The YouTube Four to drive conversions

You no longer have to choose between brand-building and conversions. YouTube gives you both, accelerating your next wave of growth through Demand Gen. With it, you can unlock untapped demand and drive action with new customers—on the #1 platform they turn to when they’re ready to research and buy.¹

Fueled by Google AI and deep audience signals, Demand Gen finds your next customer before they start searching. Its relevance and precision help you deliver the business outcomes you care about, from site traffic and leads to online sales and store visits.

To maximize your performance, we created the YouTube Performance Four: your strategic blueprint for driving conversions on YouTube. These are the essential building blocks you need to realize the full ROI of Demand Gen campaigns.

1. Prioritize Data Strength for Demand Gen by implementing sitewide Google tag, upgrading to Google tag gateway, and connecting your data sources in Data Manager.

Data strength is the foundation for driving performance with Demand Gen. The campaign is only as powerful as the quality of the data fueling it. To allow Demand Gen to make the smartest optimizations, you need to connect your most high-quality business signals.

• First, upgrade to Google Tag Gateway (GTG) with just one click through partners including Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, Google Cloud, or Webflow. This upgrade enables you to track more conversions and signals measured gives while improving downstream bidding and ROAS with Demand Gen. Customers who adopt GTG see, on average, +14% observed conversions.²
• Second, utilize Data Manager to maximize and import your first-party data and signals. Whether using the Data Manager API or working directly in the Google Ads UI, you can connect, manage and optimize your website, analytics, mobile app data, and first-party data into a single ingestion point—built with privacy-enhancing technologies by default.

Accurate measurement is your primary performance multiplier with Demand Gen. When you prioritize Data Strength, Demand Gen’s bidding, creatives, and targeting will have the foundational intelligence needed to perform for your business.

2. Align your bidding strategies to your goals and calibrate bids for sufficient conversion volume to fuel AI optimization and sustained performance.

Now that AI has your high-quality data flowing in, it’s time to put that intelligence to work with conversion volume. Demand Gen campaigns offer a variety of performance bidding strategies, primarily focused on either driving efficiency or volume:

• For efficiency, if you have a desired return on investment (ROI), consider using a “target” strategy like tCPA (Target Cost Per Acquisition) or tROAS (Target Return on Ad Spend).
• For volume, if your goal is to maximize your full campaign budget, use a maximize conversion or maximize conversion value strategy.

With your bidding strategy in place, it’s critical that you set up adequate budgets to ensure the AI has the ability to optimize and sustain performance. Give the algorithm time to gather sufficient data, generating at least 50 conversions during the learning period quickly to start delivering results.

Stronger data fuels conversion volume; better conversions power smarter targeting; and when your budgets are calibrated, Demand Gen knows how to connect with your most profitable opportunities.

3. Scale to high-value customers dynamically with optimized targeting, 1PD audience segments, and the new customer acquisition goal.

Demand Gen provides smart, dynamic solutions to help you target audiences most relevant to your business goals.

• To continuously scale conversions, optimized targeting combined with first party data seedlists looks beyond your manually-selected audience segments with the power of AI. It uncovers high-intent users you might have missed who exhibit the same conversion-driving behaviors as your existing customer base.
• If your brand is focused on expansion, the new customer acquisition (NCA) goal allows Google to prioritize bidding for users who have never purchased from you before, ensuring your budget is efficiently dedicated to net-new growth.

With AI-powered bidding and optimization fueled by audience signals, your Demand Gen campaigns are now primed to capture high-value demand and drive ROI.

4. Maximize performance through creative variety with image & video assets, including creator partnerships boost on YouTube.

And finally, your Demand Gen campaign needs creative variety to tell your story across Google and YouTube’s surfaces, building “Excellent” ads that drive performance.

• To achieve maximum performance and reach, you must tell your brand’s story across every asset type (video, image), aspect ratio (horizontal, square, vertical) and achieve full surface coverage (run on all channels). AI-powered video enhancements help you effortlessly create additional versions of your videos.

• Supercharge with creator partnerships boost, which transforms authentic creator content about your brand into performant ads. This bridges the gap between the deep trust of a YouTube creator and the scale of Google AI, delivering native, built-for-platform content to high potential new customers.

Recap

With the right fuel across data sources, targeting, bidding and creatives, you can power Demand Gen to find and convert your next high-value audiences. According to a report from Measured in the US, 46% of Demand Gen conversions came from net-new customers, outperforming the paid social average.³ Adopt the YouTube Performance Four to maximize your results with Demand Gen today.