Add product feeds to your Demand Gen campaigns
Capturing engagement and action across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, Demand Gen campaigns are ideal for advertisers who want to serve visually-appealing, multi-format ads on Google’s most impactful surfaces. Demand Gen campaigns help advertisers find and convert consumers with immersive, relevant, and visual creatives that grab attention and spur action in the right moment. Product feeds turn Demand Gen campaigns into a virtual storefront, driving consideration and purchase.
If you’re a retailer, you may have a product catalog that you source when it comes to your advertising. A Google Merchant Center product feed is a great place to store that product catalog because it helps millions of people discover, explore, and buy products.
Use product feeds with Demand Gen to turn your image or video ads into a virtual storefront. With this creative type, you can show browsable product imagery, and inspire customers to visit your website to learn more about your business or make a purchase.
- On average, advertisers see 33% more conversions at a similar cost per action (CPA) by adding product feeds to Demand Gen campaigns.
- On average, advertisers see 18% more clicks at a similar cost by adding product feeds to Demand Gen campaigns with shallow conversions.
Benefits
- Performance: Promote the right products to the right audience at the right moment. Google machine learning will anticipate a user's interests and intent to automatically show relevant products, helping to meet your max conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS goal.
- Simplicity: Instead of creating an ad for each item you promote, connect your Google Merchant Center feed to a new Demand Gen campaign. Images and product details in your product feed will be used as a large set of creatives for ads that are automatically surfaced to potential customers.
- Flexibility: Pair your tailored products with specific audience segments, while leveraging image and video formats (short + long form) to promote your products.
Prerequisites
- Set up your account for Google Merchant Center. Learn more on how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
- Create a feed for your Google Merchant Center account. Learn more about feeds and product data specifications. New product feeds can take up to 3 days to approve, so take this into account when planning your campaigns.
- Learn how to link your Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads accounts.
- In Google Merchant Center, ensure that you enable “Shopping ads” as a marketing method.
- We recommend that your products are represented with square images (1:1) to ensure that your product ads receive the best coverage possible. Images within a 0.6-1.4 ratio will receive sufficient coverage.
- Familiarize yourself with the Google Ads policies, Shopping ads policies, and product feeds for Demand Gen policies.
- Learn more about troubleshooting your product feed.
Best practices
Use these best practices for optimal results for your prospecting or remarketing campaigns with product feeds Prospecting campaigns will help you achieve a range of objectives, like generating website traffic, engagements, and sales. Remarketing campaigns typically focus on specific goals.
Location / Region targeting |
If your Google Merchant Center feed is configured to target multiple regions but you would like to target a subset of these regions in your campaign, select the target locations during campaign construction or campaign settings. During serving time, Demand Gen will match products and users from the targeted country. Note, make sure that your campaign location/region targeting matches the locations you set for your products in your Google Merchant Center account. |
Product groups |
When choosing which products to include in your campaign, it’s important to include enough products so that the system can effectively personalize the ads to each user. In general, we recommend including as many products as possible that are relevant and a good match for your selected audience and other assets you added to the campaign. Include at least 4 eligible products for the campaign to work properly, and we recommend at least 50 products for best results. |
Product filtering |
Product filtering during campaign construction only supports one filter method such as “product ID” or “product type”, and supports OR logic during product selection. Use post construction filtering to add subdivisions or exclusions to your existing product filters (AND logic). For example, if you filtered by product type during campaign construction but want to filter by product type AND a specific custom label, you can add the custom label subdivision in post construction filtering. |
Bids and budgets |
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Creatives |
Assets for product feed ads are primarily populated from your Google Merchant Center catalog. You will still need to add the following ad details:
Tip: We recommend setting up both an image and products ad and a video and products ad for best performance and full format / placement coverage. |
Google Merchant Center |
We recommend that your products are represented with square images (1:1) to ensure that your product ads receive the best coverage possible. Images within a 0.6-1.4 ratio will receive sufficient coverage. |
Product Click Tracking |
Track your product performance by using valuetrack parameters such as |
Instructions
Set up your campaign
Step 1 of 5: Create a new campaign or add your product feed to an existing campaign
Create a new campaign
You can duplicate, delete, and create a new campaign (or ad group) from the navigation menu on the left.
- Click on the 3-dot menu
next to “Campaign” in the navigation menu and click Add new campaign.
- Add the campaign name.
- Click on the toggle to “Run a product feed campaign” and select your Google Merchant Center account.
- Note: If your Google Merchant Center account doesn’t appear, make sure you meet all the prerequisites above.
next to “Campaign” in the navigation menu and click Add new campaign.Add your product feed to an existing campaign
- In your Google Ads account, click on your existing Demand Gen campaign.
- Click the pencil icon
and then click Edit campaign.
- If you have a Merchant Center feed, there should be a Product feeds tab under the campaign name.
- If the Product feeds tab doesn’t appear, make sure you meet all the prerequisites above.
- You can select specific products or choose to include your entire feed into the campaign.
- Note: Product filtering during campaign construction only supports one filter types such as “product ID” or “product type”, and OR logic during product selection. Use post construction filtering to add subdivisions, exclusions, or additional filter types to your existing filters (this uses AND logic).
- Click Save all changes.
- Follow steps 4 and 5 to select product filters and create your ads.
Step 2 of 5: 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, and Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
Then, you’ll select your conversion goals based on that advertising goal.
Step 3 of 5: Set up bidding, budget, and other settings
Your budget influences how often your ads show and how prominently they’re featured. Your bidding determines the way your budget is spent. Learn more about campaign budgets and bidding.
- Select location targeting and languages.
- Note: If your feed is configured to target multiple regions but you would like to target subset of these regions in your campaign, select the target locations during campaign construction or campaign settings. During serving time, Demand Gen will match products and users from the targeted country.
- Choose your bid strategy. Your bid strategy is how you optimize bids to meet your advertising goals. You can choose between:
- Enter your campaign budget. You can choose a daily budget (the average amount you want to spend each day, which we recommend to be 15x your expected daily average CPA).
- Set a start date and end date for your campaign. This is required if you use a campaign total budget.
- (Optional) Make your selections for devices, campaign URLs, and other additional settings.
Step 4 of 5: 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 add content exclusions to your campaigns, so that you can make sure your ads don’t run next to sensitive content. Learn more about targeting.
- Product filters: You can choose to select a set of pre-defined product group filters that are part of your Merchant Center product feed. By default, all products in your Merchant Center feed will be shown with your video ads. To use specific products, select “Specific Products” and search for the ones you want to include. You can filter by brand, product ID, condition, product type, or create a custom filter to select a custom group of products. Keep in mind, it may take some time for changes you make in Google Merchant Center and in the Google Ads UI to reflect in the campaign.
- Note: In general, we recommend including as many products as possible that are relevant and a good match for your selected audience and other assets you added to the campaign. Include at least 4 eligible products for the campaign to work properly, and we recommend at least 50 products for best results.
- Select location targeting and languages for the ad group.
- Choose an existing audience by searching for any existing custom segments, your data segments, lookalike segments, and/or selecting specific interests or detailed demographic information. Or create a new audience in the ad-group-level audience builder.
- Keep or deselect optimized targeting. It’s recommended that you use optimized targeting for optimal campaign performance.
- Exclude specific audiences and placements.
- Make demographic selections to focus only on specific demographic segments.
Step 5 of 5: Create your ads
You will create your ads at the ad-group level. So to create a new ad, select New ad in the drop-down menu under the ad group you want to create the ad for.
Note: Demand Gen product feed campaigns dynamically serve product ads from your Google Merchant Center. The product ads will automatically render in a carousel format.
We recommend setting up both an image and products ad and a video and products ad for best performance and full format / placement coverage.
- Choose which type of ad to create:
- Image and products ad (recommended): Add images with your product ads. The images can appear as an alternative or a fallback when product details can't be shown and can help your ads serve to more users.
- Video and products ad (recommended): Add videos with your product ads to expand your reach to valuable YouTube placements with rich and shoppable ad formats. Upload videos in 3 aspect ratios (landscape, square and vertical) to optimize for serving. A vertical video will enable your ad to serve on YouTube Shorts for better reach.
- Products only ad: Show ads that only showcase your products.
- Insert the ad name.
- (Image and products ad) Add images for your product ads. The images will appear as an alternative or a fallback when product details can't be shown and can help your ads serve to more users. Make sure to follow the image aspect ratio requirements below:
- Square logo (1:1)
- Recommended: 1200 x 1200
- Min. required: 128 x 128
- Max file size: 5120 KB
- Note: Selected images may be auto-cropped. You can always edit afterwards.
- Square logo (1:1)
- (Video and products ad) Add up to 5 videos. Videos will expand your reach to valuable YouTube placements with rich and shoppable ad formats. Upload videos in 3 aspect ratios (landscape, square and vertical) to optimize for serving. A vertical video will showcase your ad on YouTube Shorts for better reach.
- Add up to 1 logo.
- Include your text assets. If you selected the products only ad, you can only add 1 headline, 1 description, and 1 business name.
- Add your URL and path fields. The "Path" fields are part of your display URL and help viewers understand what to expect from your landing page. Each path can be up to 15 characters each.
- Review your campaign by clicking Go to review.
Optional Step: Post Construction Filtering
Post construction filtering via the product groups tab allows you to add subdivisions and exclusions (using AND logic) to your existing product filters. For example, if you filtered by product type during campaign construction but want to filter by product type AND a specific custom label, you can add the custom label subdivision in post construction filtering.
- After your Demand Gen campaign is published, navigate the Ad groups tab. In the Ad groups tab, select product groups.
- Hover over an existing product group and select the plus sign to add a subdivision. Select a subdivision of products that you want to combine with the existing product group (this uses AND logic), or exclude from the existing product group. Save the selection of your choice.
- To exclude a product group, first save the selection, then change the “Automatic” value to “Excluded” once you’re back in the product groups tab.
Pausing your product feed
Note: Pausing your product feed may negatively impact performance.
- In your Google Ads account, click on your existing Demand Gen campaign.
- Click the pencil icon
- If you have a Merchant Center feed linked to your campaign, there will be a Product feeds toggle under the campaign name. Click the toggle to pause your product feed.
