The Demand Gen Audience Strategy Playbook: Why Google Ads’ Latest Campaign Type Lives Up to the Hype
When Google announced they were automatically upgrading all Video Action campaigns to Demand Gen as of July, we heard the collective groan from marketers everywhere. Another "automatic upgrade" that nobody asked for? Not quite!
Demand Gen is a powerhouse campaign type to add to your Google Ads account. It combines Google's most sophisticated audience targeting capabilities with their most visual, engaging ad formats.
At Revel, we don't get excited about shiny new features just because they're new. We get excited when they solve real problems. And Demand Gen is here to do just that!
Why Demand Gen Matters Right Now
Let's start with the obvious: YouTube isn't “just a video platform” anymore. For the past two years, YouTube has been the number one streaming platform by watch time in the US. When people say they're "watching TV," more and more mean YouTube. It's become a daily touchpoint across devices for potential customers, which means it's where your audience actually lives.
Google has built their most powerful audience solutions directly into this campaign type, creating opportunities to reach users throughout their entire buying journey—not just when they're ready to convert.
The real magic happens when you combine Google's most visual channels with audience solutions that actually understand user behavior across the entire Google ecosystem. Since users are signed in across devices on Google-owned networks (YouTube, Gmail, Discover), the data quality and targeting precision is unlike anything else in the market.
The Complete Demand Gen Audience Toolkit
First Party Segments: Your Customer Data, Supercharged
Google’s Customer Match provides the most successful ways to reach first party segments like subscribed users and past buyers across Google's network. Since users are usually signed in across devices, your customer data becomes incredibly powerful for reaching the right people at the right time.
The beauty of first party segments in Demand Gen is the ability to reach brand-aware users wherever they are in the Google ecosystem—watching YouTube, checking Gmail, or browsing Discover. It's your customer data working harder across more touchpoints.
YouTube Video Viewers: The Upper Funnel Power Move
Pair a YouTube Video Views objective with a Demand Gen campaign to target an audience who viewed at the upper funnel step. This approach lets you reach prospects at scale, then keep them engaged as they move through their buying journey.
The key is thinking about video viewers as warm prospects rather than cold traffic. Hitting a cold audience with a views objective is an extremely cost-effective way to warm up users and ask them to take action or visit your site.
Google's Built-In Audiences: Affinity, In-Market, Life Events & Detailed Demographics
Google Ads has pre-built affinity, in-market users, life event & detailed demographic audiences ready to apply in Demand Gen campaigns alongside more customized solutions.
Affinity audiences let you tap into long-term interests and lifestyle-based segments to round out audience personas. In-market segments reach users that Google has identified as "ready to purchase" in a particular category.
Life milestone segments group users by recent life events like buying a home, getting married, or having a baby. For certain verticals, these can be incredibly powerful timing-based targeting opportunities that competitors often overlook.
Detailed demographics allow you target users based on their employment status, marital status, parental status, education & employment.
Custom Segments: Search Intent Meets Visual Advertising
This is where Demand Gen gets really interesting, and highly customizable. Custom segments allow targeting based on what users have searched for and/or websites they have visited, essentially bringing search intent into display and video advertising.
The strategy? Target non-brand keywords higher in the funnel when people start researching related to a need. It's cheaper than trying to serve them search ads, and more effective at introducing a solution in a way that feels natural while they're in a planning or research phase.
You can also target competitors this way, reaching users who are actively searching for alternative solutions. Just remember to pair custom segment development with data-driven keyword research through tools like Google's Keyword Planner and SEMRush to ensure the keywords have enough volume and intent to serve against larger segments.
Lookalike Segments: Google's Answer to Social Media Targeting
When similar audiences were sunset in May 2023, social platforms had a clear advantage in lookalike audience targeting over Google—until Demand Gen launched. This is the only campaign type in Google that unlocks these capabilities.
Lookalike audiences allow advertisers to reach segments that Google has identified as similar to your first party seed audiences. The best lookalike strategy involves balancing the size of seed audiences with the intent level or value that audience has to your business.
For example, past purchasers are a stronger seed than email signups, but if the purchase list is small, it's worth providing both. Google's algorithm needs enough data to work with, but it also needs quality signals to find the right lookalikes.
Demographic Layers: Precision Without Limitation
Demographics can be layered on all of the audience types above to narrow down segments even further based on your target personas.
Smart Optimization Strategies
The Optimized Targeting Dilemma
Optimized targeting is a setting that allows Google to reach beyond your defined segments to users it thinks will take the desired campaign action. While this sounds appealing, we always recommend building up data without optimized targeting initially, and only enabling it once you have strong conversion signals to guide the algorithm. You need data to understand who from your defined audiences performs best to inform how best to expand beyond your selected segments.
Google also added the option to add age and gender guardrails on optimized targeting, which we recommend if your brand has clearly defined age and gender audiences.
Data-Driven Adjustments
The performance data around audience segments allows for strategic adjustments throughout a campaign flight based on engagement and conversion behavior. You can see precisely how different segments are driving performance compared to any traffic coming through optimized targeting.
This segment-level visibility is not accessible across all social channels, and is definitely a strong advantage of Demand Gen. This enables surgical optimization rather than trust in the algorithm to only serve to top performers.
Getting Started with Demand Gen
The beauty of Demand Gen is that it allows you to reach users at any part of their buyer journey—which is far from linear in today's digital landscape.
Consider linking product data feeds to make YouTube and Demand Gen shoppable, so users who are ready to purchase immediately can do so. Customers today move seamlessly and unpredictably across channels and behaviors, so product listings help meet them where they are on their many paths from discovery to conversion.
The Bottom Line
Demand Gen represents Google's acknowledgment that modern customer journeys don't follow neat, linear paths. This campaign type finally gives advertisers the tools to meet customers across all of Google’s visual touchpoints to drive awareness, consideration, and purchase. Agencies that embrace the full extent of Demand Gen's audience capabilities now will have a significant advantage.
Ready to test Demand Gen audience strategies? Reach out to your Revel team to get started today!
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This blog was edited with the help of Claude AI.