Use a product feed to show your products in 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.

 


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

  1. Set up your account for Google Merchant Center. Learn more on how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
  2. 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.
  3. Learn how to link your Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads accounts.
  4. In Google Merchant Center, ensure that you enable “Shopping ads” as a destination.
  5. 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.
  6. Familiarize yourself with the Google Ads policies, Shopping ads policies, and product feeds for Demand Gen policies.
  7. 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

Include as many products as possible that are relevant and are a good match for your selected audiences 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.

Tip: If your product selection is too narrow, it could impact the ability to serve the most relevant product for each user.

Bids and budgets

  • If you're reporting conversion values, use the target return on ad spend (tROAS) bidding strategy. tROAS provides automated, real-time bidding for you to hit your target ROAS, by analyzing your conversion values and using them to predict future conversions and associated values.
  • Benchmark your KPIs against your social channels, as Demand Gen ads run on feed-based ad placements with social-like ad formats.
  • Recommended daily budget is 10 times the Target CPA, or expected CPA, or at least $100 USD to $500 USD per day, whichever is higher.
Tip: Just like standard Demand Gen campaigns, allow 1–2 weeks without making bid/budget changes for your campaign to ramp up.

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:
  • (Recommended) Image and products ad: 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.
  • (Recommended) Video and products ad: Add videos with your product ads to expand your reach on YouTube placements that showcase 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, which averages more than 50 billion daily views.
  • Ad headline and description: Use your ad-level headline and description to show your storefront or overall offering. Note: You're only able to use one headline and description.
    • Example: “Free shipping on all products” or “10% off storewide”.

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

  • Make sure the product specifications are accurate in your feed.
  • Make sure your product feed has items available for the countries that you’re targeting. Product availability for your campaign is based on the settings in your product feed.
  • (Recommended) Use the Google Merchant Center attribute short title [short_title] to power your thumb-stopping product ads.
    • Use quick and snappy titles, which are usually less than 65 characters, that can attract user attention as they browse.
    • Avoid attributes that are specific to product variants, like sizes or gender.
  • Use the item_group_id attribute for large merchant feeds that have identical or similar items. This attribute allows you to group product variants in your feed, so that we don’t show duplicate product images in your ad.
  • New product feeds can take up to 3 days to approve, so take this into account when planning your campaigns.

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.

Learn more about inspiring action on Google's personalized feeds with Demand Gen campaigns.

 


Instructions

Set up your campaign

Note: The instructions below are part of a new Google Ads user experience that will launch for all advertisers in 2024. If you’re still 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 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.

  1. Click on the 3-dot menu next to “Campaign” in the navigation menu and click Add new campaign.
  2. Add the campaign name.
  3. 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.

Add your product feed to an existing campaign

  1. In your Google Ads account, click on your existing Demand Gen campaign.
  2. Click the pencil icon Icon representing edit and then click Edit campaign.
  3. 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.
  4. You can select specific products or choose to include your entire feed into the campaign.
  5. Click Save all changes.
  6. 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.

The goal 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.

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.

  1. Select location targeting and languages.
    1. 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.
  2. Choose your bid strategy. Your bid strategy is how you optimize bids to meet your advertising goals. You can choose between:
    1. Target Cost Per Action (CPA)
    2. Maximize Conversions
  3. 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).
  4. Set a start date and end date for your campaign. This is required if you use a campaign total budget.
  5. (Optional) Make your selections for devices, campaign URLs, and other additional settings.
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.

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.

  1. 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: Include as many products as possible that are relevant and are a good match for your selected audiences and other assets you added to the campaign. Include at least 4 products for the campaign to work properly, and we recommend at least 50 products for best results. If your product selection is too narrow, it could impact the ability to serve the most relevant product for each user.
  2. Select location targeting and languages for the ad group. 
  3. 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.
  4. Keep or deselect optimized targeting. It’s recommended that you use optimized targeting for optimal campaign performance.
  5. Exclude specific audiences and placements.
  6. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. Insert the ad name.
  3. (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)
      1. Recommended: 1200 x 1200
      2. Min. required: 128 x 128
      3. Max file size: 5120 KB
    • Note: Selected images may be auto-cropped. You can always edit afterwards.
  4. (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.
  5. Add up to 1 logo.
  6. Include your text assets. If you selected the products only ad, you can only add 1 headline, 1 description, and 1 business name.
  7. 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.
  8. Review your campaign by clicking Go to review.

 


Pausing your product feed

Note: Pausing your product feed may negatively impact performance.

  1. In your Google Ads account, click on your existing Demand Gen campaign.
  2. Click the pencil icon Icon representing edit and then click Edit campaign.
  3. 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.

 


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