Fuel your next wave of growth on YouTube with Demand Gen

Redefine your performance strategy with YouTube, where AI-powered relevance and creative enhancements are fueling Demand Gen campaigns that convert.

With YouTube, you no longer have to choose between building your brand and driving performance. To fuel your next wave of growth, we’re introducing new Demand Gen features that bring trusted creators and AI-powered relevance together to help optimize creative, spark discovery and win new customers before they even begin searching.

Deliver more performant creative

We’re making it easier to build high-impact assets that scale across YouTube and other Google platforms more efficiently.

With just a few prompts, build more relevant and performant YouTube ads with Multimodal video creation in Asset Studio. Plus, advertisers can easily boost authentic creator partnership videos directly within the asset picker during Demand Gen campaign setup.

For retailers, serving dynamic product videos at scale will soon be even more seamless. Simply upload videos to Google Merchant Center to dynamically distribute them across Demand Gen campaigns based on real-time user interest.

Drive discovery across more surfaces, verticals and markets

Once your creative is ready, Demand Gen finds your audience where they engage the most. New Google Maps inventory connects your brand with people exploring their local areas. And, for those who prefer to shop online, we’re expanding checkout links to nine new markets, moving shoppers from discovery to purchase with fewer clicks. We’ve also expanded product feeds to more surfaces and verticals — including automotive — enabling brands to showcase their inventory with more rich data. In fact, advertisers with large product selections typically see a 33% increase in conversions when adopting product feeds in their Demand Gen campaigns. ¹

Measure what matters with precision

New campaign tools make getting started and optimizing even simpler. With AI-assisted Demand Gen campaign creation, you can combine settings from an existing campaign like Performance Max with the best practices that drive performance in Demand Gen — in just one click. Advertisers maintain transparency into all campaign settings and may adjust prior to publishing.

Plus, our end-to-end strategies make it easier than ever to prove your ROI. You can:

Use Campaign Type Attribution to isolate all conversions from Demand Gen, allowing for accurate performance comparisons against channels like paid social.
Measure how Demand Gen complements Performance Max with Uplift Experiments.
Leverage expanded, privacy-safe third-party integrations with partners like TransUnion to connect YouTube exposure to business outcomes across your entire media mix.

Google recently announced a major suite of new Demand Gen features at Google Marketing Live, heavily focusing on merging creator authenticity with AI-powered relevance. The update is explicitly designed to bridge the gap between high-funnel brand building and low-funnel conversions on YouTube and other visual Google surfaces.

If you are looking to scale your acquisition strategy before users even type a query into a search bar, here are the key pillars of the latest Demand Gen toolkit:

1. Scale Creative Production via AI & Creators

High-converting campaigns live and die by creative variety. The latest updates make asset generation and collaboration seamless:

Multimodal Video Creation in Asset Studio: You can now generate high-impact, multi-format YouTube ads from simple text prompts, allowing you to quickly test diverse visual angles.
Direct Creator Partnership Boosting: Inside the asset picker during Demand Gen setup, advertisers can directly pull and boost authentic creator partnership and affiliate videos, leveraging established creator trust instantly.
Automated Product Videos: For retailers, you can upload raw video assets into the Google Merchant Center, and Demand Gen will dynamically construct and distribute tailored product videos based on real-time viewer interests.

2. Expanded Discovery Surfaces & Frictionless Checkout

Demand Gen is moving past traditional boundaries to find high-intent audiences while they browse:

Google Maps Inventory: Demand Gen campaigns now place visual ads directly within Google Maps, capturing users while they explore local areas.
Vertical Expansion (Automated Automotive Feeds): Product feeds have expanded into complex data verticals like automotive, allowing dealerships and brands to display rich inventory details dynamically.
Direct Checkout Links: To reduce mid-funnel drop-offs, Google has expanded direct checkout links to nine new markets, routing shoppers from a YouTube video straight to a finalized purchase page in fewer clicks.

3. High-Precision Optimization & Measurement

Proving return on investment (ROI) against traditional paid social channels is a core focus of this redesign:

One-Click Campaign Transition: An AI-assisted migration tool lets you port successful campaign settings from Performance Max directly into a Demand Gen structure, automatically blending them with Demand Gen best practices.
Campaign Type Attribution: A dedicated measurement framework isolates Demand Gen conversions, making it incredibly clean to run head-to-head performance comparisons against paid social networks.
Uplift Experiments: Built-in automated A/B testing allows advertisers to isolate exactly how much incremental lift Demand Gen is contributing when running alongside existing Performance Max campaigns.

The Performance Metric: Google’s initial data highlights that advertisers managing large product catalogs see an average 33% increase in conversions simply by integrating optimized product feeds into their Demand Gen campaigns.

Getting Started Checklist

If you’re preparing to launch or upgrade an existing video action strategy to these new formats, ensure you have:

Diverse Asset Ratios: Prepare videos and images across 16:9 (horizontal), 1:1 (square), and 9:16 (vertical for YouTube Shorts) to let the AI fluidly optimize placements.
Lightweight Conversion Tracking: Train the bidding models early by optimizing for lightweight actions first (like “Add to Basket” or “Site Visit”) to feed deep performance signals back into the system.

Fuel your next wave of growth on YouTube with Demand Gen