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Demand Gen campaigns

glossary google ads updated 2026.05.20 8 min read
// contents · 9 sections
  1. What Demand Gen campaigns are
  2. How Demand Gen works under the hood
  3. What changed in 2025-26
  4. Common misconceptions
  5. Does Demand Gen support keyword targeting?
  6. Is Demand Gen a direct-response channel?
  7. Can you run Demand Gen without a video asset?
  8. Related concepts
  9. Sources

Demand Gen is Google Ads' upper-funnel campaign type that runs across YouTube Shorts, In-Stream and In-Feed, the Discover feed, and Gmail. It replaced Discovery campaigns in 2024 and is now the default surface for visually-led, audience-targeted prospecting on Google's owned-and-operated inventory (Google Ads Help, 2025).

What Demand Gen campaigns are

Demand Gen is a single campaign type that fans out one set of audiences and assets across Google's visual-discovery inventory: YouTube Shorts, YouTube In-Stream, YouTube In-Feed (the home and watch-next feeds), the Discover feed inside the Google app, and the Promotions and Social tabs of Gmail (Google Ads Help, 2025). It is the successor to Discovery campaigns — Google migrated all remaining Discovery campaigns to Demand Gen in Q1 2024 and removed the legacy type entirely (Search Engine Land, 2025).

Targeting is audience-first. There are no keywords. You bring lookalike segments (built from a Customer Match or website-visitor seed), custom segments (defined by search behaviour, URLs, or apps), and Google's demographic and interest segments. Bidding strategies are Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS; a Maximize Conversion Value option is available where a Merchant Center feed is attached (Google Ads Help, 2025).

How Demand Gen works under the hood

A Demand Gen campaign is structured as campaign → ad group → ad, with audiences set at the ad-group level and assets assembled into ads. The three asset families combine differently depending on the placement Google chooses to serve into:

  • Image — square (1:1), portrait (4:5), and landscape (1.91:1) creatives feed Discover, Gmail, and YouTube In-Feed carousel slots. Carousel ads accept 2–10 images.
  • Video — landscape, square, and vertical (9:16) videos feed YouTube In-Stream and In-Feed; the vertical variant is required to qualify for YouTube Shorts placement and Google deprioritises ad groups without it (Google Ads Help, 2025).
  • Product feed — an optional Merchant Center link unlocks shoppable formats with product tiles overlaid on image and video creatives, and is a prerequisite for the Max Conversion Value bid strategy (Google Ads Help, 2025).

Audience signals — lookalike segments in particular — drive prospecting. Lookalike segments are seeded from a Customer Match list or first-party website-visitor segment. Google's documented Lookalike segment minimum is 100 matched users in the seed list (per Use Lookalike segments, Google Ads Help, 2025); practical performance still requires a seed list of 1,000+ matched users for stable matching.

Reporting exposes asset-level performance, audience-segment performance, and a placement breakdown that separates YouTube In-Stream, In-Feed, and Shorts — added in the 2025 transparency refresh after agency pressure for channel visibility (Search Engine Land, 2025).

What changed in 2025-26

Demand Gen left its 2024 launch posture and is now treated as the default upper-funnel surface in Google's product comms, replacing the standalone "video reach" and "video views" campaigns as the recommended starting point for non-search prospecting (Google Ads Help, 2025). The most material 2025-26 shifts:

  • Channel and format controls. Advertisers can now opt out of individual surfaces (e.g. exclude Gmail, run YouTube-only) and split reporting by surface — a direct response to the "black-box placement" complaints PPC Land documented through 2024 (PPC Land, 2025).
  • Recommendations API coverage. Demand Gen optimisation scores and asset-level recommendations are now exposed through the Recommendations API, making them auditable alongside Search and PMax recommendations (Google Ads Developers, 2025).
  • Lookalike seed minimums. Google's documented Lookalike segment minimum is 100 matched users in the seed list (per Use Lookalike segments, Google Ads Help, 2025); practical performance still requires a seed list of 1,000+ matched users for stable matching. Google is also moving lookalikes toward a suggestion-mode model in Demand Gen through 2026.
  • Shorts dominance. Think with Google's 2025 measurement work flagged that Shorts inventory now accounts for the majority of new Demand Gen impressions in many verticals, making vertical-video assets a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have (Think with Google, 2025-09).

Methodology note. Whitead audits Demand Gen campaigns on four signals: (1) audience-signal composition — at least one first-party seed (Customer Match or website visitors) alongside any lookalike or interest segment, never interests-only; (2) Customer Match seed freshness, flagged when the seed list was last refreshed more than 90 days ago or contains fewer than 1,000 active matches; (3) asset-type coverage, flagged when an ad group lacks a vertical (9:16) video while opted into YouTube placements; and (4) bid-strategy fit, flagged when tCPA is set on a campaign with fewer than 30 conversions in the prior 30 days. The rule escalates to HIGH severity when signals (1) and (3) fire together — that combination indicates the matching engine has neither audience anchoring nor Shorts-eligible creative and is functionally running on demographics alone.

Common misconceptions

The "Demand Gen = Discovery rebrand" framing undersells how much the asset model and placement set changed. The biggest operator errors are inherited from the Discovery playbook — keyword-thinking applied to an audience-first surface, and direct-response measurement applied to an upper-funnel one.

Does Demand Gen support keyword targeting?

No. There are no keywords, search themes, or query-based controls in Demand Gen. Targeting is exclusively audience-based: Customer Match lists, website-visitor segments, lookalike segments, custom segments built from search and URL behaviour, and Google's demographic and affinity segments (Google Ads Help, 2025). Operators who try to replicate Search-style intent matching here generally end up over-relying on custom segments seeded with keyword strings — those work as weak intent hints, not as bidding controls. Use Performance Max or AI Max for Search when keyword signal matters.

Is Demand Gen a direct-response channel?

It can drive direct response, but treating it as one out of the gate is the most common cause of underperformance. The placements — Shorts, Discover, Gmail — are interruption inventory; intent is lower than Search and view-through plus engaged-view conversions account for a material share of the lift. Start on Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions with broad conversion definitions (sign-up, qualified lead) and only move to tCPA or tROAS once the campaign has accumulated ≥30 conversions in 30 days (Google Ads Help, 2025). Floor is ≥30 conv/30d for Maximize Conversions and tCPA; tROAS typically wants ≥50 conv/30d with conversion values attached before bid stability. Measure with view-through windows of 1–3 days enabled and account for modeled conversions in EEA traffic.

Can you run Demand Gen without a video asset?

Technically yes — image-only ad groups will serve to Discover, Gmail, and YouTube In-Feed image slots — but you forfeit YouTube Shorts and In-Stream eligibility, which is where the majority of incremental reach lives in 2025-26 (Think with Google, 2025-09). Treat at least one 9:16 vertical video as a baseline asset for any Demand Gen ad group; a 6–15 second cut of an existing horizontal video is usually enough to unlock the placement.

Demand Gen pairs naturally with Customer Match — first-party seed quality is the single biggest determinant of lookalike performance, so refresh cadence is an audit-worthy signal. Layer Enhanced Conversions and Consent Mode v2 before scaling, because view-through measurement leans heavily on the modeled conversions layer. If Demand Gen is competing with a Performance Max campaign in the same account, run brand-exclusion lists on both to prevent the two from bidding against each other on owned audiences.

Sources

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