New Updates to Demand Gen
Whilst scrolling through the roundup of announcements from the Google Marketing Live 2024 event, I reluctantly started reading about Demand Gen. I say reluctantly, because this campaign type has never appealed to me, and I haven’t yet recommended Demand Gen to any of my clients. However, based on Google Internal Data from April - May 2024, accounts that combined Demand Gen alongside Search and Performance Max recorded a 17% increase in conversions. I also thought some of the latest updates look good, particularly for smaller brands and/or start-ups:
Animated product ads on YouTube Shorts - whilst this opens up a new network for product ads, it also aims at driving more engagement by being a bit more visually appealing compared to the static products ads across the YouTube home feed, for example.
Pinned video assets - this feature will allow an advertiser to have control over which YouTube format (In-stream, Shorts, or In-feed) a specific video is shown. By the sounds of it, selecting one of the options doesn’t mean it will exclusively show on that format, but rather it will show there the majority of the time.
New insights about Lookalike segments - you can now discover new insights about your Lookalike segments, such as affinity categories, in-market categories, age, gender, geography, devices, and more. Making it easier to understand your target audience, which could be valuable for small business, or start-ups.
Lowered minimum list size to create Lookalike segments - also beneficial for smaller companies to create lookalike audiences, and therefore generate more reach, the minimum list size will reduce to 100 users, from 1,000. This will be instrumental for those businesses who never quite reach the threshold, as well as larger business who will be able to create lookalike audiences out of more specific segments.