Google's Demand Gen campaigns support inventory feeds

This past June, Google released Demand Gen campaigns to help businesses generate interest and encourage action while nurturing a vast audience on YouTube and Google. Discovery ads upgrades will roll out starting this week through early 2024.

What is Demand Gen? 

Google's new Demand Gen is an AI-powered campaign that helps advertisers reach and convert new customers through visually engaging ad content on YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Discover, and Gmail. Demand Gen campaigns are an upgrade to Discovery campaigns, and they offer several new features and benefits, including:

• More creative formats: Demand Gen campaigns support a more comprehensive range of creative formats than Discovery campaigns, including regular YouTube videos, Shorts, product feeds, and carousels. A new workflow will allow for ad previews across Google surfaces and the ability to optimize campaigns with A/B experimentation. 
• Improved audience targeting: Demand Gen campaigns use machine learning to target potential customers based on interests, demographics, and online behavior. Additionally, lookalike segments allow advertisers to sync first-party data, and Google will match it with their audience intent and interest signals. 
• More efficient bidding: Demand Gen campaigns use Google's Smart Bidding technology to optimize bids for conversions automatically. Advertisers can choose between conversions, value-based bidding strategies, or site visits and actions with Maximize Clicks bidding. 

Photo posted by Tobias Maurer, Group Product Manager, Google, Demand Gen campaigns

Demand Gen plus inventory feeds

Businesses with inventory feeds, especially brick-and-mortar retailers, have a unique opportunity to take their in-store inventory and promote it with Demand Gen ads, creating a virtual storefront for potential customers to discover, learn, and purchase with your business. 

The inventory feed is a creative type that is browsable to the user, showing them product imagery and details and encouraging them to learn more about your business and purchase your products. 

Requirements before running a Demand Gen with an inventory campaign 

• Inventory feed set up and connected via Merchant Center 
• Merchant Center linked to Google Ads account 
• "Shopping Ads" enabled as a destination in Google Merchant Center
• Note: Demand Gen campaigns currently do not support Vehicle Feeds. 

Running a Demand Gen with an inventory campaign 

You will go through the process of creating a campaign within Demand Gen. Turn on the toggle to "Run a product feed campaign" and then select your Google Merchant Center account. Once that is created, you will complete the campaign setup, including goal, bidding, budget, and more. Here is a step-by-step guide from Google support. 

Why we care about Demand Gen with inventory feed campaigns 

Demand Gen campaigns can amplify your brand with the power of your inventory, allowing you to reach a large audience while delivering low-funnel content, aka your inventory. Use product feeds to turn your image or video ads into a virtual store, allowing customers to browse your products and visit your website.

Benefits:

1. Google's machine learning helps display products to the right audience at the right time, thus improving conversion rates. 
2. Simplify advertising by automatically using product details from inventory feeds.
3. Target specific audiences with the power of your first-party data. 

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