Best practices for high performing Demand Gen campaigns

Creative

• Use at least one ad with “Excellent” Ad Strength rating to maximize the performance and reach of your Demand Gen campaigns across the range of Google’s most visual ad inventory. To achieve “Excellent”, be sure to add a diverse set of assets to your ad, including at least 3 unique assets for each aspect ratio (Square, Landscape, Vertical).
  • Ad Strength: It’s a tool within Google Ads that evaluates the relevance, quantity, and diversity of your ad assets, which provides real-time feedback to help improve ad effectiveness. 
  • “Excellent" Ad Strength rating: This indicates that you've provided a comprehensive and diverse set of high-quality images, videos, headlines, and descriptions, following Google's best practices. Learn more About Ad Strength for Demand Gen campaigns.
• Use Image & Video together to tell a cohesive story using the medium that most resonates with your audience.
  • Prioritize assets that perform across inventory: Think mobile-first when selecting assets, and use high-performing creatives from other campaigns and audiences to fuel performance. 
  • Tell your brand’s story with creative made for the platform: For video, use ABCD (Audience, Branding, Connection, Direction) creative guidance, and repeat the CTA and ensure it’s echoed in the voiceover and overlaid graphics.
• Use Product Feeds
  • Turn your ad into a virtual storefront that helps consumers discover your brand and product. If you’re a retailer selling products through a website, in a physical store, or both, use Merchant Center—a tool that helps millions of shoppers on Google discover, explore, and buy your products. You can upload and manage your product feeds so that your products appear in Demand Gen and other Google campaign types. 

For more information and FAQs, visit the Feed policy help center article.

Deep Dive into Creative

Audiences

• Use optimized targeting for conversions

  • If your campaign goals are driving towards conversions, optimized targeting will enhance your campaign performance. Optimized targeting looks beyond manually-selected audience segments in your campaign to find audience segments that you may have missed to improve the campaign’s performance. Advertisers who opt into optimized targeting find 20% higher conversions at the same cost compared to the ones without it.¹ Learn more.

• Use Lookalike segments to find similar users
  • Use Google AI to amplify your first-party data: Upload your customer list and find valuable new users who have similar qualities to your existing customers.
  • Separate high-value and low-value customers: Create unique Lookalike segments based on users with similar interactions with your business.

• Use new customer acquisition (NCA) goal to attract new users
  • The new customer acquisition (NCA) goal in Google Ads offers a fully automated approach to focus your campaigns on acquiring new users. Powered by your first-party audiences, this feature helps identify and reach potential customers who are new to your business. Specifically, advertisers that use the "New Customer Only Mode" have improved their new to returning customer ratio by 11.5% on average while achieving a 3% reduction in the acquisition cost for new customers.²

Data Strength

Ensure proper foundational data setup to help drive the best return on investment (ROI). You can achieve this by doing the following:

• Connect your data sources: Ensure all your data is connected to your ads platform
  • Robust sitewide tagging: Implement robust sitewide tagging using the Google tag or Google Tag Manager to capture data that matters most to you. And upgrade to Google tag gateway for advertisers to run on your own first-party website infrastructure.
  • Your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts: Link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts to bid for Google Analytics conversions and audiences, including using Google Analytics for Firebase SDK for app conversions.
  • Your other offline sources: Connect your CRM or other offline sources to Data Manager for a comprehensive view of your customers. Use the Data Manager API to programmatically send data.
• Maximize your signals: Enrich your data foundation with more signals to optimize the accuracy and completeness of your data set
  • Send customer signals like user provided email addresses, transaction data, and ad interaction signals (Google Click ID, Session Attributes, URL parameters like GBRAID or WBRAID) to provide a more accurate view of your customers and the conversions you get.

With your data sources connected with enriched signals, you can now fully activate Google AI as your performance engine. Your robust data fuels predictive insights and supercharges your bidding and audience capabilities across Google's channels.

More on the foundations for durable ads performance

Bidding Strategy

Demand Gen Campaign offers a variety of conversion focused bidding strategies. These strategies primarily anchor on either driving efficiency or volume.

Choose the Right Bidding Strategy for Your Goals:

• Drive Efficiency: If you have a desired ROI for your Demand Gen campaign, then use a Target strategy.

  • tCPA bidding strategy: Goal is to achieve the most conversions at a set target CPA
  • tROAS bidding strategy: Goal is to achieve the most conversions at a set target ROAS

• Drive Volume: If your goal is maximizing your full campaign budget, use a Max strategy. 

  • Max Conversions Bidding: Goal is to achieve the most conversions within your budget
  • Max Conversion Value bidding: Goal is to achieve the most conversion value within your budget

• Drive Traffic or Consideration: For traffic goals, use click-based bidding that will require no conversion tracking set up. Click based bidding should not be used for conversion goals.

  • Target CPC: Aims to get as many clicks as possible at your set target cost-per-click (CPC)
  • Max Clicks: Aims to get you the most clicks possible within your budget

Use the Bid Strategy Report to help assess the performance of your bidding over time.

• This includes your bid strategy status and key performance metrics such as clicks, impressions, CTR, cost, conversions, etc. You can also add customized metrics based on preference.

Budget Setting

Google AI actively works to understand the best way to deliver ads to achieve your goals. This can take some time, and involves a degree of automated exploration in the auction market. The bidder will need time to observe the campaign over several days to pick up on time of day and day of week trends. Below is one of the most important factors for the learning period:

Set Sufficient Budgets: Google AI requires a "critical mass" of data to optimize. Adhering to budget and conversion thresholds prevents the campaign from getting stuck in an indefinite learning phase, which causes performance swings. Supporting a campaign with enough budget from Day 1 to win in your customers’ auction is critical to driving sustained performance.

Target campaigns such as tCPA and tROAS require a budget of greater than or equal to 10 times the CPA. For Max Conversions or Max Conversion Value campaigns, the recommended daily budget is at least $100.

• Conversion bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Conversions: We recommend at least $100 per day per campaign.
  • Target cost per action (tCPA): We recommend at least 10 times your tCPA.
• Value bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Conversion Value: We recommend at least $100 per day per campaign.
  • Target return on ad spend (tROAS): We recommend at least 10 times your CPA.
• Click bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Clicks: No minimum requirement.
  • Target CPC: No minimum requirement.

Campaign Structure

• Consolidate campaigns to maximize performance in machine learning models like Demand Gen that learn best from large data sets. Our model learns at the campaign level, so consolidation improves performance.
  • Create a single campaign for your business: Unless you have different marketing objectives, ROI targets, or bid strategies—it’s best to use a single campaign for your business. 
  • Combine audience themes in one ad group: Include similar audience themes in the same ad group (for example, combine ‘baseball’ + ‘football’ as ‘sports’). 
  • Budgeting based on conversion volume: Start with the campaign budget that allows you to get at least 50 conversions in the first 30 days to perform best. 
  • If an ad group sees sparse conversions (many days/weeks with high CPA or with fewer than 10 conversions in 6-8 weeks), merge it with another to improve AI performance. 
    • Why: Ad group consolidation can help broaden audience targeting without diluting the relevancy of your ads. By combining similar types of audiences into fewer ad groups, Google AI can gather more data and make better-informed bidding decisions, allowing it to better adapt to changes in user behavior, market conditions, and competitive dynamics. Your campaigns will continue to become more competitive and efficient over time.

Pro Tips:

1. Structure your campaign with a dedicated ad group for Remarketing/Retention to target these users with tailored creatives. This enhances signals for campaigns to find and target potential customers.
2. Consolidate unless you need specific creatives for a specific audience, or strict budget control between Prospecting and Remarketing.