Create a Demand Gen campaign

 

Learning and review periods

After you make a change to your bid strategy, there may be minor performance fluctuations as Google Ads optimises your bids. To indicate this, your bid strategy status may be labelled as 'Learning'. You can hover over the status to learn why your bid strategy has the 'Learning' status. It’s recommended that you allow two weeks for the 'Learning' period to elapse before making bidding changes.

As a good general rule, wait 50 conversions before making changes to your campaign.

Give ads at least 24 hours to be reviewed and approved.

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Instructions

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the 'Appearance' icon and select Use previous design. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.

Step 1 of 6: Create a new campaign

You can duplicate, delete and create a new campaign or ad group from the left-hand navigation menu.

1. In your Google Ads account, click the create button and select Campaign from the list.
2. Add the campaign name.
3. If you’re using product feeds to show your products in your ads, click on the toggle to 'Run a product feed campaign'.

Note: If you select 'Run a product feed campaign', you'll only be able to create product ads in the campaign.

Create a new campaign

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Step 2 of 6: Choose an advertising goal

When creating a Demand Gen campaign in your Google Ads account, you’ll select one of these advertising goals: Sales, Website traffic, Product and brand consideration or Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.

Note: The goal that you select should align with what you want to achieve with your campaign. For example, if you want to encourage people to visit your website, you may want to select Website traffic.

Then, you’ll select your conversion goals based on that advertising goal.

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Step 3 of 6: Set up campaign-level targeting

Device targeting

Device targeting allows you to target your ads to people based on the device that they're using. Learn more About device targeting.

For Demand Gen campaigns, device targeting can be set at the campaign level.

In the 'Devices' section, you can either choose to show your ads on all eligible devices or set specific targeting for devices. Showing ads on all devices can help you expand your reach. If you want to focus your reach on specific devices, you can choose to target computers, mobile phones, tablets or TV screens.

If you select mobile phones and tablets, under 'Advanced targeting for mobile phones and tablets', you can choose all or specific operating systems, device models and networks to target.

Language and location targeting

To help ensure that your ads reach the customers that you want, you can include the languages that your customers speak and the locations that you want to target. Learn more about location and language targeting.

By default, targeting is set at ad-group level to better optimise your ads’ performance. Language defaults to 'All languages' and location is set to 'All locations'. Changing targeting to the campaign level is only recommended if you need to target a radius around a location.

Follow the steps below to enable campaign-level language and location targeting:

1. Navigate to the bottom of the page and look for the 'Location and language' section.
2. Toggle the 'Enable campaign-level location and language targeting' switch. This will allow you to set the location at campaign level.
3. Select Advanced search to open the map interface. Here, you'll also be able to target by radius of your chosen location.

Note: You won’t be able to change the language and location targeting back to ad-group level after publishing the campaign. Language and location can only be defined at campaign level or ad-group level.

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Step 4 of 6: Set up bidding and budget

Your budget influences how often your ads are shown and how prominently they are featured.

Your bidding determines the way your budget is spent. Learn more about campaign budgets and bidding.

1. Choose your bid strategy. Your bid strategy is how you optimise bids to meet your advertising goals. You can choose between:
   • Maximise clicks
   • Target return on ad spend (TROAS) bidding
   • Target cost per action (CPA)
   • Maximise conversions
2. Enter your campaign budget. You can choose a daily budget or the average amount that you want to spend each day, which we recommend to be 15x your expected daily average CPA.
3. Set a start date and end date for your campaign. This is required if you use a campaign total budget.

Note: If your campaign spends the budget fully, either reaching the daily limit for daily budgets or the average per-day budget for campaign total budgets, think about increasing your budget to scale your success. If not, adjust your targeting, bidding and ads to check if your campaign performs better.

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Step 5 of 6: Ad-group updates – reach people searching for your brand or business

With audience targeting, you can reach new and relevant audiences that are likely to convert, people in a certain location, those who speak a specific language, those with a particular interest and people similar to customers of your products or services. You can also define your location and language at ad-group level if you did not already at campaign level.

1. Choose an existing audience by searching for any existing custom segments, your data segments or lookalike segments, or by selecting specific interests or detailed demographic information. You can also create a new audience in the ad-group level Audience builder.

2. Keep or deselect optimised targeting. It’s recommended that you use optimised targeting for optimal campaign performance.
   • Note: When optimised targeting is enabled, demographic expansion will also take effect. This means optimised targeting may target beyond your selected demographic signals, like age, gender, household income and parental status, to help drive enhanced campaign performance. Advertisers with sensitive content will still comply with the age restrictions.
3. Exclude specific audiences, such as your data segments or lookalike segments, based on your audience strategy.

4. Make demographic selections to focus only on specific demographic segments.

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Step 6 of 6: Create your ads

You'll create your ads at ad-group level. To create a new ad, select New ad in the drop-down menu under the ad group that you want to create the ad for.

1. You will be able to choose between:
   • Video ads: An ad with a single video

Create a video ad with Video Builder

To create a new video with the Video Builder in the Media Picker, follow these steps:

1. While creating an ad, click + Videos on the 'Videos' card.
2. On the 'Choose YouTube videos to use in your ad' window, click the Create button.
3. From the wide variety of templates available, select the best suited template and click Use template.
4. Create assets for each scene of your video. Enter desired text in the text bar and click Next.
5. Click +Image and select images for the scene.
6. Crop the image as required and click Select.
7. Click Save.
8. To add more scenes to the video, click Next and repeat steps 4–7.
9. From the right-hand-side 'Video settings' panel, adjust the settings as required. Learn more about Adjusting the Video settings.
10. Click Continue to upload.
11. Enter the video name in the 'Video name' text bar.
12. Select which channel you want to upload your video to:
    • Your video ad storage channel, created by YouTube
    • Your own channel
13. Click Preview high-quality video from the announcement box to preview the high-quality version of your video.
14. Click Upload video.
15. From the 'Asset library', select the video and click Save.
16. Continue creating your ad.

Adjusting the Video settings

Click on the < button to expand the 'Video settings' panel. Adjust the settings to best suit your video’s requirements.

• Colours: Select the colour that you want to display in the background of the video.
• Font: Select the font family and font weight for your scene text.
• Music: Select from the list of available music to play in the background of your video.
• Voice-over: Adjust the voice-over-messages setting to create a voice-over for your video. Learn more about adding voice-over to your video.

• Image ads: An ad with a single image

• Carousel ads: An ad with multiple images in a carousel

2. Insert ad name.
3. Select or add media assets. Learn more about Demand Gen campaign ad asset specifications.
4. Add up to five logos.
5. Include your text assets. Learn more about Demand Gen campaign ad asset specifications.
6. Use ad strength rules to set your ad up for success.

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Related links

• Demand Gen campaign asset specs and best practices
• Demand Gen campaign asset quality and policy requirements
• About Demand Gen campaigns
• Demand Gen campaigns