How to Optimise Demand Gen Campaigns

If you're currently running a demand gen campaign and you are not 100% happy with the results that you're getting for your investment, don't worry, because in this video I'm going to take you through the exact optimization framework that we use inside of Define Digital Academy to get better results for our members. Now, the one thing that I do want to remind you, that with demand gen, you do need to remember that it is a different type of campaign, especially if you're more used to your traditional search-based campaigns. So whether that be your search campaigns, your shopping campaigns or even your Performance Max campaigns. And the reason for that is because when it comes to success with demand gen, it's very much built on not keyword targeting. It's very much built on the placement where your ads are appearing, the audiences. So who is seeing your ad? And then obviously the creatives. And you do need to make sure that you've got those three things right. And of course, on the flip side, these are the areas that you need to be optimizing to see better results with your demand gen campaigns. Now the other thing that I do want to stress, that when it comes to demand gen, you, you do need to judge the success of demand gen differently than what you do with other campaigns, especially your search, shopping, and Performance Max campaigns. It's not as a simple sum of this is how much we spent and these are the clicks and the conversions that we got in 30 days after spending that budget. It is very different for demand gen. Now that's why for most businesses, the vast majority of businesses, that demand gen will be a secondary campaign. Or even some cases the third wave of campaigns that you're launching. The only caveat to that is that if you are an educational-based business or you've got a product that the market doesn't really understand why it exists, that's a great time to use Demand Gen at the start. But for most businesses, it will be after you've already got Search running and Performance Max running. So when you do go through and analyze your— the performance of your Demand Gen campaigns, you do need to think about these two factors. And the first one is what we call the halo effect, and that is essentially once you've started running your Demand Gen campaigns, are you seeing an increase in branded traffic? So we've seen many cases where people run Demand Gen, they then see an increase in, you know, organic or direct traffic, and they can then tie that back as a direct result to starting their Demand Gen campaign. Or secondly, you can have that halo effect within your Google Ads account. And what I mean by that is that after 90 days of running Demand Gen, you may go back and do a 90-day analysis and start to see that your search, your Performance Max, and your shopping campaigns are performing better. They may be seeing a reduction in CPC or even a reduction in their cost per conversion. So it is one of those campaigns where you do need to take a holistic approach, and that's why for many businesses we don't recommend that you start with Demand Gen. It's something that you have later down the track where you've got maybe an extra 5 to 10, 10% of your budget where you can spend it to really try and grow your market or grow your audience. Now the other thing that you need to be thinking about when you do optimize your Demand Gen campaigns is what is the core function of this campaign. And generally when it comes to demand gen, you're splitting it into two camps. The first camp is your remarketing or retargeting. So this is especially when you are fully designing your demand gen campaign to go back and target people who have been on your website. They may have even clicked on some of your ads, but they haven't yet converted yet, and you just want to continue to give them a new offer or to remind them that, hey, you haven't bought yet, come back and make sure you convert. The second group is people who are looking to expand. So they are really targeting top of the funnel, wanting to increase their brand awareness, and really want to expand out into new markets or new keyword themes or new audiences. And that's very much generally, you know, where people are doing it after they've already capped out on their Search, Shopping, or Performance Max spend. So it is really important to know that you have those rationales because that will help you to establish how you view the performance of these campaigns and what optimization actions you need to complete. All right, so what we are going to do is I want to make this video as practical as possible, so we are going to jump into a screen share so I can walk you through how to optimize your demand gen campaigns using those, those 3 core areas that we're looking at, being the placements, your audiences and demographics, and also your ad creatives, which is highly, highly important. But just in case we haven't yet met, my name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy, and we started Define Digital Academy for one reason and one reason only, was to help you, the owner or the brand owner to get better results with their Google Ads campaigns. And if you do feel like you need some extra support with your Google Ads campaigns, we'd love to help you. And if you go down to the description of this video, you can see where you can actually fill out a form which gives us a request form of how we can help you. Fill that out, we get some details from you, and then we'll be in contact with you letting you know the best ways that we can help. And it's important to note that we've got options all the way from ground zero. So if it's your first Google Ads campaign, all the way up to businesses spending well over $100,000 a month. And also, while you're down in the description, you can see some links to some free Google Ads tools that we give you, which are things like our Google Ads optimization checklist and even our Claude AI-powered tools, which helps you optimize your Google Ads campaigns. So if you need any of that, make sure you follow that link in the description below. But right now, let's jump over to that screen share so I can walk you through how to optimize your demand gen campaigns. All right, so when it comes to optimizing your demand gen campaigns, remember we're gonna be focusing on those 3 core areas, the placements, so where those ads are being shown. So for demand gen, that's your display network, the, in YouTube, but within even YouTube, there's 3 different placements, which is your Shorts, your in-feed, and also your in-stream. Then there's also the Discovery Network. So that's the, what we talk about with the placements. Then it's the audiences, and then it's also the ads and creatives. So let me show you what we are looking at through here. Now, the business I'm gonna be taking you through, this, they've got 2 current demand gen campaigns which they're running. And as you can see, we've been able to, you know, really look to start increasing their metrics. Now inside of demand gen, so obviously they look at metrics outside of demand gen, but also inside of demand gen, they wanted to get above a 200. And you can see that after we saw some little spikes, but we've been able to successfully build them up above that 200 ROAS, which is what they needed. And that conversion value has been going up as well. And we've just started to actually start to increase some of their extra budget spent inside of the demand gen campaign. So it is definitely a campaign type that can work. So what we did with this one is the first one, when you talk about the placements, this is the first thing to look at. And what we did through here is that when they started with us, this is a business that's part of our On Demand program, which is a done-with-you program. They actually had only one demand gen campaign running, and I'll just show you in through here. What was happening in through here is that we noticed real, real quickly they were getting much better results with their display ads. And now it took a little bit longer to build up YouTube, but I'll just show you in through here is that what you can actually see in through here is that YouTube is now actually outperforming their display campaign. So we started to increase that up. So what we did from there is by splitting that out, we can now control what we're spending between the display campaign and also the YouTube ads. Now I don't recommend that as a starting point. It's also important to note that this business is very, very strong with their YouTube ads and their recording. So that's why I always knew for them that YouTube would be their main play, just because the owner of this business is in YouTube himself as well. So really, really good at that format. So that's why we broke that out, so that we knew that— because we knew that this YouTube would be the real winner for them in the long-term play. So the other thing that what I sort of want to fill out from here as well is it's important to note that the way that we structure our demand gen campaigns is that we'll have ad groups based around Shorts, in-stream, display, and also in-feed. Now obviously for YouTube, he's just focused on Shorts and in-stream. In-feed is a different one. If you don't know what in-feed is, in-feed is when people do a search inside of YouTube, you can actually have your ad appear there. But because he's got a very big content following. He didn't need that. So that's why we focused just on Shorts and in-stream. Shorts is obviously on the Short Network, the vertical tall ads, and in-stream is those interrupting type ads. So that's what we will start to go through, is we firstly went through the placements to really find out and really have a strategy of what's going to work for the business. Now there's other examples we've got where they only run display. YouTube doesn't work for them. So that's why I like to start with the structure in your ad groups for, for demand gen with ad groups based around your placements. Now I don't want to spend too much time talking here. At the end of this video, I'm going to show you where you can watch another video, uh, here on my YouTube channel where I break down how we structure these correctly. But that's the first action that we did, is that we broke out the placement so we could control the spend between the different types— image-based ads, YouTube ads. You don't need to do that, but that's just one of the options you could go down. We've got other demand gen campaigns where they have two demand gen campaigns One is a remarketing campaign which targets display and all the YouTube channels, and then another one is a top of funnel. The difference between those two is that the remarketing is only targeting people who have been to their website or engaged with their YouTube channel in the last 60 days. All right, so now let's talk about the audiences. So this is the next part. So if you can always be thinking with Demand Gen, it's placement— where your ads show— audiences— who sees it— audiences and demographics— and then the content— what are they actually seeing. So where you want to go in through here is if you go into your audiences, keywords, and content, and go into your audiences. And I'm just going to move this date range back again. So what you want to be looking at in through here is if you go to these audience segments and show the table, you can see from here that we've broken this into our— we've called this LAL, which is our lookalike audience, our welding interest, and also welding. So we've got our lookalike audiences, and then we've got some different interests. So we've built some audiences around interests. In that other video, which I'm going to show you too, It shows you how we build this out. But what that allows us to do once again is we can start looking at the core data of these audiences. Now, what I'm going to do from here is that we can go through and have a look. And if, if we start to see over time that some of these audiences are spending heaps of money but not giving us any data, then we start turning them off. So these are actually new audiences which we're just starting to test. There's not much data in there yet to go through and have a look at. But what you can see from here is that this is what we want to really start doing, is really looking at what is our cost per conversion metrics. And then if we wanted to, we could exclude some of these audiences, or we could add in extra audiences for testing. The other thing that— what you can do as well is with your demographics, you can go through— I like to have a look at this, look at your age, and then also look at your cost per conversions. And if we want to, what we could do is we could go through and exclude some of these audiences. Now for this business, they had a lot, a lot of data that they knew that just this 18 to 34 age bracket just did not convert for them. So that's why we excluded it at the start. Um, but let's just say you're running all of these age demographics and, but you knew, and I would say you'd want to be seeing at least 60 to 90 days of data. If you weren't getting any conversions, you could then close off those different audiences, those different demographics. Just select them, click edit, and then you can exclude from the ad group. All right, now let's go over to the third part. And for me, with demand gen, this is the most important part, especially when you're dealing with anything YouTube, or even your display ads, remembering that it's the creative which is going to make or break the success of this campaign. So what I recommend, and what we've seen is the best performing, is that you are testing 3 to 5 different angles inside of an individual ad group. So one of the big mistakes I see with, with demand gen is that what people will do is that they will just put everything into one ad. So they'll have one ad, they'll put all of their ads into one ad, and then it's, you You can kind of see it, but what the problem is, is you can't turn it off really, really quickly. So what I want to show you in through here is you can see this is the data, data from March to May. You can see that we've run through 9 different creative angles. Right now we've got 1, 2, 3, which are working. And this purely comes to what is working in terms of our click-through ratio, in terms of our conversions. Now, what we can also do from here is that I do really, really recommend when coming to your YouTube ad ads, you add in this metric called video played to. So if you go to columns, modify columns, and if you just actually search, put a percentage mark in there, and you'll see here video played to, and add that in there. So what this allows us to do is that we've been working with this business in that, say for example, we knew— say for example, these two ads, they're pretty much exactly the same, but what the difference is, is that that's just a different iteration. So same messaging, same hook, same offer. It's just one has a male delivering it, the second one has a female delivering it. Then what we've done from there is that this angle is a completely different angle. And what we've worked with this one is, is that it's got a slightly different offer which is starting to perform better. And so what we start looking at doing is if you start to see a really high watch rate at the start, we know that there's a really good hook. But if they drop really quickly, we then know the offer's going in. If they don't convert, you know, that's an offer issue. So You can then go through and start to sort of start play about and really start to create the options that are working best for the business. One thing I would also note too is that with Demand Gen, you do need to make sure that you are spending some time updating these creatives. We like to test 5, 3 to 5 creatives at a time. And as you can see from here, in a space of 60 days, we've gone through, uh, another 6 creative angles that we just haven't, haven't had to use anymore because they were underperforming. Performing. Let me show you how that works in the Display Network. And what we do with the Display Network, you can see from here, we've had to hide out some of the images for privacy. But you can see here we've got a before and after angle. We've actually got two different before and after angles. We tried a sale discount concept that didn't work. We tried a gifting concept that didn't work. So now we started to bring in some of the winners from Meta, which is working for them. Once again, what you can see from here is that within these different angles, we've got about 3 images, 3 to 5 images. It's not really— I don't really mind how many images are in there as long as they're all under the same angle. So what I mean by that is that you might— so for example, we've got sale discount concepts or before and after images. So you want to just keep everything grouped together so that you can see, so that you can test a lot quicker. As I know some people like putting them all inside of one ad, the reason why I like rolling that from here is it allows us to test with speed. Because once we've got ad angles all grouped together, we can see the data at that angle level, as opposed to, as opposed to, you know, having to dig in and find that data. Now, by running different ads or multiple ads, we're still allowing Google to choose the best winner. So if it starts to see some better performance, we're saying, Google, go for it, show that one more often. But we still want to get the data at the different angle options. So that's the next thing that you do. Now as a general rule, what people sort of look at, you know, how many impressions are you looking at? We generally run on— we want the testing running over about 30 days. Sometimes if we don't have enough data, we'll let it go for 6 weeks or even 2 months. But for me, you can see from here, we do like to make sure that there's enough data. In display, you want to be seeing at least 2,500 impressions. So you can see from here, we got this one at 2,500 impressions and it just wasn't getting enough data. So that's why we dropped it out. And then we keep the winning angles in there. So you can see this one is the winning angle and it is just keeps performing for us. We keep it in there. We have added in some other testing ones for us. You can see here in the last 30 days, this newer angle which we've got in has now become the winner. And you can see it's got a click-through ratio which is 1% better. This one is still giving us slightly better conversion rate, but let's go to the last 14 days and see how that's changed over. It's a little bit harder with, um, 14 days because it takes long. This one's on about a 3-week acquisition window, but you can see from there this interaction rate is still super, super high. So, and it's getting more total conversions, but the conversion rate is low. So that's why you want to be— allow that test to run through. The biggest message I want you to take home with demand gen is this, is that your creative is going to be the make and break. So you do really need to make sure that if you are going to venture into the world of demand gen, that you've got a creative team that can keep up pace with these changes. Because it's not just going to be a once, hey, we've created some creatives and we never need to test it again. The other thing is as well is that some people go, well, can we just batch create content? The problem with that is, is that you do need to be doing it on the response of data that you are getting. So it does realistically mean that you are going to be able to creating new content or new creatives every 4 to 6 weeks at a bare minimum if you want to see success with your demand gen campaigns. Hey, thank you so much for joining me. Now, as promised, if you'd like to know more about how we structure demand gen and the exact settings we use, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. And remember, if you do need extra— any extra help with your Google Ads campaigns, just go down to the description of this video. We'd love to show you the different ways that we can help you and your business see better results with Google Ads. Hey, thanks for joining me. See you next time.