Google’s Demand Gen campaigns have been significantly changed for the better throughout 2025, turning from a promising awareness tool to a core conversion driver in Google’s advertising ecosystem. The updates this year provide advertisers with much greater control while they increase where and how ads can appear.
Understanding these changes is important because Demand Gen now lies at the centre of Google’s “Power Pack” strategy along with Performance Max and AI Max. Here’s what has changed and what it means to your campaigns.
The most requested update finally came in March of 2025 – true control of where your Demand Gen ads appear. In the past, campaigns were run across YouTube, Discover, and GMail with little capability to target specific placements. Now you can customize just where your ads show.
You can opt to run campaigns exclusively on YouTube, target only Discover or Gmail or target specific formats such as YouTube Shorts. This is important because different placements have different performance for different businesses. A strong short form video content brand might want to focus on Shorts, whereas a B2B brand might get better results focusing on Gmail or Discover placements.
The YouTube Shorts-only option should be paid particular attention. As one of the fastest growing formats of content, Shorts provides access to mobile-first audiences who consume quick, vertical video content. Being able to run Demand Gen campaigns in this format alone opens up targeting options that previously weren’t available.
Google still encourages to use all available placements for maximum optimization by AI, but having the choice allows it to test, learn and allocate budget on actual performances instead of accepting the one-size-fits-all approach.
Google Display Network inventory also became a part of Demand Gen this year, adding further reach to over three million sites and apps. This dramatically increases the potential audience size without sacrificing the visual and engaging ad forms that define Demand Gen ad campaigns.
Creating good visual content across multiple formats and screen sizes has always been challenging. The 2025 updates address this with tools that reduce production burden with no loss of creativity.
Vertical image ads for YouTube Shorts now support true 9:16 format, which means your images will display correctly in the vertical image space without awkward cropping. This seems like a small detail, but done well, formatted creative does much better than forced adaptations.
Video enhancement features – can automatically create shorter clips from your existing longer videos. Instead of editing multiple versions on your own for various placements, you can allow Google’s tools to make the variations, but have the option to go back and examine and change things. This is especially useful for advertisers that have quality, long form content but don’t have the resources to do extensive video editing.
The enhanced ad creation workflow adds in stakeholder sharing of preview addressing a practical pain point. Working around getting creative approval from clients or internal teams previously required workarounds. Now you can share your previews directly with people outside Google Ads, making the feedback and approval process easier.
AI-powered image and video enhancements coming out later in the year can automatically build and optimize other versions of your ads. The system assists campaigns in scaling by creating variations that could potentially work better in certain contexts without having to create the creatives manually for each variation.
For e-commerce and retail advertisers, 2025 saw features that make Demand Gen much more helpful in driving actual sales and less in awareness.
Richer product information is now displayed directly within adverts, including real-time pricing, ratings and availability information. Users are able to see if items are in stock before clicking, which lowers friction and increases the quality of traffic to your site.
Local inventory visibility displays in-store availability for retailers having physical locations. This brings together the online advertising and offline shopping behavior to help drive foot traffic as well as digital conversions. Users can see if something is available in their immediate vicinity before making a trip.
Shoppable Connected TV is a major enlargement of where purchase behaviour can occur. And viewers watching YouTube on their television screens can now browse and interact with products directly or use send-to-phone capabilities to continue shopping on mobile. Demand Gen campaigns with TV screens said to be the source of additional conversions at maintained ROI levels.
Travel Feeds integration integrates Hotel Center feeds with Demand Gen for dynamic video ads that include hotel price, ratings & availability. This makes Demand Gen viable for travel advertisers who used to rely on other campaign types for this kind of inventory connected advertising.
One ongoing challenge with upper funnel advertising has been to demonstrate impact beyond immediate conversions. The 2025 updates give improved tools to understand what Demand Gen’s actual contribution is.
Platform comparable conversion columns allow you to measure Demand Gen performance utilizing attribution models which match other platforms. This makes comparing channel to channel more meaningful, helping you understand the performance of Demand Gen compared to paid social efforts to make some sense of things instead of comparing apples to oranges.
Attributed Branded Searches reporting will tell you how your Demand Gen campaigns are driving branded search volume on Google and YouTube. This helps quantify the impact of awareness that eventually converts through search, helping to address the challenge of attribution that has always made visual advertising more difficult to justify.
Conversion lift measurement now operates at lower levels of spend and conversion volume than before. You can test incrementality on the manager account level or on the level of specific campaigns, understanding what happens because of your advertising versus what would have happened anyway
Omnichannel bidding can help maximize overall online and offline sales, knowing that the customer journey can be a journey across multiple-touchpoints and channels before purchase takes place.
If you’ve been running Video Action Campaigns, then moving to Demand Gen isn’t an option. Google discontinued the ability to create new Video Action Campaigns starting in April 2025, and automatic upgrades will start in July.
This consolidation makes strategic sense – Google reports that Demand Gen achieves substantially better ROAS than Video Action Campaigns provided. But the transition needs attention – to make sure your existing campaigns transfer properly and carry on performing.
Any best performance marketing agency that was managing video campaigns had to plan for this change, making sure assets and strategies that took advantage of Demand Gen’s capabilities wouldn’t merely go to automatic migration defaults.
Understanding how Demand Gen is different from Video Action Campaigns — Broader Placement Options, Enhanced Creative Tools, Improved Measurement — helps you take advantage of the upgrade and not just survive.
These updates make Demand Gen much more than an awareness play. It’s now a legitimate conversion tool, standing alongside Performance Max and AI Max, in Google’s suggested campaign structure.
The Power Pack concept proposes the use of Demand Gen for awareness and interest, AI Max for capturing and converting search intent, and Performance Max for orchestrating full-funnel performance at scale. Whether or not this approach will work for your particular business requires testing but having an understanding of the interplay that is being intended aids in evaluating where Demand Gen fits.
For digital performance marketing strategies, the increased controls actually make Demand Gen more practical. Being able to focus on specific placements, measure cross-platform performance comparably, and understand branded search impact are answers to objections that used to inhibit Demand Gen adoption.
The more than one hundred updates Google shipped in the first half of 2025 alone led to meaningful performance improvements for those who advertise using Demand Gen. The type of campaign is clearly gaining a lot of investment and attention from Google, which means that there is likely to be continued development of the campaign ahead.
Google Demand Gen got transformative updates throughout 2025 and went from an awareness-focused campaign type to a core conversion tool in Google’s Power Pack strategy. Key changes include more channel controls for placement-specific targeting, creative improvements that automate video and image optimization, retail features that link inventory of products with advertising of visual images, and improvements to measurement that enable cross-platform comparison and measurement of incrementality. The transition to mandatory Video Action Campaign consolidated video advertising into Demand Gen, and new functionality such as Shoppable Connected TV and Travel Feeds increased the where and how of Demand Gen’s ability to drive results.
Key updates include increased channel controls, where you can select specific placements such as YouTube Shorts only, enhanced creativity to automatically optimize videos, more detailed product information in ads, better measurement with cross-platform comparable metrics, and skills the mandatory transition from Video Action Campaigns.
Yes. Starting in March 2025, Google introduced channel controls to allow you to run Demand Gen campaigns on YouTube Shorts only, YouTube in general, or in Discover, or on Gmail, or on specific combinations. This gives advertisers control over the placement of their visual ads.
Google sunsetted Video Action Campaigns in 2025. New campaign creation stopped in April, and automatic migration to Demand Gen started in July. According to Google, Demand Gen provides better performance than Video Action Campaigns, and the consolidation is good for most advertisers.
Demand Gen generates awareness through visual advertising on YouTube and Google surfaces and interest. It works alongside AI Max for Search which captures and converts search intent, and Performance Max, which orchestrates full-funnel performance at scale. Together they make up Google’s recommended campaign structure for the year 2025.
Platform comparable conversion columns allow cross-channel comparison using attribution models matching other platforms. Attributed Branded Searches Understands how brands drive branded search volume. Conversion lift measurement is now working at lower spend levels. These features aid in the quantification of impact beyond immediate conversions.
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