Demand gen is replacing video action campaigns (VAC)*. With demand gen, advertisers are able to seek inspiration, conduct research and make online purchase decisions on the most browsed surfaces across YouTube and Google. On average, advertisers who run video ads with Demand Gen saw similar conversions to their video action campaigns at a similar cost per action.1 And by adopting a multi-format strategy, you’ll drive even better performance. Advertisers who uploaded video and image assets to Demand Gen saw 20% more conversions at the same cost per action than those who uploaded video assets only2.
Key dates:
- April 2025: The option to create new video action campaigns will be removed from Google Ads.
- Starting in July 2025: Existing video action campaigns will be upgraded to Demand Gen campaigns automatically.
Learn more in the Google Blog post about this update.
1Google internal data, Global, July 2024, YouTube and GVP inventory only, Google Ads.
2Google internal data, Global, January 2024 until February 2024
How are demand gen and video action campaigns different?
Campaigns being upgraded to demand gen will retain many of the settings that you’re familiar with in video action campaigns but benefit from added features. There is also an added benefit to performance that can come from a Demand Gen campaign’s ability to optimise performance across these added dimensions with automated smart bidding.
Demand Gen inventory is expanded from YouTube to also include Discover, Gmail and Google Display Network.
| Where ads show? | *Discover | Gmail | YouTube | YouTube Shorts | Google Display Network |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demand Gen | |||||
| Video action campaigns |
*Discover Feed is a feature unique to mobile devices. Users can read a feed of articles found for them based on their interests. On Android, users access it by scrolling left from their home screen. On iPhones, it is on the iOS Google App.
Demand gen ad formats have been expanded to include image. Learn more about demand gen campaign asset specs and best practices.
| Ad formats | Instream video | In-feed video | Shorts video | In-feed image | Shorts image |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demand Gen | |||||
| Video action campaigns |
Features you gain by upgrading to Demand Gen
Creatives
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Creative preferences: Creative preferences allow you to anchor a video asset to a particular format within your Demand Gen ad.
- Creative A/B experiments: Demand Gen experiments allow advertisers to test the effectiveness of cross channel creative, including both image and video, by creating a head-to-head test in a clean experiment environment that ensures that users are randomly assigned to isolated groups.
- Text prompt AI-generated images: Easily create custom image assets with generative AI, you can create new and original image assets in just a few clicks. If you have existing images that perform well, you can generate similar options.
Campaign settings:
- Lookalike segments: Lookalike segments are groups of people that share characteristics with others on an existing 'seed' list. You’ll provide the seed list using your first-party data, including a customer match list or a list of people who’ve interacted with your website and app or YouTube channel. We’ll then use this information to find other potential customers with similar characteristics.
- Maximise clicks bid strategy: Max clicks bidding strategy is a great option for someone who wants to run Demand Gen but doesn’t have conversion goals set up in their account.
- Language and location settings are available at the campaign and ad group level: Advertisers may choose between setting their location/language settings at the ad group or campaign level based on their needs. Having these settings at the ad group level allows for easier budget fluidity between your targeted locations if that’s of value to you. If not, you can still create separate campaigns for different locations to more strictly enforce how budgets are allocated across locations. Please note, once you choose if you want your setting at the ad group level or campaign level, you can’t change it once the campaign is set live. Note that radius or proximity targeting is still available in demand gen, but only at the campaign level.
Reporting:
- Format segmentation reporting: Gather additional transparency to understand insights broken out at the format level – segmentation is broken out by in-feed (inclusive of Discover feed, Gmail, YouTube Home feed, YouTube Watch Next and YouTube Search), Skippable in-stream and Shorts.
Feature comparison
Green text indicates a feature you gain in Demand Gen, red text indicates a feature not available in Demand Gen.
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Demand Gen campaigns |
Video action campaigns | |
|---|---|---|
| Where in the sales funnel? | Mid-lower funnel | |
| Inventory |
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| Devices | Mobile, desktop, tablet, connected TVs | |
| Format |
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Video ads |
| Audience |
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| Bidding |
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| Measurement |
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| UI (workflow, reporting) |
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| Extensions |
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How to upgrade to demand gen
The path you take to upgrade depends on your account goals and circumstances, but you can proactively transition by shifting your video action campaign budget to your demand gen campaigns or by creating new demand gen campaigns that mirror the strategy and organisation of your video action campaign setup.
There are 3 ways that you can approach the transition from video action campaigns to demand gen:
- Transition your budgets manually: Once you are ready to start moving budgets over to demand gen, you can decrease the budgets on your video action campaign while proportionally increasing your budgets on your demand gen campaign.
- Use copy and paste: Use copy and paste to create a copy of your existing video action campaign, and paste it as a brand new Demand Gen campaign, carrying over existing settings.
- Use the migration tool (available starting Q1 2025): We’ll take learning from your previous video action campaign and apply them to your new Demand Gen campaign to minimise the learning period. Using this tool will disable your previous video action campaigns but they will remain visible in your account for reporting purposes. If you plan to transition as video only without leveraging new demand gen features, use the migration tool to transform your video action campaign into a demand gen campaign.
If your video action campaign is ending
We recommend creating a demand gen when your video action campaign ends, either through manual creation or copying and pasting an existing video action campaign into a new demand gen campaign. If you already have a demand gen campaign that has the settings you want for your video action campaign budget, you can move the video action campaign budget to that campaign, instead of creating a new demand gen campaign. There should be little need to wait for the migration tool in this scenario.
If your video action campaigns are evergreen or always on
If you’d like to transition your campaign mid-flight or if you have always-on campaigns, you may want to transition your budget with a more phased approach and consider using the migration tool.
- Move budgets:
- Most advertisers, especially those with shallow conversions*: Ramp Demand Gen budget to 100% of video action campaign budget
- Advertisers who have had ramp issues in the past, or 'deep' conversion*:
- Ramp Demand Gen budget to 10% of video action campaign: Let run 1–2 weeks
- Ramp the demand gen budget to 50% of the video action campaign and let it run 1–2 weeks
- Ramp the demand gen budget to 100% of the video action campaign
*’Shallow conversions’ refers to actions on your site that are relatively ‘easy’ for users to be counted as a conversion (like a visit to a page on your site that takes few clicks to navigate to) vs. ‘Deep conversions’ refers to things like purchases or form submissions which typically require a higher level of user interaction.
If you take no action
If you take no action, your campaign will automatically be upgraded to demand gen in Q2 2025. We recommend shifting your video action campaign spend to demand gen prior to the automatic upgrade for the following reasons:
- Migrating early allows you to learn the demand gen setup flow and test features unique to demand gen.
- By not upgrading, you would be foregoing the potential performance gains that you could have been realizing, had you upgraded sooner.
- Auto-migration means that your campaigns will use some default settings, which you can customise if you manually migrate.
- The ability to monitor performance at the rate you’re comfortable with between now and when the auto-upgrade happens is beneficial compared to waiting until the automatic upgrade, particularly if you have lots of campaigns to upgrade.
Copy and paste tool
In Google Ads, you can replicate existing campaigns and convert them to demand gen using a copy and paste option that builds on to the existing campaign copy and paste workflow. This option will only appear if the selected campaigns are video action campaigns.
You'll have to add your logo and business name during the process, since these are demand gen settings that video action campaigns don't have. Logo and business name will be pre-populated based on existing demand gen, Performance Max or other ads campaigns.
How to copy an existing campaign and paste as a new demand gen campaign
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Campaigns to access the Campaigns tab.
- Select the campaign that you want to copy.
- Click the Edit menu, then click Copy.
- Click the Edit menu again, then click Paste. You’ll then find tick boxes with paste options.
- Select the option to change your selected campaigns to demand gen.
- Set your Business name.
- Click
Edit logo to set your campaign logo. You can choose your logo in 3 ways:
- Upload: Upload your own file.
- Website or social: Enter your URL. We’ll scan your website for images that meet our size requirements.
- Asset library: Choose your preferred logo from the asset library.
- Select your desired image and click Save.
- To finish, click Paste.
.Once you paste, you can navigate to your campaign and also add features that are unique to demand gen, such as lookalike audiences or video and image together in one campaign.
Migration tool
The migration tool will help take your existing video action campaign and transform it into a video-only demand gen campaign. With the migration tool, you will copy your existing video action campaign and paste it as a like-for-like video-only demand gen campaign. When you paste as a demand gen campaign, this will move your existing video action campaign to deleted status. When you use the migration tool, we will reference your existing video action campaign history to help ramp up your demand gen campaign faster.
You will still be able to see your old campaign in the account by looking at campaigns with deleted status.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Will there be any alerts about this migration?
Where can I find the video action campaigns in my account?
You can use a combination of filters to identify video action campaigns in your account.
In the Campaigns tab:
- Click ‘+ Filter’
- Add the following 2 filters:
- Campaign type: Video
- Campaign subtype: Drive conversions
You may want to include the 'Status' filter and select all except 'Removed'.
Removed video action campaigns will not be upgraded automatically to demand gen. 'Paused' and 'Ended' campaigns may be upgraded, depending on how recently any video action campaigns have accrued spending in your account.
What are best practices when upgrading to demand gen?
| Setup | Use one of our upgrade tools to create your demand gen campaign. If you follow the same goals as your video action campaign, make sure that you use the same conversion goals and settings. Follow a consolidated campaign structure and combine audience themes into the same ad groups. |
| Audience | Replicate your audience approach from comparable video action campaigns and try testing Lookalikes. Running the same audience as your existing campaigns will not affect performance. |
| Budget |
Conversion-based bidding: Set a daily budget greater than 20x your expected CPA. Value-based bidding: Set a daily budget greater than 20x (expected average conversion value/tROAS). |
| Bidding |
Try similar bid levels to your video action campaigns, and set your conversion attribution window to >28 days. If you need to optimise the campaign, limit bid changes to only +/- 15% and wait a week between changes. |
| Creative | Use existing video assets, ensuring a mix of horizontal and vertical videos. We highly recommend adding image assets as well. Review our creative best practices. |
| Duration | We recommend a minimum of 4–6 weeks duration for running your Demand Gen test. Extend the duration to avoid unexpected performance issues. |
| Evaluation benchmark | Evaluate your Demand Gen performance against campaign specific KPIs aligned to your marketing goals and your bidding strategy. |
Ramp-up
As an AI-driven campaign, demand gen’s machine learning model needs time to learn about your customers. To create a positive experience and account for the learning period, let the campaign ramp up for at least 2 weeks or 50 conversions before making any changes to your construction. This is the same expectation and best practice that would be applicable if you have transitioned a video action campaign to a new video action campaign.
Ramp-up timeline:
- Launch demand gen
- Learning period: ~2 weeks
- Campaign period with optimisation: Min. 4–6 weeks recommended
- Conversion lag time: ‘X’ days
- Scale and upgrade
Helpful tips
- Ensure that there is clear alignment between the campaign goals to measure success, ramp time and budget.
- Have a consolidated campaign structure for effective learning – consolidate ad groups by combining similar audience themes whenever possible and consider merging ad groups with fewer than ~30 conversions in 30 days.
- Limit bid changes to +/- 15% to avoid performance volatility.
- Utilise campaign optimisation recommendations and performance readouts throughout the campaign flight.
Suggested alternatives to features that aren’t available in demand gen
| Feature | Suggested alternative |
| Lead forms (beta) | Lead forms are available in PMax. |
| Seasonal events targeting | Use our audience finder tool to see what alternative targeting might be similar. |
| New customer acquisition (NCA) | Learn about alternatives to NCA. |
| Shared budgets | With demand gen, you set location and language targeting at the ad group level. This allows for similar budget fluidity that might have attracted you to use shared budgets. |
| Frequency capping | Frequency capping is a concept that works well in a brand campaign context, however, demand gen is a performance-optimised campaign where frequency caps can sometimes be counterproductive to your performance and where over-exposure is accounted for automatically. |
| Affiliate location assets | These settings are not available and do not have alternatives. |
| Omnichannel bidding (Bidding on store visits) | Coming in H1 2025. |
Will demand gen campaigns compete with my existing campaigns?
If you keep the campaigns in the same account or have ads driving to the same final URL* in different accounts, this tells Google Ads that they’re for the same advertiser and they will not cause you to have to pay more per auction. If there are overlapping targeting, ad formats and inventory between campaigns in your account, it may mean that one campaign starts to serve more often and spend more in comparison to the other campaign.
Example: You have video action campaign ‘A’ and Demand Gen campaign ‘B’ that both have video ads and target France and the ‘Sports fans’ audience. A user is about to watch a YouTube video where an in-stream ad is eligible to serve. Before the bid is considered, Google Ads sees ads from Campaign A and B are both from the same advertiser and eligible to serve. Using quality signals, Google Ads determines A is the better ad to enter the auction. The bid is considered to determine which eligible ad of all competitors in the auction should serve and how much they pay. Ad 'A' enters the auction and serves, accruing a cost.
- 'B' did not cause 'A' to have a higher bid.
- 'A' served 'instead of' 'B'. If this is a recurring scenario, over time 'B' might have a harder time serving, and you would start to see 'A' accrue more of the impressions and spending. The degree to which serving is uneven is dependent on the variance of quality signals between the 2 campaigns.
If this is a concern, you can make the campaigns' targeting overlap less (i.e. use different audiences, use different geographic locations, etc.). There can sometimes be benefits to campaigns working in tandem, even if one campaign does use more of the budget. Video action campaigns and demand gen don’t have perfectly overlapping audiences or inventory, so serving alongside each other means that the combination of the campaigns can have broad reach and ability to find conversions. If doing this, make sure that you look at performance in totality across the campaigns instead of individually
*In the final URL, just the root domain has to be the same in order for our system to consider the ads from the same advertiser for them to not bid against each other. For example, Ad A has a final URL of example.com/shoes and Ad B has a final URL of example.com/shirts. The system will recognise these ads as being from the same advertiser as the root domain of example.com is the same.
Can I view historical data from my video action campaign after it is upgraded to demand gen?
We will retain your video action campaign in your account after it is copy/pasted (or upgraded automatically), that is, you will see a paused or removed video action campaign and a newly created demand gen campaign.
When created, the Demand Gen campaign will default to be named the original Video Action Campaign name + #2.
You’ll still see your legacy video action campaign in your account, and the naming convention should make it easy to map source video action campaigns to their migrated demand gen campaign upgrade.
Should I add more assets to my new demand gen campaign once my video action campaigns transition to demand gen?
Will my ads need to be re-approved upon creating new campaigns?
Are sensitive verticals eligible for demand gen?
Can I use the new customer acquisition goal (NCA) in demand gen?
The new customer acquisition bidding goal is not supported in demand gen. Instead, demand gen users can power their prospecting strategies and acquire new customers using exclusions:
- Lookalike segments: Find potential new customers similar to your existing customers to grow your business:
- Create a data segment of existing customers: Upload any relevant customer data into your Google Ads account. Examples of your data could include your ‘Purchasers’ via website visitors, customer lists of past (or recent) customers, or app users.
- Create a Lookalike segment: use these existing customer segments to create a Lookalike segment. Lookalike segments automatically exclude anyone in your seed lists.
- Select 'Broad reach' to expand potential new customer pool.
- Device ID lists cannot be used as seed lists for lookalike expansion.
- Exclusions: Pair our ability to exclude your existing customers with our wide array of high-value audience segments:
- Create a data segment of existing customers: Upload any relevant customer data into your Google Ads account. Examples of your data could include your ‘Purchasers’ via website visitors, customer lists of past (or recent) customers, or app users.
- Exclude from targeting: Add these existing customer segments to your 'Exclusions' in your ad group audience.
- Add high-value audience segments: Augment your targeting strategy by selecting audience segments that are likely to become new customers from our wide array of options, for example, users in-market for your product category or users who have searched for your brand on Google or YouTube.
Am I billed the same way I am for video action campaigns?
Video action campaigns and demand gen both optimise for conversions or conversion-based goals (like tCPA, conversion value or ROAS, depending on the bid strategy), but their billing is based on different metrics.
Video action campaign billing is based on CPM.
Demand gen uses mixed billing (similar to PMax), including CPM and CPC bidding, which varies based on the Google surface and ad format:
- YouTube video: CPM
- YouTube image: CPM
- Gmail: Teaser Click (The first click to expand the ad. You aren’t charged for the secondary click to the website)
- Discover image: CPC
- Discover video: Engaged view (When someone watches your video for 5 seconds or more and clicks to play the video or clicks a link, that’s considered an engaged view.)
Where can I learn more about demand gen?
Can I expect all video action campaign audience segments that are supported on Demand Gen to work the same way on Demand Gen?
The below Google audience segments are limited to in-stream, in-feed and Shorts ads on YouTube (similar to video action campaigns). These segments include:
- Parental status
- Expanded Google-built segments (within 'Interests and detailed demographics')
- Certain in-market Google-built segments
- Note: If you need to verify specific segments, you may ask your account manager.
