Demand Gen campaigns, formerly known as Discovery campaigns, are a lesser-known type of Google ad that incorporates Gmail and YouTube. They are a good strategy for warming up campaigns and driving traffic to a website. Demand Gen offers different ways to target ads on YouTube, including Google search, Google partners (YouTube), and display. Lookalike audiences are available only on DemandGen. It also allows for product feed campaigns on YouTube, Gmail remarketing, and importing GA4 audiences. Carousel ads should have consistent image dimensions. Demand Gen is a valuable tool for remarketing and driving conversions.
- DemandGen campaigns are a lesser-known type of Google ad that incorporates Gmail and YouTube.
-They are a good strategy for warming up campaigns and driving traffic to a website.
- DemandGen offers different ways to target ads on YouTube, including Google search, Google partners (YouTube), and display.
- Lookalike audiences are available only on DemandGen.
- It also allows for product feed campaigns on YouTube, Gmail remarketing, and importing GA4 audiences.
- Carousel ads should have consistent image dimensions.
- DemandGen is a valuable tool for remarketing and driving conversions.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to DemandGen Campaigns
01:25 Utilizing Lookalike Audiences and Product Feeds
09:56 Optimizing with GA4 Audiences and Conversion Value
16:25 Driving Sales and Reaching a Wider Audience
YouTube Video on Google Demand Gen Campaigns
Link.Tree: All Links
my friends, I'm here to talk about demand-gen campaigns. Most people are not familiar with them. They're probably one of the lesser-known Google ad types, but I thought it would be a good way to introduce them to most of the buyers who are just getting a PPC or dabbling with campaigns. I think it's a good strategy depending on the account that you're working on. Most people are used to Google Search. They're used to Google Shopping campaigns. They're used to YouTube video view campaigns. They're used to even PMAX campaigns. But demand-gen is kind of not really surface. And there's a couple of reasons why. The number one reason it was just renamed from Discovery campaigns. I'm not sure if you remember those two last year during the Google Marketing Live Conference of 2023, they were morphed into demand-gen. Then they've come with some really cool features that I think we should all be aware of. The first is it incorporates Gmail and it incorporates YouTube and it incorporates Discover as well. But really, it's those two that really take the cake. And YouTube, of course, is the world's second largest search engine. Now, wait a minute, you'll support. Are you talking about search engines and YouTube? Can I get my ads from Search onto YouTube search? Yes, you can. Just to take it a step further, there's three different ways to do that. You can pick and search Google Search only, Google Partners, which is YouTube, and then display, right? Google Partners and display. You should never, ever, ever, ever use Google display. That is complete crap. That's garbage. I usually use the second one because I'm a big believer in YouTube search. I think there's a lot of amazing traffic because it is the how-tos and reviews are just, that's really what drives YouTube, really. I think it's an awesome place to be. Then on top of that, there are already ads on YouTube, right? Now, here's where I'll get checked by my more experienced buyers on this platform because there is something called video action ads. I'm not sure if you remember those or if you guys have dabbled with those. The problem with those are those are conversion-based. You can't just like drive traffic. That's the cool thing with demand-gen. Demand-gen is very big on traffic and you don't have to have a conversion hook to do it. It almost has a max clicks function, which, you know, I'm not big on max clicks. I think max clicks is actually what's really farming a lot of campaigns lately. But remember, this is over a year old. So at the time, there was a niche to fill in terms of getting traffic to a site to warm it up, right? It's called warming up your campaigns. Also, lookalikes live here, right? So remember similar audiences. All of us remember similar audiences. That got deprecated into or morphed into optimized targeting. So optimized targeting is what we all know as and that's another name for that is actually audience liquidity is also another name it goes by. And that's, of course, when you have a seed audience and you extrapolate it out based on performance and similar audiences, you cannot use anymore. However, that actually got morphed into lookalikes and lookalikes do live only on demand-gen. So you have, I think it's three different levels. There's the close lookalike, semi-lookalike, and then kind of like a distant lookalike. So I usually just keep it to the first one. Can't go wrong there. And then just based on performance, move it down the funnel. Another great thing about demand-gen is it uses product feed within YouTube. So if you've ever seen those ads with product feed, that's what this is. It also is a almost like a white hat at the cart remarketing funnel. So what I love about this is there's only three ways to really add a cart, right? There's auto at a cart, at a cart abandonment, right? So when somebody adds a cart in abundance, they get the email from either MailChimp or Shopify or whatever. Oh, you've Cartaman and please come back or whatever. Here's an offer. Then you have a person doing it. That's organic email to cart. So that's when you segment the audiences and you kind of design, you're actually designing different templates, email templates to remark it to them, all sorts of different creative. The first is kind of junk. If you just get that Cartaman email, unless it's an offer, you're probably not going to get back in. But a lot of times if you have a good email person, you're able to use different strategies to warm it up or to warm them back up and bring them back into a purchase. That can include different products. It could include different creative, could include different offers, all sorts of cool stuff. That's when you need a person there. My agency actually specializes, or not specialized, but that we do have email marketers. And it's a very cool thing. It's something we really got down to a science. And then we have this. This is paid at the cart. Now, wait a minute. You have something to just say you just have, like, why would you have both? And I actually do have an account that uses both. When you have accounts that deal with a lot of cart abandonment. Now, what's one that deals with a lot of cart abandonment? Automotive is one. The next one is travel. Travel has huge at the cart abandonment. I mean, think about the last time you went on vacation, right? You checked out every single hotel at that location. You checked out every single flight for the week after week before, all that stuff to find the lowest, the best deal you could get, right? And then you looked at all sorts of activities. You look at rental cars. So you have something like travel in that vertical, at a cart abandonment, is a thing. It's something you just deal with in the thousands of people every day. And so what you have to do is that one structure is enough. You need two structures to do it. And frequency is it. That's how you bring people back in. And then, of course, you're able to use Google Merchant Center, right? So if you're dealing with the e-commerce platform, right, you're able to, or e-commerce clients, you're able to bring them back in again through whatever they last checked to bring them back into the funnel via your product feed through Google Merchant Center. Then you have display, it's almost like a display social campaign. And how do I, why do I say that, right? Well, first of all, look at what I was talking about earlier. I was talking about Gmail and I was talking about YouTube. That's where I said the focus was. So think about Gmail for at a cart abandonment. That's one. But for YouTube, think of social. YouTube is a social platform. There's no doubt about that. So if you view it as, in terms of the placements you can use, you can use video, you can use display, and then you can use carousels. Think about it. You can use, like I said, the top YouTube shorts. That's a, it's almost like, it's just a social platform at that. You're doing a social buy, really. So, and this kind of gets into the realm of programmatic at times because, you know, the big thing you're going to see with demand, Jen, is that the secondary, tertiary, fourth touches, the view through conversions be a little high, just like probe. But because it has lookalikes, it just, I think it has a little bit of an edge. It's not as bad as probe. Probe is, you know, as a first touch, it's not, that's not a strength. It's biggest strength. If you don't look at any kind of probe, it's usually retargeting, right? That's as big as strength. And same with goes with this. I agree with that. But due to the lookalikes, due to the feed aspect, right? You're able to, you're able to get those first clicks in, right? Just like Facebook. Like if you think of Facebook, you know, it's really about the stories, it's about the feed, it's about those big placements and the, and the right creative, the right audience, and the right offer to bring people into your funnel. Same thing goes for this. And that's why I really dig this. It's a different placement than probe, but it's kind of similar. In fact, you will get view through conversions. So be ready for that. And for people who don't know what view through conversions, that's like when you're in the data attribution model and, and you're in the attribution model, you pick the data feed, right? You have two different choices within Google. You have last click and you have data feed. Data feed is the one that contributes like a third, a third of the conversion here and a third there. But the first click is usually with a bigger placement, right? It's usually with Facebook or search or something kind of big, or even like a YouTube video completion rate or something like that. That's how initially they're brought in. But pro kind of like basically does the view through conversion, like I said, as a mid funnel retargeting aspect to get people to buy and purchase. And like I said, same thing with this. But, but like I said, it has great placements that mimic Facebook that I think really make it a good first touch mechanism. So keep that in mind, my friends. That's why I like it. So let's go, let's go further into in terms of how to set these up. So here we have, we have sales, we have these, we have all these different aspects that have objectives you can choose from. I'm just picking sales right here. And that of course leads me to these conversions to improve sales. And then you pick demand gen. So it goes from, you can click website traffic, awareness consideration, or a lot of times people don't even use goals, guidance, because they think that automatically jump, jumps up the cost per click or the the CPM, etc. I think it's fine either way. Then here you have, if you click down, you have, you can click conversions, clicks, conversion value. And this is like I said, this is what differentiates it from YouTube action ads, because YouTube action ads are straight out conversions. But here you can do clicks. Now remember what I said earlier though, and in my other videos, Max clicks is what's destroying search right now. I really think this. I think it's a great way to start a campaign right now. I think it's fine to warm a campaign. But man, the spot traffic is through the rough right now. It's it's not getting any better. So be very careful how you use this. I I've been tending to start with conversions just because I want more qualified traffic. I want to send that signal out. Hey, I'm not messing around. I may use clicks at first. I may use it for a couple of days just to get that just to warm the campaign, look at my CTRs. The CTRs are low, then I need to swap out creative. But if they're high, and I'm looking through the path of conversion, out of carts are filling out, et cetera. Hey, I mean, just let's flip the switch conversions now, right? Or even conversion value. And like I said, when you use conversion value, make sure you're using the you're grouping these correctly, right? Like if you're if you're say if you're a boat salesman or a boat account, and you're selling 10,000, 50,000 votes, and then you're selling some glasses, those aren't in the same campaign, right? You should be segmenting your campaigns by by grooves by items by, you know, there's a big difference there. So best sellers, et cetera. So make sure you're you're segmenting that correctly to get the best to move the right product within the right campaign structure. Then you have conversion values. You can do I don't usually you do this when I first start, I like to see where the benchmarks are and usually the benchmarks suck, but not the benchmarks suck, but your initial findings are a little weak because it's getting those first conversions. Of course, your costs, you know, your cost bracket positions is going to be very high in the first couple rounds. It's working to bring them down and it's learning. So I normally don't set this up right away, unless it's a very small merchandise, etc, then I then you can. And then here you're able to set up campaign URL options for your UTMs to analyze that and Google ads. Another, like I said, cool thing about demand gen are the product feeds. You cannot do this on the Google Merchant Center is linked. That has to be linked, my friends. And then you're able to run product feed campaigns on YouTube and then Gmail. And then, of course, discovered too. But really, that's what you're doing it for the high reach and the one-to-one Gmail marketing, which is what demand it. So if you take anything from this video, it's about the YouTube, right, the YouTube feed and Gmail remarketing. That's really its biggest strength. Here I have the ad set buildouts here. So like I said, there is optimized targeting. We do have that again. Here we have the how to build the ads. Like I said, you could do single image ads, video ads, and then you have carousel image ads. We're going to go to that in a minute. And then this is how it'll look in terms of the three different placements. And you basically set everything up here. You go down one. Oh, yeah. And then one thing I want to know, oh, this is this is interesting. I really want to make sure I touch on this. When you do carousels, make sure you're doing them right. So to do carousels correctly, the card, they all have to be one image. And what do I mean by one image? There's three different images to pick one. There's square, there's horizontal, which is like the movie, right? And then there's four by five, which is semi-vertical, right? Nine by 16 is a true vertical. But really, for some reason, it claims it's four by five for this, which is kind of true to a certain extent. But when you do carousel, make sure they're all square. Make sure they're all horizontal or all vertical, four by five. They cannot be one square, one horizontal, like that don't do that. You'll know you're messing up when it won't let you show. So this is a paintball one. I'm in a paintballing. I used to be. And so if you see here this one by one, right? You'll see that the example won't show up unless they all match. So these, remember, when you do a carousel, it has to be one of these, all of them. It cannot be one of each or whatever. It has to be all square or horizontal or vertical. And then you're allowed 10, then you're allowed to use the order, set the order of how you want them to flow. So that's an up and down arrow right here. Now, I love this placement. I think this is really cool to show you, you know, go through the different products, et cetera, not to mention the product feed placement as well. Here I'm going up again. I wanted to also talk about this is something that I think we all need to start doing a little bit better on is importing GA4 audiences. You know, a lot of us are kind of lazy. You know, we kind of say, oh, yeah, I just clinically to Shopify of the API placement. You know, really, you should be using GA4 as well. Like you should be, you know, relying on, you know, because GA4 is where they really segment the audiences correctly, right? And that's when you're able to say, okay, these are the ad, like, here's the Add a Card abandonment email I was talking about. This is actually from that video where I show people how to do a step by step. But what I love about GA4 is you're able to segment out all these micro targets and then able to incorporate them into your campaign. So what you do here is it's Google Analytics 4. You go to Admin, you go to Audiences, and then you pick Create an Event, and then you, that's how you do it. Just remember the conversion value only links with standard events. They don't add links to custom events. So, oh, so keep that in mind if you're looking to make sure that the those custom events, like, why isn't I made this custom event? Why isn't it purchases? Because why are the conversion value not being linked to that? It's because it's not a standard event. It's either asking a standard event, which is an ATCIC or purchase. And then, really, it should just be purchase. You shouldn't be linking conversion value to Add a Card. I've always thought that was a little strange whenever I saw that. Really, you know, that you want to pay for sales at the end of the day. Really, the conversions, that's when you do Add a Card, etc. And then when you conversion value, that should be all be purchases. But this is how you do it. And then, here, again, when you have your product feed, right, like I said, this is how it looks on YouTube, right? Very cool, right within your feed. Then you have Discover, and then you have Gmail. This is the Creme de la Creme, my friends. This is it right here. This is your email marketing campaign. Now, wait a minute, Joseph. I thought, now I'm going to say, I think I said this earlier, but I'll say it again, I thought PMACs does remarketing. Yes, it does. But again, it depends on the vertical. If you're dealing with a vertical that has tons of card abandonment, then you would do this. Now, otherwise, if you have a PMAC campaign, does it automatically. If you're just selling, spending 50 bucks a day, it does it automatically. But if you're spending thousands of day, and you're having thousands of them at a card abandonment today, you need to start doing this. There's no doubt about that. And also, I guess that'd be like a resort placement as well, like if you're selling like Disneyland tickets, or not, it's very farm, etc. And my friends, that takes us through our journey. I want to say, please look at us on medium. We also have our podcast. You know, I've been doing some really unique one-on-ones with my podcast. I've been really talking about, you know, I have a great, two great series. One is the Meta Blueprint year one. I love that title, by the way. And then you, I have the, are you an amateur? Are you a professional series? And I think that's a very cool series. And I've been really dropping some nuggets there. I'm going to make a video on that as well, that I think can really contribute. We also have some amazing interviews I have coming up. Some people have really reached out to me that I'm shocked. So please be sure to be watching those interviews. Those are really cool. But definitely keep an eye on the podcast. Are you amateur or professional series? I'm going to really build that out. I really think that's a cool way to talk more on, you know, as you're doing these ads, are you an amateur or are you professional? Are you doing amateur things or are you doing professional things? And you really, you know, should be doing, of course, right? You shouldn't be doing things like learning on people's dime, et cetera, you know, on as an, as an amateur, as just starting out, you should be a professional when you're doing this. And you got to do, you have to have professional things in mind. You shouldn't be doing ads for somebody. And this is your first ad campaign. So I really want to make sure that's driven home. So that's really it, my friends. Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to some more dialogue and have a great campaign building. Thank you.
