After nearly 20 years, YouTube continues to reinvent the user experience, and has hit 122 million global daily users, with a monthly active audience of 2.49 billion spanning across every demographic and the majority of territories across the world. 

Google Demand Gen is a campaign type that is designed to crack open the immersive, relevant, and visual creatives that sit across this ecosystem. YouTube Shorts in particular has provided the scale and inventory to challenge rival short-form video providers, opening up a huge channel that traditional Google Ads buyers are wrestling to extract value from but social buyers have all the tools to take advantage of. 

Google recently showcased commitment to developing automated AI-driven solutions. During Google Marketing Live 2024 the platform shared content that emphasized the need for brands to harness solutions that require your goal, assets, audience and budget to find the most effective ad combinations. Powering these intelligent solutions in real time with the optimum input for each requirement to find competitive advantage and campaign performance is becoming increasingly complex. 

To help performance marketers meet these complex demands, Smartly have worked with a series of advertisers to grow Google Demand Gen into an integral part of their digital marketing mix. 

“Smartly easily extended our short-form video from Paid Social onto Google Demand Gen. Using Google Demand Gen as a ‘social complement’, we uncovered a new channel that we can continue to use as part of our always on campaign structure.” - Senior Director, Head of Growth Marketing, Noom

Below are 3 steps we have learnt along the way to unlock the massive potential of this channel: 

Step 1. Consolidate Media Buying‍

Google Ads and social campaigns are frequently bought by different teams, through different technologies. Consolidating the buying with a single source empowers teams with a single view of campaign performance, offering the opportunity to recreate personas, build advanced targeting strategies, and share creative routes that maximize campaign performance.

Step 2. Deliver Intelligent Creative

Creative fatigue is an active and pesky challenge across Google Demand Gen campaigns that deliver reach and frequency rapidly. To truly “stop the scroll” performance marketing teams need the ability to increase engagement propensity through higher-scaled creative variations that enable a thoughtful and personalized advertising experience. Bringing in relevant product data, advanced templating, Gen AI assists and asset level reporting empowers teams with a more  intelligent strategy and solution. 

‍Step 3. Develop a Structured Testing Plan

Opening up a new channel on the scale of Google Demand Gen requires a considered approach to testing. Building out campaigns at scale to accommodate different goals, audiences, and budgets gives the platform the opportunity to optimize. Once live, applying automated rules, running A/B testing and respecting algorithm learning periods will result in high performance.

If you are interested in learning more about how Smartly can help you unlock Google Demand Gen performance either speak to your Smartly representative or request a demo.