# How to Use Demand Gen Campaigns to Fill the Gap Between Awareness and Conversion *By Kodie Critzer · June 8, 2026 · https://brcg.co/blog/demand-gen-campaigns-mid-funnel-awareness-conversion* > How to run Google Demand Gen campaigns for mid-funnel demand: creative sets, similar segments, and measuring with incrementality not last-click. --- Most DTC brands we pick up have the same shape of problem. Search is working, the ROAS math looks clean, and growth has flattened anyway. That is what running out of in-market demand looks like. There are only so many people typing your product into Google each month, and once you own that auction, the next dollar has nowhere efficient to go. Demand Gen campaigns are built for exactly that wall: reaching people who would buy if they knew you existed, before they ever search. The catch is that teams trained on Search math tend to break Demand Gen on day one by holding it to a last-click ROAS target. This is a use-case breakdown of what Demand Gen is for, how we set it up for clients, and how to read it honestly. ## Key takeaways - Demand Gen is a mid-funnel channel. It creates and warms demand across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail; it does not primarily harvest existing intent the way Search does. - Treat it as a creative channel first. Demand Gen lives or dies on the image and video assets you feed it, not on keyword hygiene. - Lookalikes are now "lookalike segments" built from your seed lists. You provide the seed; Google models similar users at narrow, balanced, or broad reach (per Google's documentation). - Do not grade it on last-click ROAS. Measure it with incrementality reads and assisted conversions, or you will pause a channel that is actually working. - It pairs with Search rather than competing with it. Demand Gen builds the demand, Search catches it when intent shows up. ## What Demand Gen is actually for Google Demand Gen replaced the old Discovery campaign type and runs across YouTube (in-feed and Shorts), Discover, and Gmail. According to Google's documentation, it is positioned as a campaign type for driving demand and consideration with visual, social-style creative. In plain terms: it is the channel for people who are not searching yet. Your Search campaigns answer a question someone already asked. Demand Gen plants the question. For a DTC brand that has saturated branded and non-branded Search, that distinction is the whole reason to run it. You are no longer competing for the same finite pool of in-market shoppers; you are growing the pool. Here is where it sits, and the part most teams get wrong is the bottom row, the measurement read. ![Demand Gen sits between broad awareness and intent capture, and should be judged on incremental lift rather than last-click credit.](/sanity-image/image-fd95e27e3324b5abd8f999d16e68b5d2b454ae83-1011x198-png) *Demand Gen sits between broad awareness and intent capture, and should be judged on incremental lift rather than last-click credit.* ## The creative is the campaign We tell every client the same thing on the kickoff call: Demand Gen is a creative buy wearing a performance interface. The targeting is mostly automated. What you actually control is the asset set, so that is where the work goes. A Demand Gen campaign serves into placements that look like organic feed content, which means polished, hard-sell product shots tend to underperform native-feeling creative. For a typical DTC build we ship into a single campaign: - **Portrait video, 9:16, three to four cuts.** A hook in the first second, the product in use, one clear claim, a price or offer card at the end. We make versions with and without on-screen captions. - **Landscape and square video** for the in-feed YouTube and Gmail placements that do not take vertical. - **Image assets at 1.91:1, 1:1, and 4:5.** Lifestyle over studio. Real customers over stock when we can get the rights. - **Multiple headlines and descriptions** so Google can assemble combinations per placement. The mistake we clean up most often is one tired video and two stock photos. Demand Gen needs enough creative variety to find a winning combination, and it needs that variety refreshed, because these placements fatigue faster than Search ads. Plan on a new cut roughly every two to three weeks for any campaign spending real money. ### Audience signals and "lookalike segments" What used to be called lookalike audiences are now lookalike segments inside Demand Gen. The mechanic is the same idea with a cleaner build: you give Google a seed list, and it models users who resemble that seed. Per Google's documentation, you choose a reach setting of narrow, balanced, or broad, where narrow stays closest to the seed and broad opens the funnel wider. The seed quality is everything. Modeling off "all site visitors" gives you a muddy lookalike. Modeling off your actual purchasers, or better, your high-value repeat buyers, gives Google something worth copying. For DTC we usually seed from: - A Customer Match list of purchasers, ideally segmented to high-LTV customers. - A first-party list of email subscribers who have opened in the last 90 days. - High-intent on-site events such as add-to-cart or checkout-started. We typically launch lookalike segments at balanced reach, layer in a few custom segments built from competitor and category search terms, and let the campaign learn before touching anything. Resist the urge to hand-build narrow interest stacks. The automation does better with a strong seed than with your manual guesses about who the customer is. ## A named setup we actually ship Here is the shape of a Demand Gen build for a DTC brand outgrowing pure Search. Nothing exotic, but the defaults matter. - **Objective:** Sales (or Leads for subscription products). This unlocks conversion-based bidding rather than a pure reach objective. - **Bidding:** Start on Maximize conversions to gather data, then move to a Target CPA or Target ROAS once you have enough conversions for the algorithm to optimize against. Set the first tCPA above your Search CPA on purpose. This is colder traffic; pricing it like Search starves it. - **Audience:** Lookalike segment seeded from high-LTV purchasers at balanced reach, plus one custom segment from category search terms. - **Creative:** One campaign, one ad group, four to six video cuts across aspect ratios, six-plus images, full set of headlines and descriptions. - **Exclusions:** Existing purchasers and active subscribers, so you are paying to acquire, not to re-serve people you already own. ## Measuring it without last-click math This is the part that decides whether Demand Gen survives its first month inside your account. Last-click attribution gives credit to the final touch before conversion, which is almost always Search or direct. A mid-funnel channel that introduced the customer weeks earlier shows up looking weak under that lens, and someone pauses it. We have watched brands kill a channel that was quietly feeding their entire Search line. So instrument it for what it does. Tag everything cleanly, send the events to GA4, and look at assisted conversions and a geo or conversion-lift incrementality read, not the last-click ROAS column. ```text # Demand Gen creative UTM convention utm_source=google utm_medium=demandgen utm_campaign=dtc_prospecting_lookalike_hilv utm_content=video_9x16_hookA_v3 # GA4 measurement structure # Mark these as conversion events in GA4 Admin > Events event: add_to_cart # mid-funnel signal Demand Gen should lift event: begin_checkout # warming signal event: purchase # value: revenue, currency: USD # Read it here, in this order: # 1) GA4 > Advertising > Attribution paths (look for demandgen as an early touch) # 2) Geo or conversion-lift test (holdout regions vs exposed) # 3) Total-account efficiency: did blended CAC hold as spend grew? ``` The single most useful read is the blended one. Turn Demand Gen on, scale it deliberately, and watch whether your total new-customer CAC holds while Search volume climbs. If branded and non-branded Search demand rises while blended CAC stays flat, Demand Gen is doing its job even when its own last-click ROAS looks unimpressive. That relationship, more spend up top producing more captured intent below, is the entire thesis of the channel. If you want a cleaner causal answer, run a geo holdout: hold Demand Gen out of a matched set of regions, run it in the rest, and compare conversion rates. It is more work than reading a dashboard column, and it is the only way to actually know. This is the work we do for DTC brands that have outgrown pure Search inside our [paid media practice](/services/paid-media): building the Demand Gen creative sets and standing up the incrementality reads so the channel gets judged on what it really contributes. ## FAQ **What is Google Demand Gen actually for?** Demand Gen is a mid-funnel channel that creates and warms demand across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail using visual creative and audience signals. It reaches people before they are ready to search, so it should be measured on assisted lift and incrementality, not last-click ROAS. **How is Demand Gen different from a standard Search campaign?** Search captures people who already typed intent into Google, so last-click attribution roughly works. Demand Gen reaches people who have not searched yet, using images and video to build interest. Holding it to the same last-click ROAS target will make a working channel look like it is failing. **What replaced lookalike audiences in Demand Gen?** Google now uses lookalike segments built from your seed lists, such as purchasers, high-value customers, and engaged subscribers, at narrow, balanced, or broad reach. Per Google's documentation, you provide the seed and Google models similar users instead of you defining the audience by hand. ## Build it right the first time If your Search line is efficient but flat, the next unit of growth is usually sitting in the mid-funnel, and Demand Gen is the cleanest way to go get it, as long as you build the creative for it and measure it on its own terms. [Talk to us](/contact) about standing up Demand Gen creative sets and an incrementality read for your account. --- Source: Blue Ridge Consulting Group (BRCG) — https://brcg.co