“Only 1/100th of the total spend is traceable to specific placements,” the executive said. “It’s worse than Performance Max for tracking spend… and Pmax is already awful.”
Performance for Demand Gen campaigns run by agency VML has been inconsistent across multiple brands, according to Miki DeHaven, the agency’s media director.
But others are noticing the experience is becoming more refined. “When we first used Demand Gen, it was dead on arrival,” Lisovetsky said. “Campaigns wouldn’t perform and advertisers would lose money. But there’s been an improvement in the last year.”
Expanding Demand Gen to ‘new levels of murkiness’
Sources note that the incentives coincide with the announcement that Demand Gen inventory is expanding into Google Display Network (GDN), a collection of about 2 million sites, apps, and videos where advertisers can buy ads. Buyers have said GDN includes lower-quality inventory due to its reliance on AdX, rather than offering access to multiple SSPs like rival buy-side platforms.
While opting out of GDN inventory is possible, the first buyer noted that they cannot cherry-pick individual sites upfront and usually only realize the lower-quality placements after running campaigns for a while—at which point they have to manually exclude those sites.
“It takes most advertisers a while to figure it out before excluding those sites and can be time intensive,” the buyer said.
Four ad buyers were told by their Google reps to use Demand Gen for lower-funnel conversions, particularly after Google announced it will replace Video Action Campaigns (VAC)—which drive conversions in YouTube—with Demand Gen campaigns, starting in Q2 2025.
“There’s no transparent report for Demand Gen as far as how much you’re running in Gmail or the search feed versus YouTube,” a second ad buyer at an independent agency told ADWEEK. “The VAC product has its own murkiness, and Demand Gen will take that murkiness to new levels—it’s going to be running in other Google O&O services that VAC wasn’t running in before.”
With this update, the buyer described Demand Gen as the most “blank-check” product in adtech, as Google will be “effectively monetizing its vast inventory with fewer restrictions on yield.”