Best practices for high performing Demand Gen campaigns

Creative

• Use at least one ad with “Excellent” Ad Strength rating to maximize the impact of your Demand Gen campaigns or strive to achieve an “Excellent” Ad Strength rating for at least one ad.
  • Ad Strength : It’s a tool within Google Ads that evaluates the relevance, quantity, and diversity of your ad assets, which provides real-time feedback to help improve ad effectiveness. 
  • “Excellent" Ad Strength rating: This indicates that you've provided a comprehensive and diverse set of high-quality images, videos, headlines, and descriptions, following Google's best practices. Learn more About Ad Strength for Demand Gen campaigns .
• Use Image & Video Together to tell a cohesive story using the medium that most resonates with your audience.
  • Prioritize assets that perform across inventory:Think mobile-first when selecting assets, and use high-performing creatives from other campaigns and audiences to fuel performance. 
  • Tell your brand’s story with creative made for the platform:For video, use ABCD (Audience, Branding, Connection, Direction) creative guidance, and repeat the CTA and ensure it’s echoed in the voiceover and overlaid graphics.

Deep Dive into Creative

Audiences

• Use optimized targeting for conversions
  • If your campaign goals are driving towards conversions, optimized targeting will enhance your campaign performance. Advertisers who opt into optimized targeting find 20% higher conversions at the same cost compared to the ones without it.
• Use Lookalike segments to find Similar Users
  • Use Google AI to amplify your first party data:Upload your customer list and find valuable new users who have potential based on what is similar to your existing customers. 
  • Separate high-value and low-value customers:Create unique Lookalike segments based on users with similar interactions with your business.

• Use new customer acquisition (NCA) goal for new user acquisitions
  • The new customer acquisition (NCA) goal in Google Ads offers a fully automated approach to focus your campaigns on acquiring new users. Powered by your first-party audiences, this feature helps identify and reach potential customers who are new to your business. Specifically, advertisers that use the "New Customer Only Mode" have improved their new customer ratio by 11.5% on average while achieving a 3% reduction in the acquisition cost for new customers.

Data Strength

Customers want to ensure proper foundational data setup to help drive the best return on investment (ROI). You can achieve this by doing the following:

• Connect your data sources: Ensure all your data is connected to your ads platform
  • Implement Robust sitewide tagging using the Google Tag or Google Tag Manager . Also consider upgrading to Google Tag Gateway .
  • Link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts to bid for Google Analytics conversions and audiences, including using Google Analytics for Firebase SDK for app conversions.
  • Connect your CRM or other offline sources to Data Manager or use the Data Manager API .
• Maximize your signals: Enrich your data foundation with more signals
  • Include customer signals like user-provided email addresses by setting up enhanced conversions and passing consent signals with Consent Mode .
  • Add purchase and transaction signals by including values to your conversions to optimize for ROAS and profit.

More on the foundations for durable ads performance

Campaign Structure

• Set up consolidated Campaigns to maximize performance in machine learning models like Demand Gen that learn best from large data sets. 
  • Create a single campaign for your business:Unless you have different marketing objectives, ROI targets, or bid strategies—it’s best to use a single campaign for your business. 
  • Combine audience themes in one ad group:Include similar audience themes in the same ad group (for example, combine ‘baseball’ + ‘football’ as ‘sports’). Our model learns at the ad group level, so consolidation improves performance. 
  • Size ad groups based on conversion volume:Start with the ad group size that allows you to get at least 50 conversions in the first 30 days to perform best. If you are not getting that volume, you should further consolidate. To aid with consolidation, consider merging ad groups with fewer than ~30 conversions in 30 days.
• Use Product Feeds
  • Turn your ad into a virtual storefront that helps consumers discover your brand and product.If you’re a retailer selling products through a website, in a physical store, or both, use Merchant Center—a free tool that helps millions of shoppers on Google discover, explore, and buy your products. You can upload and manage your product feeds so that your products appear in Demand Gen and other Google campaign types.
• For more information and FAQs, visit the Feed Policy Help Center Article .

Bidding Strategy

• Choose the Bidding Strategy for Your Goals
  • Campaign Goal: Conversions- Maximize Conversions is the recommended strategy. If you have a specific ROI to follow, use tCPA as an alternative. 
  • Campaign Goal: Multiple Conversions or Conversion Value  - Maximize Conversion Value is the recommended strategy. If you have a specific ROI to follow, use tROAS as an alternative. 
  • Campaign Goal: Clicks, Website Traffic, or Consideration- Maximize Clicks is the recommended strategy. 
    • Note that if you have a specific type of website traffic (e.g. those who interact with a product, spend X mins on a page) in mind, Maximize Conversions would be a better fit.
• Use the Bid Strategy Report to help assess the performance of your bidding over time.
  • This includes your bid strategy status and key performance metrics such as clicks, impressions, CTR, cost, conversions, etc. You can also add customized metrics based on preference.

Budget Setting

Set Sufficient Budgets:  Supporting a campaign with enough budget from Day 1 to win in your customers’ auction is critical to driving sustained performance.

Target campaigns such as tCPA and tROAS require a budget of greater than or equal to 10 times the bid, while Max campaigns retain the greater than or equal to $100 per day rule.

• Conversion bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Conversions: We recommend at least $100 per day per campaign.
  • Target cost per action (tCPA): We recommend at least $100 per day per campaign, or 10 times your tCPA—whichever is higher.
• Value bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Conversion Value: We recommend at least $100 per day per campaign.
  • Target return on ad spend (tROAS): We recommend at least 10 times the bid per day per campaign.
• Click bidding daily budget
  • Maximize Clicks: No minimum requirement.