The RIGHT Way to Set Up Demand Gen Campaigns in 2026 | Step-by-Step Tutorial

In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up a demand gen campaign the right way. Let's dive in. All right, I'm inside of my account. I'm at the campaign campaign level here and I'm just going to click this blue button, create a campaign. I'm going to hit new campaign. Then all you have to do is hit create a campaign without guidance when it comes to this objective thing. And then we're going to click demand gen. Now it says use these conversion goals for the campaign. You might get like a ton of conversions that populate or conversion goals there. Just depends on how your account's currently set up. I'm setting this up for an E commerce business, so all I want is purchases. But make sure you clear out any conversions that you don't want that populate here. So mindset, fine. I just want purchases. So we're all good. Now I'm going to hit continue. This thing popped up because I was creating one earlier. So I'm just going to hit start new. You probably won't see this. This is just a draft from last time. So I'm going to hit start new. This puts us now into the campaign build process. All right, so first thing is just naming it. So I'm going to do demand gen sectionals. I'm just putting YT because this is for the YouTube channel video. I probably won't actually use this campaign because I'm already running one. So this is just for training purposes. All right, product feeds. This is an E commerce company. I want my feed attached to it. So, so I am going to have this toggle on. So that that means my product feed is attached to this campaign and is turned on. Then campaign goal. You have like conversions or clicks. I'm going for conversions. Most of you should go for conversions as well. So make sure that is set up. Conversion goals. We've already talked about. I've got my purchases set up, so we're all good there. Then there's this target cost per action. So this would be setting a cap like, hey Google, I want to get, you know, conversions for a hundred dollars. If I were to put like a hundred, you know, dollars here, right? If you are already a big spender and you're setting up a demand gen campaign, you have tons of conversion volume across your entire account. You actually could go in here and start off with a target cpa. Most of you though, that's probably not going to work. So what I recommend is going for max conversions as soon as you start and Then which is basically if we don't put a target here, you're going for max conversion bid strategy. You don't want that target. That target will actually slow you down in the beginning. So right now we're in a stage of just getting this campaign launched and we just need some volume. So you're in this volume ramp up stage. So run without a target cost per acquisition. Then daily budget here, technically, whatever your goal will be once you have volume and you're like, you know, for this campaign to work, for us to continue to spend money on it, we need, you know, about a hundred dollar cpa. I would advise at least having a hundred dollar per day goal. So whatever your CPA goal is intended to be, start with a daily budget around that. The more the better. So let's say your goal's a hundred, but you've got 500 per day to spend. Awesome. You're going to get more data quicker but at least have enough to hit your target CPA goal once you get to that stage. Now the only issue is if your goal is small, let's say you're like, well I have a 25 CPA goal, I would still recommend testing then a bit higher. So usually I like to spend at least 50 to $100 per day on a test for a demand gen campaign. So I'm going to have this set to 100 per day for this account just to get it going. We've got this customer acquisition setting. So this is adjust your bid to help acquire new customers. This gets, this is like a tricky setting. It sounds great but I tend to not use it. I know a lot of people are like, oh, always have this on. I, I don't and I just don't think it actually works that well. So I usually have this turned off. I am going for a remarketing campaign on this, the build that I'm doing in this video. And so I'm going to be targeting, you know, all visitor audience and remarketing to that. And so I just normally have this turned off and I recommend most of you who are starting off just, just keep this turned off for now. Later on if it's working and you want to do a test with it on. Awesome. But let's just get, let's get the demand and campaign working first. Brand guidelines here you could put in custom colors if you have like brand guidelines you need to follow and fonts. I don't have any of that, so I'm going to skip that part. EU political ads new I'm targeting The US for sectional sofas. All right. Then we have language, location and language. You want to make sure this presence setting is on and then you can set campaign location and language settings to overwrite ad group settings. So with a demand gen campaign you can actually target different locations if you needed to at the ad group level. So this is just saying this can override your campaign settings. Can override your ad group settings which they obviously spell out right there. Just leave this off unless you have a specific case. So we're going to have that. So we're all set there and then I'm going to go down to devices. So here's set specific targeting for devices. Usually I turn TV screens off and a lot of times I'll turn tablets off and in this case I'm going to turn tablets off. You can leave tablets on. You can leave TV screens on. Usually I kill TV screens always and then tablets. A lot of times I don't run until I get the campaign working. Once the campaign's working then I'll flick on tablets. Here you can test but usually I start mobile phones and computers ad schedule I want on all day. Third party measurement. That's, that's if you're using third party tools and campaign URL options. Same thing. If you're using third party tools that you need tracking template parameters in there at the UR level you can add that. In this case I don't. Now I'm going to go to ad group one. So here I like to segment my ad groups by the audience types. So here I'm going to be doing all visitors if I can spell. So this is going to be a remarketing audience that I'm setting up on my demand gen campaign. You can segment your ad groups in various ways. I'm going to get to the, you know, ad level here where we actually create ads because there's multiple ads that can be built. You can have video and image and product only and mix between all of those. So some people I've seen segment by ad type, others will segment by audience type. It can go even more complex. Let's say you're, you have different services. So for example, if I'm running lead gen for grow my ads, my agency, let's say I have an ad group for Google Ad services and then I have an ad group for meta ad services. Right. I probably want those segmented but the problem is I could have the same audience I'm trying to target but I might not want those ads living in the same ad group for control purposes. So then I would have an ad group for Google Ads and I would have an ad group for meta ads and they could both be targeting the same audiences, right? Or in this case, this is an E commerce business. I just want to go after the audience that I want to, which is all visitors 90 days and then I'm going to have my ad creative inside of that ad group and then I will optimize based off how that ad creative performs. So you can segment it and slice and dice in many different ways. Just know though, demand gen campaigns learn at the ad group level. So I do try to consolidate as much as possible as long as it's themed and makes sense. In this case it will make sense. So all visitors 90 days is the ad ad group we're going after. We've got all products set up. Location targeting is United States, language is English. All right, channels, it auto sets you to all Google channels. You can actually come in here and choose. You can choose YouTube, Discover, Gmail, Google Display, network. Normally I will start off with just everything on and then I'll start optimizing based on performance and removing things if I need to. And if you just want to do a YouTube campaign, specifically you're targeting YouTube ads within demand gen, you can just then have the YouTube set up and then you can even just do like shorts if you want and feed and stream all of that. Again, I set everything. Usually I roll with everything and then I start optimizing afterwards. Audience. Okay, here I'm going to be adding my all visitor 90 day audience that already have set up. If you don't have an audience set up, you'll be able to create a new audience and then you go through this audience creation process here you can create custom audience segments. You can use your data which is like website data, customer match data. You can even do a lookalike segment, think almost meta ads a bit here. Here you could use, you know, a seed list from your customer data or remarketing data. So there's a lot of options here. Normally if you're brand new to demand gen, I recommend starting with a remarketing audience. It gets things going. I know you might want to use demand gen. A lot of people are like, well we want prospecting and cold traffic and top of funnel, middle funnel. Yes. But I like to kind of warm things up, get my feet wet with it, get some success with it. Then I'll move into expanding into cold audience. But if I can get remarketing to work for me and get a feel for how it works Then I'll show you kind of what I eventually do that will open up some cold traffic. So here I'm going all visitors 90 days. Now after that you've got this optimized targeting. Right now it's auto selected to use optimized targeting. I don't want that on. I'm going to have this turned off. Basically what I'm saying is I only want to target visitors or audience people in my all visitors 90 day audience pool. I don't want Google to go expand its targeting because now it's not technically a remarketing audience. Right now I just mentioned I recommend if you're brand new to managing start with a remarketing audience, get that kind of dialed in, you're going to have a better chance of getting some success where you actually feel comfortable with it. Once you've got that working, once you have conversion volume and it is hitting some good performance, I actually go in and then I flick on this optimized targeting. That's going to open up some cold prospecting. And so it no longer will be just a remarketing campaign. I am now actually going to get some cold prospecting coming in from it. But I don't start with it usually. I'll warm it up, get some success with a remarketing audience. Then I'll go use this optimized targeting setting. So I'm going to leave this off for now. Then there's this ad group URL option. We can just skip that too. Now we're going to go into ads. All right, You've got three types of ads you can create. You can go product only if you're E commerce. You can go image in products and then you can go video and products again. I have a product feed set up and that's why you do see product ad, product ad and then product only ad down there. If you don't have a product feed attached, you probably don't need to worry about having a mix. But you can do image, you can do video mix if you're like a lead gen. So I recommend when you're starting out to actually go build all three. Now if you don't have video creative, that's different. But go have an image and product ad. Go have a video and product ad and go have a product only ad. And it goes through the creative process of actually creating these ads. It's very simple to set up. It's just like setting up a responsive search ad. Essentially in most cases, you know, you're giving it headlines and descriptions and Call to actions. There's a few things I do want to highlight though. A Images. If you're going display, you know, try to use as many images that fit your theme as possible. And then there's this asset optimization setting for images here. I do usually have these turned on. Same with video. If we come to video, you're going to add in video assets that you have, whether they're on YouTube channels or you're uploading videos. But here, this asset optimization piece has resize videos. Shorter videos show a screenshot of landing page in your ad I and they'll. They'll have examples for you. The only thing sometimes I'll turn off here is this. Show a screenshot of your landing page in your ads. But I'll do resize videos and shorter videos for sure. And sometimes I do test this. So don't feel like, you know, one of these settings will make or break your campaign. But I like to have like Google does a good job now of resizing videos and creating shorter videos. If you see your own ad though, and it looks weird, it's probably because one of these settings is turned on. So if you do find a weird thing, then come in and actually turn off some of these asset optimizations. But for the most part I launch with them on other than the screenshot one is a bit weird. So I will a lot of times have that turned off when it comes to the video now product, it's just your feed. So here there's not a whole lot. It's creating headlines and descriptions because these can show again like on YouTube if you have that set up, so there will be some text there. But here you don't have to worry about too much other than just kind of getting, you know, some headlines and descriptions in there. The ad preview section is very nice. You can see how things would show. Let's add a video in here real quick. I'll just do this one just to kind of show you a preview. So here you can start seeing previews of what it would look like on YouTube. Discover. Let's do desktop here you can switch between devices as well, which is nice. So you can just kind of see how this would potentially look out in the wild. Gives you a general idea of what you can kind of expect then, which is nice. And you can even go deeper with this link here. Review combinations and placements. Check all that out. So that's very nice. I am not going to go set all of these up since I already have ads created. So we'll go into the next Stage. Okay, so you're at your review campaign. Once you actually build an ad, all you're going to do is hit publish campaign. Then once it publishes you're going to want to go in and make sure everything's set up correctly. So we're going to go do that next. Okay, so the campaign has been launched. Just always make sure you go check your campaign settings again. Double check everything's been set up correctly. I would also go through ad group settings too. And so here we've got. Let me go hop back in here we've got our ad group. I'd go through my ad group settings as well, make sure everything's set up correctly how I want. Now let me show you. This is a real one I've ran again I'm Targeting all visitors 90 days here I have my product only ad running. I have a video and product, a multiple video products, ones that I've ran and then an image and product over time. What I do is just kind of pause out the ads that don't do well with that audience. So for this example and this is a remarketing audience so it makes sense, you'll see that my product only and a couple of these videos are doing the best. So I've got essentially two ads running now because the others just didn't do as well from like a performance based. So again that's my setup. A lot of times is audience and then I allow the different asset ad or the different ad types to be all within one ad group and then I optimize from there. Now with demand gen campaigns you have to remember these won't usually be great at direct conversion. So before you scrutinize the performance a lot of times you want to go into the weeds of how it's working because it's, it's not supposed to be a last click ad campaign type even when I am using it for the remarketing purposes here. So one thing I recommend doing, you go to your goals, you go to measurement and then you go to attribution. Once we're in here, go to this assisted conversions and from the time frame, so I've got a pretty long timeframe here, you can kind of go look at how your campaign is doing. So here's demand gen and I can see that in this time frame you see this assist by last click conversions, this is 6x more likely to assist versus be a last click conversion. So this ratio here is really high on demand gen you'll see it's like not as high on my Other campaigns, which makes sense. That means this thing is playing a role in assisting but not direct conversions. So that allows me to see, okay, this is kind of doing that job of playing a part in the customer journey. But normally it's not going to be a last click converting type campaign. I want to show you another report here. This is wicked reports that we have set up on an account. This is a true third party tracking and attribution that we have going on. I want to show you how demand gen plays like a role here. So we had a shopping campaign that was able to drive first click for this specific customer. Then they ordered a swatch. So for home reserve, it's a sectional sofa company, you can get these swatches. It's a part of the customer journey. Normally you get like a swatch that gets mailed to you. You, you know, you feel the material and the colors and then you know, people make their decisions from there. But a lot of times you still need to kind of warm them up. So that's a really good area to have remarketing ads running to these types of audiences where they haven't fully purchased from you yet, but you need to get them back to make that purchase. So ramp up customer testimonials and how great your product is. Right. Well look, look what they started clicking on. And afterwards demand gen. So demand gen wasn't technically last click, but it played a role in their customer journey. As you see, they started coming back direct, then they were on our email list and then eventually throughout their customer journey they ordered another swatch it looks like. But then they came back and actually made an order, you know, many, many days later. Almost, almost longer than 30 days. Our customer, usually it's about 30 days for this specific company here was a tad longer, but they finally made an order. That took a while. But demand gen played a role there. Right? So it wasn't, hey, they came from a shopping ad, ordered a swatch and never heard from us again. No, Demand gen started targeting them and they started seeing our ads out in the wild, probably on YouTube, probably on the display network and if they use Google Discover, probably on there as well. And this played a real role in bringing them back to order. The other way you can see how certain networks are performing is if you come to the segment and you come into network, this will be able to show you where performance is if you're targeting everything. So here we don't have much in Google Display Network, YouTube. We can see how YouTube's performing and we can even see how it's performing from in YouTube placement. So in stream, in feed and shorts, most of it is conversion wise. Looks like it's coming from the in streams. We can see Gmail. Gmail for this campaign is actually doing really well. And then we have Discover as well. So you can see how the placement performance is is working there. And again, if one of these doesn't look like it's doing well for you, come in, edit your settings and you can go to those channels and flick that off. So if for whatever reason Discover wasn't doing well, we can just turn Discover off, boom, we're good. And so that's how you can easily see when you do a full setup like I just showed you, you can easily see how performance is from the network settings that you have ads running. Okay, there you go. You now know how to set up a demand gen campaign the right way. I hope you got great value from this. If you want to upskill in Google Ads even further, I would love to see you inside of our community called PPC Copilot. I have course material in there. I do. Q and as we have an incredible group of advertisers with lots of questions, lots of answers going on and people learning and continuing to expand their skills with Google Ads, go check that out. There's a link in the description below. If you want to go learn more, I would love to see you inside. If not, no worries. See you on the next video.