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 at the right moment. Product feeds turn Demand Gen campaigns into a virtual shopfront, driving consideration and purchases.
If you’re a retailer, you may have a product catalogue that you source for your advertising. A Google Merchant Center product feed is a great place to store that product catalogue 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 shopfront. 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
- 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 destination.
- 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.
- Familiarise 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 through campaign settings. During serving time, Demand Gen will match products and users from the targeted country. Note that you should make sure your campaign location/region targeting matches the locations that 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 that you added to the campaign. Include at least four 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 |
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Creatives |
Assets for product feed ads are primarily populated from your Google Merchant Center catalogue. 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 coverage of formats and placements. |
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. |
Learn more about inspiring action on Google's personalised feeds with Demand Gen campaigns.
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 you can't see your Google Merchant Center account, make sure that you meet all the above prerequisites.
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 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 isn't shown, make sure that you meet all the above prerequisites.
- You can select specific products or choose to include your entire feed in the campaign.
- 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 a subset of these regions in your campaign, select the target locations during campaign construction or through 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 optimise bids to meet your advertising goals. You can choose between:
- Enter your campaign budget. You can choose a daily budget (the average amount that 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 that 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 and product type or create a custom filter to select a custom group of products. Bear in mind, it may take some time for changes that 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 that 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 to each user.
- 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 optimised targeting. It’s recommended that you use optimised 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 that 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 be automatically rendered 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 coverage of formats and placements.
- Choose which type of ad to create:
- Image and products ad (recommended): Add images for your product ads. The images can appear as an alternative or fallback when product details can't be shown and can help your ads serve to more users.
- Video and products ad (recommended): Add videos for 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 optimise ads 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 fallback when product details can't be shown and can help your ads serve to more users. Be 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 optimise ads 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 a products-only ad, you can only add one headline, one description and one 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.
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.
