Google’s Demand Gen Ad Campaigns: Do They Work?

In short, Performance Max servers your ads across Google’s entire ad ecosystem, including search and display, while Demand Gen only uses YouTube, Gmail and Discover.

Performance Max campaigns are the more versatile of the two, utilizing Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities to optimize ads across all Google’s platforms based on specified conversion goals. This approach allows advertisers to maximize their reach and performance by automatically finding the best ad placements and formats across Google’s entire ecosystem.

On the other hand, Demand Gen campaigns are specifically tailored for engaging users in more personal and visually appealing ways. These campaigns leverage rich, creative formats to capture users’ attention as they are exploring their interests, making them ideal for driving brand consideration and connecting with audiences in a more curated environment.

Our test results show that Demand Gen just isn’t an effective way to advertise on Google.

Why Demand Gen didn’t work for us:

• Poor sales results: Despite seeing conversions in our reports at a decent cost, those leads very rarely lead to a sale. The quality of sites we ran on were extremely poor and it was difficult to optimize to better sites. Skeptics would say gamesmanship is at play with the publishers clicking on your ads and encourage Google’s engine to serve more ads to their websites so they could generate more ad revenue.
• Abhorrent targeting options: Google offers Demand Gen campaigns under the veil of “simplifying” your campaign set up and leveraging trends like “AI” or “machine-learning” to boost their appeal. But the real-world results don’t live up to the hype. They give you the illusion of targeting options but they remain far too limiting and your ads run in places you would typically never want to pay for.
• Mostly video inventory: Google has a problem: they have too much video inventory to sell and not enough advertisers that want it so they appear to have packaged it up with Demand Gen. Sure, I watch videos on YouTube all the time so I know there’s plenty of premium inventory there, but there’s billions more impressions that aren’t unfortunately.
• “Black Box” marketing: Bots control your future here. There’s little transparency and control in where your ads run and that’s hard to manage and harder to explain to your boss when sales are down.
• Non-English sites: Despite setting our Demand Gen campaign settings to “English” only, our ads consistently ran on non-English YouTube channels

While I applaud their efforts to create campaign types that are easier to set up, the default settings for these are far too loose and have a great propensity to spend your budget fast. Remember: Google is a public company and appeasing share-holder value by increasing your ad spend creates a conflict-of-interest for its users. In my opinion, it appears Google is more interested in finding ways to sell their long-tail inventory and boosting your ad spend, then they are in producing results for you.

As an experienced performance marketer, I much prefer Google’s non-automated campaigns – Google Search and Display – with rich targeting options and far more control over where your ads run. This comes at a cost, however, of a greater learning curve, but the trade-off is worth the effort.

You can use Demand Gen if you have a large budget and want to experiment a bit, but for smaller businesses or those new to Google Ads, I simply can’t recommend it.