What Are Demand Gen Campaigns And When Should You Use Them

Google Ads has never stood still, and over the past couple of years, one of the most significant additions to the platform has been Demand Gen campaigns. For many advertisers, the question is not just what Demand Gen campaigns are, but whether they actually deserve a place in their paid media strategy. The honest answer is that they can be incredibly powerful in the right context, and equally wasteful if used without a clear purpose. Understanding what they are, how they work, and when to deploy them is the difference between a campaign that builds real momentum and one that quietly drains your budget.

What Are Demand Gen Campaigns?

Demand Gen campaigns are a Google Ads campaign type designed to drive awareness and consideration amongst audiences who are not yet actively searching for your product or service. They serve visually rich ads across YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Google Discover, and Gmail, all from a single campaign structure. Think of it as Google's answer to the kind of scroll-stopping, interest-based advertising that platforms like Meta have traditionally dominated.

Where Search campaigns intercept intent, Demand Gen campaigns are designed to create it. They reach people earlier in the buying journey, at the point where someone might not even know they have a problem worth solving yet, let alone be searching for a solution. Google's machine learning handles the placement and targeting decisions, using signals from user behaviour across its ecosystem to serve your ads to people it believes are most likely to engage and convert.

Demand Gen replaced the older Discovery campaign format in 2023, bringing with it expanded placements, improved creative options, and stronger audience controls. If you were previously running Discovery campaigns, Demand Gen is its more capable successor.

How Demand Gen Campaigns Actually Work

At its core, a Demand Gen campaign runs on audience-first targeting rather than keyword-based matching. You define who you want to reach using a combination of Google's audience segments, your own first-party data, custom audiences built from search intent signals, and lookalike audiences generated from your existing customer lists. Google then takes those parameters and determines where and when to serve your ads across its visual channels.

Creative assets are central to performance here. Unlike Search campaigns where a compelling headline does most of the heavy lifting, Demand Gen campaigns live or die on the quality of the visual creative. You can use single images, carousels, and video assets within the same campaign, giving the algorithm a range of formats to test and optimise against. The stronger and more varied your creative library, the more effectively the campaign can find what resonates with different audience segments.

Bidding is typically focused on either maximising conversions or targeting a specific cost per action, depending on your campaign objectives. Google recommends having robust conversion tracking in place before launching, as the algorithm needs reliable signals to optimise effectively.

When Should You Use Demand Gen Campaigns?

This is the question that matters most, and the answer requires some honest reflection about where your business actually is in its growth journey.

Demand Gen campaigns make the most sense when you are trying to reach audiences who do not yet know your brand exists or have not yet considered your category as a solution to their needs. If you are launching a new product, entering a new market, or operating in a space where search volumes are low because awareness of the problem itself is limited, Demand Gen can be a genuinely strategic tool for building that pipeline of future intent.

They also work well as a complement to existing Search and Performance Max campaigns. If your Search campaigns are already capturing available demand effectively, Demand Gen can work upstream to grow the pool of people who will eventually enter that funnel. A business running strong Search activity alongside a well-structured Demand Gen campaign is, in effect, both harvesting existing demand and seeding new demand at the same time.

Retargeting is another area where Demand Gen campaigns can add real value. Using your own customer data or website visitor audiences, you can serve visually engaging ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand but have not yet converted. Given the placements available, including YouTube pre-roll and in-feed ads on Discover, these campaigns can keep your brand visible in a way that feels natural rather than intrusive.

When Demand Gen Is Not The Right Choice

It is just as important to understand when Demand Gen campaigns are not the right tool. If your primary goal is to capture people who are already searching for what you offer and your budget is limited, investing that spend into Search or Shopping campaigns will almost certainly deliver stronger returns in the short term. Demand Gen is not a direct response vehicle in the traditional sense, and expecting it to behave like one leads to disappointment.

Businesses with very small budgets also tend to struggle with Demand Gen campaigns. The algorithm needs sufficient data and spend to optimise properly, and under-funded campaigns rarely give the machine learning enough room to find its feet. If your overall Google Ads budget is modest, focus on capturing existing intent first and consider Demand Gen once you have a stronger foundation in place.

Getting The Most From Your Demand Gen Campaigns

If you decide that Demand Gen is the right fit for your objectives, a few principles will put you in a much stronger position from the outset. Invest seriously in your creative assets, particularly video. YouTube placements reward high-quality, engaging content and poor creative will undermine even the best audience strategy. Make sure your conversion tracking is verified and accurate before you launch, as the algorithm is entirely dependent on the quality of the signals you feed it. Build out a range of audience layers, including first-party data, custom intent audiences, and lookalikes, so the campaign has genuine depth to work with.

Give the campaign time to learn. Demand Gen campaigns, like most Google Ads campaign types that rely on machine learning, need a period of optimisation before performance stabilises. Rushing to make bid or audience changes in the first couple of weeks tends to reset the learning phase and delay results.

Final Thoughts

Demand Gen campaigns represent a genuinely exciting evolution in what Google Ads can do for businesses willing to think beyond pure direct response. They are built for a specific purpose, reaching and influencing audiences before they enter the search funnel, and when used with that purpose in mind, they can play a powerful role in a broader paid media strategy. The key is knowing what you are trying to achieve, ensuring your fundamentals are in place, and giving the campaign the creative quality and time it needs to perform. Used correctly, Demand Gen campaigns are not just an awareness play; they are how forward-thinking advertisers build the pipeline that powers long-term growth.