMAX. And then measurement, how do we measure it? I think from engagement to, is there a lift in search? Are there assisted conversions? At Amsive, we like to use incrementality testing to see did that additional investment that we made, whether it’s in YouTube or in other platforms, did that actually have impact or would’ve gotten that conversion anyway?

So measurement’s also the last, I think, of the four pillars that we got to think about with Demand Gen. And with that, I’m going to turn over to Darren to talk a little bit more about some of the options within Google.

How Demand Gen expands the opportunity for future demand

Darren Pan (09:23):

Amazing. Thank you, Michael. As Michael has just alluded to, we know that we need to be able to continually generate net new demand. Ina also called this out during her intro saying, remember when Google used to just be search? Even when I started digital marketing, it was primarily just search, and this is before the PMax days. Yes, when you first start off an account, most accounts follow a similar DNA where you start off with the searches and then the PMaxs.

This is going to be your lower funnel campaigns. This is where you’re going to see your best performance, your best CPAs. But over time, if we’re hitting the same audience using the same keywords over and over again, we’re eventually going to hit that ceiling. Once we hit that ceiling, that’s when we start to see more inefficiencies, your CPA might start to rise. So basically we want to expand that net a little bit wider.

And one way to do that is through video. And when we say video, for the context of today’s conversation, when we say video, we do mean YouTube, we do mean Demand Gen as a product in itself. And for those of you who has been hearing Demand Gen, Demand Gen, what is this? What is that? I think the next slide will also showcase what the campaign is and what the placements are, but I also want to call out the stat here on the bottom right of the screen. On average, 68% of Demand Gen conversions came from users who did not see the brand’s ads in Google search in the past 30 days prior to converting. So this is just saying that Demand Gen is getting that incremental. It’s showing your ads before the consumer even knows who you are as a brand, product, or service.

Inna Zeyger (11:01):

And before you jump into the next slide to talk more about Demand Gen, there’s just one idea I’d like to add on about the sales ceiling because the sales ceiling doesn’t mean that search or PMAX stopped working. Those two can be working incredibly well. It really means that the available pool is finite or becoming constrained. So there’s only so many people that are actively searching for your product or service at any given time, and there’s plenty of potential customers outside of that pool.

They may not even know that your brand exists. They may have a need, but still be researching their options. They may be shopping around and building consideration, or they just might not ready to take any sort of action yet. So where search is incredibly good at responding when somebody raises their hand, but optimizing search doesn’t necessarily make more hands go up.

So that’s where the Demand Gen gives us another lever to influence those potential customers earlier and build that consideration and ultimately expand to that pool of people who may become future search or conversion demand. I’ll stop there. Great point.

Where Demand Gen ads can appear

Darren Pan (12:04):

No, great point, Ina. Great point. And for those who are wondering, what is Demand Gen? Because for those of you who don’t know or who maybe know a little bit about the product, basically to keep it short, Demand Gen, it has multiple placements. The three left placements are going to be the YouTube placement. So we call this in stream where before, during, or after you watch a video on YouTube, that’s where the ad placement is.

In feed, when you’re looking at the YouTube search results, looking for the next video you want to watch, you might see an ad in between. That’s what we call in feed. And then we also have YouTube shorts. It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you’re browsing on shorts, you’ll see ads as you’re scrolling maybe on TikTok, Instagram reels, very similar placement to that. Unique to Demand Gen is that not just YouTube, but we also are showing these ads on Google owned and operated placements.

So we can see that we have the. My screen’s a little small here, but we do have the Discover page, the Gmail page, Google Display Network, and this is a new placement, but we also now have Google Maps. Google Maps is a big, big placement, especially if you are, let’s say, a local service customer or you have a brick and mortar.

Maps has been a really, really strong placement in addition to add to your media mix, and we’re seeing really strong performance boost there. A question that I’ve gotten as well too, just for you guys to know, does Demand Gen show on Waze? Unfortunately, not right now. Right now, we only have Maps because Maps was a newly added feature. I’m not saying it’s a promise, but I’m saying it could be on a roadmap in the future. But for now, these are the seven placements that Demand Gen will optimize for.

The key message here for our video, as Michael was kind of talking about how video is going to be integrated into your strategy, you don’t necessarily need to. The ideology of video is, are we brand building? Is it performance video? What is YouTube? The key message is that you don’t necessarily need to choose between either one because YouTube does get you both. Naturally, Demand Gen, how we position the product in itself, it is more going to be the mid to lower funnel type of product.

How Demand Gen works with Performance Max

It should be supplementing your search and your PMax campaigns or lower funnel campaigns, but also it should be getting conversions in itself as well too. So Demand Gen, to keep it in simple terms, we do view it as a performance product, but naturally with the video and image capabilities of the campaign type, how people interact with this, this is also going to be brand building.

So that’s why it does get you a little bit of both, or not historically, but how we position it is going to be more of that performance product. And we see this as well too when we take a look at long-term return on ad spend versus our competitors, or not even competitors, just other channels in general. So compared to TV, streaming, paid social. So if you are a customer that is using maybe paid social ads as a way to target that upper funnel, we are seeing better ROAS versus our paid social channels as well to 86% higher incremental.

For Demand Gen as well, to capture people during that discovery phase of when they’re trying to figure out what brand, product, or service that they’re trying to find based on the specific needs that they have, the simple answer is Demand Gen. The left stat says advertisers saw 14% more conversions on average when they added Demand Gen to an already search and/or PMAX campaign account. So adding Demand Gen is going to have ad incremental.

It’s also going to expand that reach, as we mentioned a couple slides ago, in terms of generating net new demand. The right set says 89% of online consumer purchase journeys with more than one touchpoint. Google and YouTube are actually used before Meta or Meta is not even used at all. So think about your own shopping behavior, your own habits when you’re trying to figure out who should I call to fix my plumbing?

Where should I look to buy the best running shoes for this marathon I’m running? From all these different types of decisions, Google and YouTube is most likely part of your journey. It’s most likely first, if not first, I guarantee it’s probably second. So I think how users are viewing Google and YouTube, they’re always on it searching for the right answers, and we want to make sure that your ad is there at that placement. We have three billion daily, or sorry, not daily, monthly users across our Google owned and operated placements that I showed you. So that is inclusive of the Gmail, Discover, Display Network, and even YouTube, YouTube Shorts.

I won’t go over all the nitty-gritty here, but the main value props of Demand Gen, it expands your impact. So it has the video and image capability. If you are a commerce customer, you can also attach your product feeds to Demand Gen and basically have a shoppable ad that you’re showing to your customers or showing to users that could be potential customers.

As we move over to the middle, tailored ad experiences. So what this is trying to say is because we’re able to refine that audience targeting, Michael called out the first party audience data, using first party audience data is what’s going to make Demand Gen its most powerful. So by using first party audience data, we can speak to that specific audience. We can have tailored creatives, tailored messaging for that specific audience, and you can basically roll out a message that you would not otherwise roll out if you are just on the search in Pmax.

Having to speak to these customers today is most important because the average person is being bombarded by millions of ads per day, per hour. You want to make sure that you are capturing the right message for that specific audience, and that’s where Demand Gen can come into play here. And lastly, AI powered bidding and measurement. We know that Gemini, NanoBanana, AI with Google, everything, we are going all in on AI, and we’re seeing it show up in our products, we’re seeing it show up in our bidding. So what I mean by that is we’re seeing overall better performance in the past year. I believe the stat that we have is there’s been a 30% increase in conversions on Demand Gen just with all the Gemini improvements that we’ve added over the past year. So year over year, we’re seeing more and more conversions through our AI solutions and with the measurement capabilities that we have as well too, that is outside of the traditional conversions as well.

Also wanted to touch on a very important point here. What’s the difference between Demand Gen and Performance Max? For those of you who have ran Performance Max, I’m sure you guys know that it’s showing across pretty much all of our Google campaign types. And when we say that, it’s going to be your search, shopping, display, video, AKA YouTube. So if you’re running Performance Max, why should I run Demand Gen? A lot of texts on the screen, but the green and blue that is highlighted, basically your PMax campaign in the green, it is a signal targeting versus. It’s using signal targeting, so meaning it uses the audiences that you put as a way to inform what direction that the ad should go. Whereas Demand Gen is going to be more targeting. So let’s say you upload your first party audience data and it’s previous purchasers, you’ll only show to the previous purchasers.

So Demand Gen is going to be a little bit more focused, whereas PMax is going to be a little bit more broad, and that’s because it’s showing across all the channels. The point of PMax, like the name suggests, is to maximize performance on whatever channel it can find. So most of the time it’s going to be your search, your shopping, if you’re a commerce customer. So it’s going to be the search and shopping placements within PMax.

So Demand Gen is about maybe 5% of the total spend on average is coming from your PMax campaign. So you’re not showing up on a lot of these Demand Gen placements if you’re just on PMax only. Secondly, with Demand Gen and PMax, when we’re in the same ad account and they’re going to be competing in the same auction, assuming all conditions are the same, like budgets, bids, targeting, the ad with the higher ad rank, it will go to that campaign type 10 times out of 10.

So meaning if you have a Demand Gen campaign and you upload all the videos, images, basically follow our best practices and your ad rank is excellent, it’s going to show above your PMax campaign, like the Demand Gen version of PMax, if you will, 10 times out of 10. So what we’re trying to say is be more targeted and focused, especially if performance is a goal for your Demand Gen campaign, and that’s why adding it is going to be incremental and let PMax do all the other placements.

If your Demand Gen campaign runs out of budget for that day, then PMAX can use that Demand Gen placement to fill in the gap for the rest of the day if you run out of budget or your bids are restrictive. So a lot of variables at play, but I think the main message is that there isn’t a ton of overlap that you may think, hence this Venn diagram here in the middle or on the left.

But overall, adding Demand Gen makes it a little bit more focused and targeted, and that way your PMAX can focus on the lower funnel campaigns. Ina, did you want to comment on?

Inna Zeyger (21:31):

Yeah, there’s just a couple of quick things I’d want to underscore here because we do get this question from clients a lot, and yes, there’s absolutely overlap between Demand Gen and PMax. They overlap in inventory and both can give advertisers just a tremendous amount of reach across Google, but as you said, they function very differently. So we have a number of clients where the audience capabilities within Demand Gen are really important part of the value proposition for running with Demand Gen. So for example, lookalike audiences are a really good example, something that advertisers have historically been very comfortable using in other audience-driven platforms, and it just gives us a way to start with a really strong first party foundation and use that to help identify other additional high value prospects. The other big difference is control over where we want to reach those audiences too.

So Demand Gen, you can specifically choose placements like YouTube or Shorts or Gmail or Discover or Maps, so you don’t have to select all of them. But with Performance Max, the idea is a little bit different. So we’re giving Google our goals, our conversion signals or assets, and then allowing the system to find performance across the broader PMax ecosystem.

So I don’t think of this as sort of choosing one versus the other, to your point. Okay, I’m going to try an analogy right now, but PMAX is like giving Google the destination and letting this throughout whereas Demand Gen is more of a planned road trip. We have more say in who we want to reach, which roads we take and where we stop along the way, but they’re really solving different problems. So PMAX is very strong at identifying conversion opportunity across Google. Demand Gen gives us just a lot more of a deliberate way to reach and influence audiences who may not yet be at that lower funnel moment.

And ideally, to your point, they work together. Demand Gen can help build that consideration and demand and the rest of the performance ecosystem like PMAX and Search can eventually capture that.

Darren Pan (23:29):

That was a great analogy. I’m going to take that.

Inna Zeyger (23:30):

I tried.

How to invest, guide, and scale Demand Gen

Darren Pan (23:33):

I’m going to take that one. But yeah, exactly my point as well too. So I think we’re in agreement that adding Demand Gen will simply just be incremental to your search of PMax. Number one question I get, what is the budget? How much money should I put into Demand Gen? So I want to preface this stat as this, meaning we’re not saying that if you do not meet this threshold that you shouldn’t.

This is once you’re up and running Demand Gen, this is ideally the goal you should get to in terms of spend level, not just right off the jump. So the stat is on average, advertisers who have allocated seven and a half to 20% of your total Google ad spend to Demand Gen saw on average 20% more conversions, 14% increase in conversion value, 3% reduction in overall CPA. So when we say 7.5 to 20%, let’s say you spend $100,000 on Google Ads in one month, so 7.5 to 20K should go towards Demand Gen.

Again, the reason why there’s a range is because we examined thousands of accounts during this study and we were trying to see what is the optimal spend distribution, media mix spend to see the full benefits of Demand Gen, basically bringing down the holistic account CPA, bringing up the holistic account ROAS, and this is where you start to see the positive correlation between your video media strategy going to your lower funnel. So seven and a half to 20%, seven and a half would be that floor and trying to get to that 20 would ideally be the goal, but that should not be a sign of discouragement if you cannot get there.

Michael Candullo (25:16):

Hey Darren, I just want to jump in on this one because we see this a lot with our clients and they’ll ask. Our experience is similar in that when our clients invest more in Demand Gen, the overall results tend to be much better. I mean, marketers are really in charge with growing the brand, not necessarily lowering. Well, you do want to lower obviously your cost per acquisition, but there’s only so much you can do to. I think Ina talked, and you did too, Darren, about the hitting the ceiling. If we’re not out there and we’re not allocating, that’s why in my initial slide I had integration and thinking about I really need to think about my marketing mix and my media mix, this is critical because the advantage that you’ll have in investing more money to speak to new audiences is going to grow your business.

If you’re not putting the fuel to the fire to help reach out and communicate to new consumers, you’re not only missing that opportunity, but you’re going to be challenged to really grow what you have. I mean, you could have a good job in converting what’s already out there, but this is critical. It’s a little bit of a leap of faith. I could tell you real quickly, I mentioned top of the hour that we started in 2006. When mobile came into the arena as a medium for advertisers to target consumers with,

There was a little bit of hesitation because you really couldn’t measure it one-to-one on a last click basis like you could when you were doing traditional desktop. Probably aging myself here, but this is a similar sort of situation where we know that audiences, your customers are consuming, and I think everybody would agree, they’re consuming digital content throughout the day. So it does make sense you want to be outside of just search and PMAX and able to engage those customers.

So being able to put more budget to it, there are ways to measure that and in aggregate, make it work, and then also measure it at the specific Demand Gen level. But I would say this is critical, and I just want to double up and we can keep going, that we’re seeing similar sort of behavior within our agency and we work across literally hundreds of media accounts and we definitely see the lift when we do this.

Darren Pan (28:02):

I also wanted to add in, when we say the budget recommendation as well too, it shouldn’t be necessarily you taking away from search, meaning you shift the funds away from search over to your Demand Gen, because we know that these are going to be your most efficient campaigns. When we talk about this as a seven and a half to 20%, it should be incremental spend because we want to make sure we don’t take away from your existing strategy. Cool. I’ll pass it over to Ina. Let’s talk about audience.

How to incorporate first-party data

Inna Zeyger (28:34):

Probably one of my favorite things to talk about, and I know Michael and Darren, both of you have mentioned it, but Demand Gen is very closely aligned with how we approach media at Amsive because audience intelligence is really in our DNA. So when we start with Demand Gen or just about any other type of initiative, we want to start with the audience and build from first party data as the backbone as much as we can.

And that can include things like CRM customer lists, existing converters, GA4 audiences, site engagement, product or service purchasers, high value customers. The list can go on and on and on, but really it’s just whatever signals tell us who is creating the most value for your business. And from there, we can help our clients identify which of those groups should inform the overarching strategy. So that might mean we build from our highest value existing customers.

It could be building towards an aspirational audience that we want more of. It could also be layering on in-market signals, content engagement, other behavioral indicators, and also excluding people who’ve already converted when that makes sense. So there’s a lot of inputs here that can help us define who we want to influence, and then that audience that we’ve built starts informing everything else.

So for example, how broadly we scale, which placements make sense, right? We need to know where the audience is so we’re not going to target them where they’re not. Maps may become particularly interesting for a location-driven business. Gmail or Discover placements might play a very different role. And then once we move on from that, that’s where the audience informs the creative. So what does this particular person need to understand about the brand or the product or service at the stage of where they’re at in their journey?

So the sequence for us is really straightforward. It’s audience first, placement follows, creative follows the audience, and then the objective. And Darren’s going to get much, much deeper into that creative piece next.

How to build creative for your audience and objective

Darren Pan (30:35):

Yes, exactly. So we know with Demand Gen video in general, your creative is pretty much going to be everything. We can have the right strategy, we can have all the right best practices in place, but if your creative is not speaking to the audience that you’re trying to target, users are going to pick up on that. And no matter how well we do the strategy, it’s simply just not going to see the results that you expect. So I want to start this off with the myth of the all-purpose ad.

I think when I first started running video ads back in the day, we did just use one video and we tried to target the entire funnel. We would see some results here and there, but overall it’s not really the best way to go about it. So we saw that over 50% of ads across the funnel has failed to achieve top performance in terms of any of its marketing objective.

And when we say marketing objective, we kind of put into three buckets of the reach. So top of funnel is going to be your reach, your middle funnel is going to be consideration, and the bottom funnel is going to be your performance, your conversions. We also saw that less than 10% of ads were able to perform across the full funnel, so across the three marketing objectives that I just covered.

So 90% of ads are basically not performing to its full capabilities. We also saw that 81% of the ads that were studied were suboptimal, meaning less than 40% of what we consider to be creative best practices. So that’s a large portion of ads and creatives today that are simply just not adhering to A, best practices, or B, reaching the specific audience that the creative is informing you to show your ads to. So there’s a lot of moving parts to this.

What we also found is that for having low creative volume is also going to be detrimental. I think what we’re trying to achieve here is having five plus videos. And when we say five plus videos, this is at the account level, not at the specific campaigns. We’re just saying for a specific customer, we want to achieve somewhere around five plus and at least one of those has to be a vertical video.

And the reason why we say this number of five plus is because we’re able to showcase across different placements. We’re able to show the five plus videos are most likely going to have different types of messaging. So you’re able to target different types of funnel, address different types of audiences. You’re just giving the system more optionality to perform. And we also see that in terms of increasing conversions on PMax and increasing conversions on Demand Gen by about 45%.

Inna Zeyger (33:11):

And let me just quickly chime in on that just to bring it down to the very practical day-to-day level and outside of the Google ecosystem too, because we often see people trying to shift from their creative from Meta, TikTok into Demand Gen, and that’s probably not going to work. And it’s not necessarily that the creative is bad, it just may be doing a different job. So a straightforward example would be a strong promo ad that says apply now, it rolled today or 20% off.

That can work really well when I know the brand and I’m close to taking action, but if it’s the first time that you’ve introduced yourself as the brand to me, you may be asking for the conversion before you’ve even given me a reason to consider you. So what you’re looking to do is get that sort of earlier stage creative messaging to do more of that introduction of who you are, what do you solve, why should I care, why you should be even as a brand in the consideration set.

So the creative differentiation doesn’t necessarily mean reinventing everything for every campaign, just means making sure the message is appropriate for the audience and the job we’re asking it to do.

Darren Pan (34:26):

Yeah, exactly.

Inna Zeyger (34:27):

I totally got distracted. I got so into talking about creative. So when we talk about the broader creative, we’ve already defined the audience and the objective. We’ve talked at length about that, so creative has to follow it. So for that audience that’s earlier in the journey, we want more storytelling, more introduction to the product, service or brand rather than just saying, “Hey, buy now.” The second reality is that the creative volume and diversity can still be a challenge.

We know that most clients don’t have endless versions of every asset and every size and every format. So the opportunity here is really to start with a strong creative concept and then scale it intelligently. On the Amsive side, we often work with our clients to create templated versions, different aspect ratios, vertical versions, different lengths to get that diversity support and to also have enough environments to run it in.

And then the last piece I’d add here, and this is important because we do work with quite a few highly regulated industries and also brands that are very concerned about the appear, we need clear guardrails around what can change, what cannot change, and what requires approval and how the brand appears across these different environments. So our goal really is to make producing the right creative easier without losing the strategy or the brand control behind it. And Darren, I think it’s a perfect place for you to show everyone some of the tools available to help solve some of that production piece.

Creative production tools and support in Demand Gen

Darren Pan (35:44):

Yeah. If you are a customer that’s saying, “I don’t have the budget, I don’t have the bandwidth,” we have solutions for you. So because Amsive is a Google partner for 20 plus years and we love Michael and everybody on this team, we actually do have a creative production services. Long story short, you can give us a brief of what you want, the assets that you have, and we can put together the creative for you following best practices depending on the market jacket that you have. So this is a free solution.

There’s no minimum spend. This is basically an exclusive partnership deal that we have with Amsive as well. So this is an option for you guys if creative is a challenge, even for vertical video as well too. If you just have horizontals, we can convert those to vertical video. Some AI automated solutions. We also do, if you just, let’s say have a horizontal video, within the ad account, you can just toggle on when you create the ad right before creation, you could toggle on enhance my video by shortening it, enhance it by verticalizing it.

And it’ll basically use AI and create these images just in a matter of minutes. You don’t have to do anything, it’ll just launch with the ads that you have currently existing. So if you don’t have very sensitive brand guidelines or something like that, this is definitely a simple, quick solution. And in my opinion, 95% of the ads that I saw have been really good, no edits necessary.

Also, within the Google Ad account, there’s also a lot of editing tools that you have at your disposal. So I’m just going to breeze past these a little bit, but just though that these are possible. Video voiceover, this is text to speech. This is where you can type in whatever you want it to say and then you can choose a male, female voice, an excited voice. There’s a lot of different things you can do, but you can add a voiceover to your video if it needs a little extra pop.

If you do not have assets and you need images or you have existing images and you want to edit it, an example right here, you see a pink cup, you could put it in someone’s hand, you could put a shoe on a beach or something. There’s a lot of different things you could do. You can change your squares to horizontal images, your horizontal to vertical images.

All of it can be done within Google Ads for free in a matter of minutes. AI image editing and the same thing as I was referencing the previous slide, put a dog on a beach, you can change a cat to a dog. There’s just so many things you can do. It’s just all different types of prompting. And of course, if you ever see any images that you don’t like, you can just submit your feedback and that is how we’re informing the system.

This has changed so much over the past year. It was a little janky to start off with, but it has drastically improved because of all the user feedback that we’re getting. So please, please do submit feedback on the good images and even the bad images as well as you’re testing around with this. Now, if you wanted to create video, we also have a new feature within Google Ads where if you have a static image, you can change it into a six or 10 second video.

We have templates, so it’s not something you have to prompt super heavily on. We have some preexisting templates for you to use. So if you wanted to have some quick, nice edge, and it doesn’t look too AI generated, you can definitely use this as a feature. The one thing for anything with AI, it needs a strong foundation. So it needs a high quality image.

If you’re using a pixelated 240p image or something like that, the results may vary. So making sure that you have the high quality foundation to start off. And all of this lives within Google Ads and it’s called the Asset Studio. Any image or video that you have that you upload, it will basically live in the Asset Studio, and this is where you’re free to edit, make changes, generate new assets. Everything can be found here. So it’s a simple space. Just think of it as its own editing studio.

Inna Zeyger (39:43):

Yep. And this is really where all the pieces come together for us. So the first thing that we need to define is the role Demand Gen is going to play within the broader media program. So everything needs a job. For one advertiser, that job may be expanding beyond the demand search and PMAX are already capturing. For another, it may be building consideration with a customer segment that you want to grow. So once that role is clear, we establish the framework around it.

We define the audience, the first party data. We know we’ve talked about it quite a bit at length. After we get the audience, we define the creative needs and then we establish a level of investment required to support that strategy and we can really start layering that, creating that groundwork for what the measurement really looks like. And all of those things really help determine how much data we need and how long the campaign needs to run before we should expect a statistically meaningful result.

And then again, like I said, before anything launches, we establish a measurement and success framework. So what are we actually expecting this investment to change should be defined before our first impression even serves. And again, because Demand Gen should just not really exist simply because we want another campaign in the account, it should have that defined role, a defined audience strategy and enough investment to do that job for us. And once we’ve established what that success means, Darren can walk us through the ways that Google helps us measure within the platform.

Measuring platform performance and business impact

Darren Pan (41:07):

Cool. All right, let’s talk about measurement. So this is going to be super important because this is going to be pretty different than your traditional search and PMaxs. So when you’re running this for the first time, you’re not freaking out about performance. I think there’s definitely some nuances here. So I wanted to start off with what does a conversion mean on YouTube?

So our conversion column, it’s a definition of the top two, meaning the click-through conversion and the engaged view. A click-through conversion is when someone clicks on the ad, converts, traditional conversion, ideology, that’s a click-through conversion. The second one is an engaged view. When someone watches 10 plus seconds of your video or watches the entire video, they don’t have to interact with the ad. If they open it in another tab, search for your brand name and then purchase from there, that will count as an engaged view.

So our main conversion column is already inclusive of these two definitions. What we do not factor in is a view-through conversion. A view-through conversion is when a user gets an ad impression. So maybe I just watch a video, I wait till the five seconds, and then I skip. And then maybe for some reason in the first five seconds it caught my attention and I converted on a separate tab. That is a view-through conversion. So we do not factor that into our conversion column.

We have a separate reporting column that you can add in. It’s mainly for reporting. We don’t use it for any kind of optimizations. The reason why I wanted to call this out is because I wanted to talk about what the measurement framework looks like and what some of these solutions that we have to address some of these conversion gaps. So for the measurement framework, looks kind of confusing, but really the first two weeks, all we want to do is look at some of the more upper funnel metrics.

It does take time when you launch a video strategy for us to see performance and to see the account performance. So the first couple weeks we’re looking at reach, impressions, clicks. You’ll see some verbiage here that maybe will sound unfamiliar, but I’ll go over the next couple slides. But after the two weeks, we start to see some uplift in some of our other metrics that again, we’ll cover in a couple slides as well.

And then after one month, we want to make sure we take a holistic view of the account, like what happened after one month? Did our account CPA go down? How is the video campaigns interacting with our other campaigns? So we want to make sure we do that in a one-month look. And then basically after two months, we’re going to do that same look again and see what the difference is of month two, month one and see that uplift.

So going into what each of these are, so you’ll see in the first couple weeks you’ll see platform comparable conversions. So this is what this is. If you are a social conscious customer and you are looking at your Meta performance and your Google performance, we mentioned that Google does not include view-through conversions in its conversion columns.

Meta, TikTok, social, they do. So social, they include click-through conversions, engage view conversions, and view-through conversions into their main conversion definition. So if you’re looking at a high level, you may see that, oh my God, Meta is outperforming by double. It has half the CPA, double the conversions versus my Demand Gen campaign. But we have drastically different definitions. We added a platform comparable column where we basically mimic the definitions of our social competitors. So if you’re looking at high-level reporting of Meta, TikTok, Google, make sure to look at platform comparable, and that will be a more one-to-one comparison. It just gives us a more fair shot once we have the same definitions.

Secondly, we also have a new reporting metric that we called attributed brand search. You do need a Google rep to get this activated onto your ad account. What this is, is in the example here on the bottom of the screen, basically once it’s set up, in this example, on October 1st, Darren completes a YouTube video for Nike. Three days later, Darren does a Google search for Nike shoes. So, Darren, search is reported as one ABS or attributed brand search. What this metric shows is the actual relationship, the down funnel relationship between someone watching a video and searching for your branded term. Back in the day, I used to just look at the branded campaign, see the fluctuations once I introduce video, but there’s a lot of variables in that when we’re just looking at that kind of relationship, whereas this is directly tied to the impression of the video that is served to the users.

So this is a new metric, I would say in the past few months. Definitely get this turned on through us by working through Amsive because this would give you a better understanding of how it’s brand building in addition to driving better performance. We also have some attribution reports within Google Ads that will show you. Demand Gen may not be the last campaign type that someone clicks on before they convert.

Maybe they click on a Performance Max ad and then Demand Gen ad, and then they convert on a search ad. In that journey, especially if you’re on last click, you won’t see Demand Gen get any credit. So this attribution report within the Google Ad account shows you how many times Demand Gen was a part of that user journey, how many times it’s assisting your other campaigns. So there’s a lot of different ways to view how video is supporting your campaigns because naturally how people interact with these ads are so, so different.

So we’re trying to give you guys the ammunition for you guys to be comfortable in terms of understanding the relationship and how it’s all working together. And then we start to see the account CPA go down, account ROAs go up. We start to see this positive correlation. This is going to be in the long term, meaning the two plus month mark.

So once after two months, we’ll start to see that relationship and then that’s when we start to see, okay, we can reach the seven and a half to 20%. How can we scale? So there’s a lot of moving parts here, but overall, that’s how Demand Gen can complement your ad account. And then going back, tying all this back to the measurement framework. So hopefully this makes a little bit more sense, but looking at the platform comparable in the first couple of weeks, looking at attributed brand search in week three, and you can even look at these metrics as you’re going on into month two, but more so these are going to be the beginning metrics you’re looking at, and then we’ll start to see the more lower funnel metrics later on.

Inna Zeyger (47:55):

Yeah. And what Darren just walked through is a lot of useful measurement within the Google ecosystem. It’s a lot. There’s a lot of new opportunities too. But where I’d like to zoom back out is that measurement can’t just stop there in the Google ecosystem. So our job is to connect those platform signals back to the business outcomes our clients actually care about. So whether that’s new customers, revenue, qualified leads, applications or something else. And then the next level beyond that is incrementality and asking or answering the question, did adding Demand Gen create business activity that would’ve otherwise not have existed?

And that’s a lot different of answering the question of whether Demand Gen received credit for a last click conversion. So before launch, we established the baseline across all of the Google campaign types, branded demand and the core business KPI. And then really depending on scale, we can use approaches like exposed versus unexposed audiences, matched markets, holdouts, or staggered rollouts for a pre-post to really understand what actually changed.

And so the methodology of that incrementality can vary, but the question really doesn’t. So what changed because we added this Demand Gen investment? And so for us, platform measurement is really the starting point. Business impact and incrementality are where that measurement framework ultimately needs to land for us.

Q & A

Darren Pan (49:30):

Cool. Amanda?

Amanda Feld (49:31):

Yes. Thank you guys all so much. We are going to do a little bit of a Q&A now. We had gotten some questions ahead of time that we are hearing honestly the most when it comes to Demand Gen. In the interest of time, I will hop right in. The first question is for Darren. So Darren, a lot of people are wondering if they’re already running on social platforms, whether it be a Meta or a TikTok, how does Demand Gen fit in with this existing strategy? If they’re already doing one of those, is there still a place for Demand Gen in their overall media planning?

Darren Pan (50:04):

Absolutely. So with Demand Gen versus Meta versus TikTok, we do view Demand Gen as that social platform. So what I mean by that is that whatever performance you’re seeing on the Meta and TikToks, especially when we look at platform comparable conversions and we have the same definitions, we should see similar CPAs and similar performance. In addition to that, there’s this really neat stat if you’re in the Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, that type of vertical video format.

So we saw that 65% of YouTube Short users are not on Instagram Reels and 45% are not on TikTok. So you’ll be missing out on this massive audience that you would otherwise never would show to if you are not showing on YouTube shorts. So from that vertical video perspective, massive reach from a social performance perspective, there’s still reach. We do have the Google owned and operated placements that social platforms are not optimizing on.

We have three billion monthly users. We have higher overall ROAS, as I covered at the beginning of the presentation. And if you already have the Meta and TikTok ads already launched and are you already up and running, they’re doing well, you can easily just lift and shift those creatives over to Demand Gen. We have the same exact aspect ratios that you can just bring on over and you can even use our asset studio to make some slight edits if you want, but overall it’s an untapped audience you wouldn’t otherwise reach.

Amanda Feld (51:32):

Great, thanks. Inna, now question for you. What is Amsive’s favorite part about running Demand Gen? What do you guys look for and consider when you choose to run it? Obviously, Darren and I do come from a very biased perspective, so we’d love to hear your take on when and why you’ve been choosing to run Demand Gen for your clients.

Inna Zeyger (51:51):

I mean, I’m going to sound like a broken record because I’m just going to keep on saying audience and audience first. And again, our general approach has been audience first, and this sort of allows us to do that more so in the Google ecosystem going outside of just traditional search demand. So we have a number of clients where being able to start with strong first priority data and use that to help identify additional high value prospect is incredibly valuable because they have such good data or we can model off of that data because I mean ultimately we run into that sort of ceiling is search is great because people tell us what they want, but they have to search first where Demand Gen has been a really great tool to give us an opportunity to use what we already know about our best customers to influence more potential best customers before they’ve raised their hands. That’s a pretty big deal for us.

Michael Candullo (52:43):

And if I can add onto that real quick, I think what excites us is also the growth component. We’re hired to help our clients grow their business. Marketers are in their seat to grow the business. You get a marketing budget and that has to be accountable, and part of that is growth. And so the best way to grow the business is to actively pursue growth. And I think that’s what Demand Gen enables clients to do digitally. So I think that’s additionally part of what gets us excited.

Amanda Feld (53:25):

That’s great. And these were their own answers, we promise. But I do agree. Okay. Keeping things even, we’ll go back to you, Darren. When it comes to a little bit more awareness tactics, so let’s say a lot of us are running things on TV or even general YouTube outside of Demand Gen, how does Demand Gen fit into that? Is there redundancy? Do they complement each other? Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between some TV or YouTube branding efforts and then Demand Gen?

Darren Pan (53:54):

Yeah, absolutely. We have three video campaign types, and fortunately it’s tied to a marketing objective. So we have video reach campaigns for top of the funnel, video view campaigns for the mid-funnel, and Demand Gen for that lower funnel. So quick, simple, easy. In terms of the relationship between the three, of course, for accounts that are going to be more performance heavy, the search PMax accounts, you’re going to start to maybe funnel up where you go, your next step is Demand Gen, and then you go upwards, upwards to the more reach and awareness type of campaigns.

But YouTube is not necessarily just purely for awareness. It’s a great brand building tool, but on the focus of Demand Gen, can you show your Demand Gen campaigns on TV? Absolutely. I think the stat in 2025 that we had was there were a billion conversions on CTV placements last year in 2025 alone, which is an insane stat.

We’re seeing more and more conversions come from the TV placement. I called this out earlier too at the presentation where Demand Gen, we do view it as a more mid to lower funnel product depending on your targeting. I think you can target a little bit more broad, you can target a little bit more narrow for action, completely up to you, but Demand Gen has capability to do both, but it is what we deem to be a performance video product. But yeah, optimizing towards the reach and awareness should help complement everything together. It’s not that you have to do one or the other.

Amanda Feld (55:27):

Great, thanks. And I know Darren mentioned earlier repurposing social videos. We can also utilize a lot of videos that you might be running on TV. And to his point earlier, there are things we can do with our partnership with Amsive to tweak them, make them a little bit fit better with YouTube or Demand Gen, but assets and creative should definitely not be the barrier here.

Okay, we’ll do another question for the Amsive team to make sure that we are keeping things even and fair. As you mentioned, there are a lot of accounts that are particularly sensitive, whether they fall into a sensitive vertical, have high branding standards. So what is Amsive doing to ensure that everything that runs is adhering to these high brand safety standards that we have?

Inna Zeyger (56:08):

My favorite thing. So brand safety is something, and maybe I like just to distinguish between two things. There’s brand safety and then there’s also how the brand appears outside of just the copy and language, so brand presentation. But brand safety in general is something we want to and should have established upfront, not after a campaign is live.

So a lot of discussion, a lot of placements, but we usually have quite a few existing brand safety placements in place on the Google side, which gives us a lot of options and tools around content suitability and exclusion to help manage the types of environments where a brand can appear alongside, and we can tailor those based on what are the risk tolerances for our clients.

Some clients don’t mind and some clients have just highly strict regulations. But going back to that brand presentation piece, especially for regulated and brand sensitive clients, we want to understand not only where the ad can appear, but how the creative can render across those different placements, what can be adapted and what needs to remain super locked down.

So really our approach is going to be customized to establish those guardrails with our clients first and then build the campaign around them. And again, there’s so many ecosystems and placements available on the Google side that it’s an important conversation to have and then to tailor customize where we serve and how we serve it, which is also why it’s super important to have all of the different creative placements available in sizing so you limit and reduce the risk of it showing up in a way that you don’t want it to. Done.

Amanda Feld (57:44):

Makes sense. Perfect. Well, thank you guys so much. The goal of today was to make sure that you guys understand not only what Demand Gen is, but almost more importantly, why? When do you use it? How should you think about it? How should you be evaluating it? So hopefully this helps kind of give an intro. The teams at Amsive and at Google would love to have some follow-ups to discuss your brands a little bit more in depth. There are obviously nuances for each client, so look out for that as well as an email with the recordings, next steps, and you should be getting a form. We’d love to hear the feedback as well. So thank you guys, everybody, for joining. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to unlocking growth with Demand Gen with you.

Michael Candullo (58:23):

Thanks everybody.

Darren Pan (58:25):

Thanks everybody.

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