If you are aren’t an advertiser you might not be aware of the change Google announced back in May 2023: Discovery campaigns become Demand Gen campaigns , but, if you are, nothing is news for you.
Nevertheless, let’s go back to basics.
What are Demand Gen campaigns?
Demand Gen campaigns are upgraded Discovery campaigns. They are Multi-format ad campaigns across Google feeds only: Gmail, Google Discover, YouTube and have the audience focused on customer intent signals.
To make it simple to understand, the new format is adding to the old Display campaigns the possibility to run on YouTube. Let’s see side by side, comparatively, how different are they according to the documentation offered by Google.
Discovery ads vs Demand Gen
When it comes to available bid strategies, the following table is summarizing what it offers so far:
| Bid Strategy | Campaign Goal | Budget | Optimization | Condition |
| Max Clicks | Traffic | No minimum budget | Change bid strategy after gathering data | |
| Max Conversions | Conversions | 15 x expected avg. CPA | Add Target CPA | can be used only after 50 conversions + need of custom goal |
| Target ROAS | Revenue | Min $100/day or 20 x (avg. Order value/tROAS) | Gradually increase of tROAS | min 75 conversions in 30 days |
Demand Gen Audiences
With the whole migration from Third-Party data to First-Party data, Demand Gen audiences are functioning based on “Lookalike segments” which try to find groups of users that share the same characteristics as your First-Party data. Moreover, the audiences from the Discovery campaigns once upgraded became “Lookalike segments” .
My own experience with Demand Gen
Overall, the theory sounds good for the advertisers. The new type of campaigns offer the possibility to be in multiple places where your target audience is active such as YouTube Shorts. Additionally, you have the possibility to combine images with videos which might result in a better CTR (clickthrough rate). Now the only question left is: Is everything working as expected?
My answer is depends. It is obvious the campaign is still in Beta and there is room for improvement. Below are some of reasons to justify this:
Firstly, on the my first Demand Gen campaign created most of the traffic was registered on the image ad even if the campaign had also videos. When the support was asked the reason behind, no clear feedback was given.
Secondly, there was a case where same ad run in three different regions (America, Asia & Europe) on all devices, but the discrepancy in CTR was really high between regions (0.40% Asia & America) vs 60+% Europe. A lower difference can be explainable, but the difference was way too high for not suspecting a glitch. As expected, support offered a standard explanation such as ad quality, market dynamics or audience targeting.
The last “weird” situation encountered was with an Indonesian CTA in the Google Ads platform in a campaign where Indonesian when not a targeted country or language. The good thing is the CTA was not display in Indonesian for the audience.
In conclusion, always new things are coming with good and bad things. To answer to the question: Is Demand Gen campaign better than Discovery?
For sure it has a lot of potential and comes with solutions to some of the advertisers’ challenges, but there are also a lot improvements which still need to be made for having 100% functional upgrade.
What are the challenges you had with Demand Gen campaigns?
More articles related Google Ads here.
