Google Demand Gen Campaigns: A Practical Guide

In May 2026 Google said it would fold Display campaigns into Demand Gen, letting advertisers manage their Google Display Network ads from inside Demand Gen campaigns, with the move “expected to complete by 2027,” in its announcement. A migration tool began a phased rollout in June, Google’s help page says. Video action campaigns had already gone the same way: advertisers could no longer create them from April 2025, and existing ones were upgraded to Demand Gen from mid-2025. On October 14, 2026, Google added that advertisers will be able to mark channels as high or low priority and set a best-effort spending limit on low-priority ones in Demand Gen, Performance Max, Search and Shopping, rolling out “over the next months,” in its announcement.

Demand Gen, launched in 2023 as the replacement for Discovery campaigns, has become Google’s main campaign type for visual ads on YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Maps and the Display Network. Google publishes a monthly update on it, and says the “hundreds of improvements” it made in the second half of 2025, “on average, are driving a 30% increase in conversions or conversion value for advertisers,” based on its own experiments, in its August 2026 update.

This guide covers where Demand Gen ads run, the formats and audiences, bidding and budgets, how to measure results, and when to choose it over Performance Max.

What Demand Gen is for

Google describes Demand Gen as a way to “generate demand and deliver business results on Google’s most visual, entertaining surfaces,” and Performance Max as a way to “maximize performance across all of Google’s channels and surfaces,” in its Demand Gen help page. The difference is intent. Search ads reach people already looking for something. Demand Gen reaches people watching, scrolling or reading email, who may not know your brand yet, much as ads on Instagram or TikTok do.

The same help page says Demand Gen can reach “up to 3 billion monthly active users,” a figure Google gives without a source. More useful than reach is control: Demand Gen lets you choose channels, audiences and creative in ways Performance Max does not.

Where Demand Gen ads run

Google’s channel controls page lists five places you can choose from:

• YouTube, including in-stream, in-feed and Shorts.
• Discover, the feed in the Google app.
• Gmail, among the messages in the inbox.
• Google Display Network, the sites and apps that run Google ads.
• Google Maps, which serves only when the account has a location extension turned on.

Channel controls began rolling out in spring 2025 and are set for each ad group. Google recommends “All Google channels” for most advertisers and warns that, because the system chases the cheapest conversions, a given channel may serve at “lower-than-anticipated volumes.” Since April 2025, Demand Gen campaigns opted in to the Display Network have served image ads there automatically, after Google renamed the old Google video partners option to Google Display Network in March, according to its integration notes. Ads can also reach TV screens: Google says Demand Gen campaigns that include them “drive an average of 7% additional conversions at the same ROI,” in its January 2026 update.

Formats and creative

Demand Gen runs four kinds of ad, per Google’s help page and its asset specs:

• Image ads in horizontal 1.91:1, square 1:1 and vertical 4:5, with 9:16 recommended for Shorts.
• Video ads in horizontal, square and vertical formats, at least 5 seconds long. Videos under 10 seconds won’t serve in YouTube in-stream.
• Carousel ads of 2 to 10 image cards.
• Product ads from a Merchant Center feed. Google says advertisers with large catalogues “typically see a 33% increase in conversions” when they add product feeds, based on its own data for feeds of more than 50 products, in its May 2026 update.

Google’s best practices page sets a creative benchmark: at least one ad per campaign with three vertical, three square and three horizontal images, plus one video in each orientation. It also advises pausing only assets that are “low-performing and have had at least 14 days to ramp up.” Vertical creative matters most for Shorts, where Google recommends 9:16 assets.

Google will also make creative for you. It can turn images into short videos, resize videos and add text overlays, much of it switched on by default, as our piece on auto-generated video ads explains. Check what it produces before it runs at scale.

Audiences

Lookalike segments are available only in Demand Gen. You give Google seed lists, such as customers, and it finds similar people. Since March 2026, lookalikes have worked as suggestions rather than hard limits by default, so Google can reach beyond them, PPC Land reported. Google’s help page confirms the change and offers a form to keep lookalikes as a “Targeting Constraint.” Seed lists must total over 100 active matched people.

Optimized targeting uses Google’s AI to look beyond the audiences you select, and Demand Gen enables it by default at ad group level, Search Engine Land reported. Google recommends it for prospecting, but says to avoid combining it with Maximize clicks bidding, to protect click quality.

Other options include custom segments built from search terms and websites, Customer Match lists, remarketing lists and, for Display placements, contextual targeting. Google’s customer lifecycle goals also work in Demand Gen, so you can bid higher for new customers or target only them. Keep prospecting and remarketing in separate campaigns, so you can see which one is finding new buyers.

Bidding and budgets

Demand Gen supports Maximize clicks, Target CPC, Maximize conversions, Target CPA, Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS. Manual CPC, viewable CPM and pay-for-conversions bidding are not available. Google’s Demand Gen FAQ advises starting with Maximize conversions and moving to Target CPA or Target ROAS only “after your campaign received at least 50 conversions,” with a first ROAS target about 20% below the last 30 days’ result. Since April 2026, campaigns can also optimize toward view-through conversions, and in August Google said it would extend this to the Display Network and count video views only.

Google’s budget advice is inconsistent. Its main help page recommends a budget “at least 10 times your target CPA.” Its low-budget troubleshooting page recommends 20 times, and adds that “a minimum daily budget of at least $100 USD per day, per ad group will help avoid a cold start,” while $500 per ad group per day “will help drive effective and efficient performance.” Treat 10 times your target cost per acquisition as the floor and 20 times as the level to aim for.

Give the campaign time. Google says not to judge performance until it has at least 50 conversions, and to change bids and budgets by 5% to 10% a week, and no more than 15%. A campaign starved of budget or reset every few days never leaves learning, a common cause of high costs covered in our guide to lowering ad costs.

Measuring Demand Gen

Last-click reporting undercounts Demand Gen, because many people see an ad on YouTube and buy days later through a search. “Relying only on last-click attribution severely undervalues your Demand Gen investment,” Karly Scott of Logical Position wrote in Search Engine Land’s Demand Gen playbook. Better measures, from simplest to strongest:

• Data-driven attribution and engaged-view conversions, which count conversions after someone watched at least 10 seconds of an in-stream ad, or 5 seconds in feeds and Shorts.
• Branded search and new-customer reporting, to see whether Demand Gen is creating demand that shows up elsewhere.
• Demand Gen Uplift Experiments, announced in May 2026, an automated A/B test of adding Demand Gen to a campaign mix that includes Performance Max, per Google’s announcement.
• Conversion Lift, which holds back a group of users from the ads. Google’s help page lists a $5,000 minimum budget and at least 1,000 observed conversions, with studies of at least 7 days and more than 14 recommended. Conversion Lift isn’t available to every account, and Google says to ask your account representative for access.

Uplift Experiments and lift tests are the only ones of these that show what Demand Gen caused rather than what it touched. How to set one up and read the result is covered in our guide to incrementality testing.

Demand Gen or Performance Max?

Performance Max buys across every Google channel, including Search and Shopping, and decides where the money goes. It suits advertisers who want the most conversions at a target cost and are happy to let Google choose. Demand Gen suits advertisers who want to reach new people with visual creative, control channels and audiences, and test creative the way they would on social platforms.

Google pitches them as partners rather than rivals. It says adding Demand Gen “delivers 10% higher ROAS and 12% higher sales effectiveness,” based on a 2024 Nielsen analysis Google commissioned of Search and Performance Max campaigns with and without Demand Gen, in its Uplift Experiments announcement. Its Uplift Experiments test exactly that combination. If Performance Max mostly spends on brand searches and past visitors, Demand Gen is the obvious place to look for new customers; our piece on Performance Max and Demand Gen covers how to check and split the budget.

Common mistakes

• Judging it like Search. Expecting next-day conversions, or cutting the campaign before it reaches 50 conversions.
• Optimizing to soft actions. Google advises marking shallow actions such as page views and add-to-carts as non-biddable, so the system learns from sales or leads.
• Too little vertical creative. Horizontal assets on Shorts run with blurred bars and look like ads made for somewhere else.
• Accepting migration defaults. Migrated Display campaigns “continue to opt into the GDN by default,” and Demand Gen switches on optimized targeting by default, Search Engine Land warned, so review channels and audiences after any move.

Demand Gen is one of several places where Google has taken over settings advertisers used to control, a shift set out in our piece on what you can still control in Google Ads. Planning and running Demand Gen is part of our performance marketing work, with video from our motion graphics and animation team and product feeds through ecommerce marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Demand Gen campaign in Google Ads?

Demand Gen is a Google Ads campaign type for visual ads that reach people while they watch, scroll or check email, rather than when they search. Ads run on YouTube, including Shorts, Discover, Gmail, the Google Display Network and Google Maps. It supports image, video, carousel and product ads, lookalike audiences and conversion-based bidding. Google launched it in 2023 to replace Discovery campaigns.

How much budget does a Demand Gen campaign need?

Google’s pages differ. Its main help page recommends a budget of at least 10 times your target cost per acquisition, while its troubleshooting page recommends 20 times, plus at least $100 a day per ad group to avoid a cold start. Google also says not to judge results until the campaign has at least 50 conversions, so the budget needs to reach that within a few weeks.

What is the difference between Demand Gen and Performance Max?

Performance Max runs across all Google channels, including Search and Shopping, and decides where to spend with little input from you. Demand Gen runs on visual surfaces such as YouTube, Discover, Gmail and the Display Network, and gives you more control over channels, audiences and creative. Many advertisers run both: Performance Max to capture demand, Demand Gen to reach people who don’t know them yet.

Do lookalike audiences still work in Demand Gen?

Yes, but differently. Since March 2026, lookalike segments in Demand Gen work by default as suggestions rather than hard limits, so Google can show ads to people outside them when it expects better results. Google offers a form to keep lookalikes as a strict targeting constraint. Seed lists must total more than 100 active matched people, and lookalikes are available only in Demand Gen campaigns.

How do you measure whether Demand Gen works?

Don’t rely on last-click conversions, which undercount ads people see before they search. Use data-driven attribution and engaged-view conversions, watch branded search and new-customer numbers, and test properly with Google’s Demand Gen Uplift Experiments or a Conversion Lift study. Conversion Lift needs a minimum budget of $5,000 and at least 1,000 conversions, with studies running at least 7 days and ideally more than 14.