How Demand Gen Campaigns Works
Demand Gen campaigns were introduced by Google in 2023 as the successor to Discovery campaigns, incorporating TrueView for Action (video) alongside image and carousel formats. Demand Gen serves ads across four high-intent Google surfaces: YouTube (in-stream and Shorts), YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Google Discover (the personalized content feed on mobile), and Gmail. The campaign type is designed to address mid-funnel demand generation — reaching people who aren't actively searching but are receptive to discovering new solutions. It uses Smart Bidding (Maximize Conversions or Target CPA) with Google's AI optimizing delivery across all four surfaces simultaneously.
Why Demand Gen Campaigns Matters for B2B Marketing
For B2B marketers, Demand Gen fills the gap between branded search (bottom-of-funnel) and broad awareness (top-of-funnel). It reaches professionals during their content consumption moments — watching YouTube, browsing Discover news, checking Gmail — with contextually relevant ads. This is particularly valuable for categories where B2B buyers do extensive research before searching: new technology categories, emerging SaaS solutions, or services that buyers don't yet know to search for by name. Demand Gen can accelerate the point at which a prospect enters active search mode.
Demand Gen Campaigns: Best Practices & Strategic Application
Demand Gen best practices: provide a mix of asset types — short video (6-15 seconds), longer video (30-60 seconds), and static images — to maximize placement eligibility across all four surfaces; use customer match lists and lookalike audiences (Demand Gen supports similar segments) to anchor targeting to your ICP; set Target CPA conservatively to start (30-50% above your current search CPA) to ensure sufficient volume for learning; upload your best creative from other channels as Google's AI selects assets based on predicted performance; and A/B test creative concepts using the experiment feature built into Demand Gen.
Agency Perspective: Demand Gen Campaigns in Practice
MV3 positions Demand Gen as a mid-funnel bridge in B2B campaigns — reaching the prospects who are in learning mode before they enter search mode. We use customer match lists seeded from CRM data to build lookalike audiences, then serve a sequence of educational content (problem-focused first, solution-focused second, social proof third) across YouTube and Discover. This primes those audiences to eventually search branded and category terms where our search campaigns capture them at lower CPA than cold search traffic.
