Use a product feed to show your products in Demand Gen campaigns

Add product feeds to your Demand Gen campaigns

Capturing engagement and action across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, Demand Gen campaigns are ideal for advertisers who want to serve visually-appealing, multi-format ads on Google’s most impactful surfaces. Demand Gen campaigns help advertisers find and convert consumers with immersive, relevant, and visual creatives that grab attention and spur action in the right moment. Product feeds turn Demand Gen campaigns into a virtual storefront, driving consideration and purchase.

If you’re a retailer, you may have a product catalog that you source when it comes to your advertising. A Google Merchant Center product feed is a great place to store that product catalog because it helps millions of people discover, explore, and buy products.

Use product feeds with Demand Gen to turn your image or video ads into a virtual storefront. With this creative type, you can show browsable product imagery, and inspire customers to visit your website to learn more about your business or make a purchase.

Improve your campaign performance by adding your product feed:
  • Established Demand Gen campaigns with large product selections typically experience a 33% increase in conversions upon adding product feeds.
  • On average, advertisers experience 18% more clicks at a similar cost by adding product feeds to Demand Gen campaigns with shallow conversions.

Benefits

  • Performance: Promote the right products to the right audience at the right moment. Google machine learning will anticipate a user's interests and intent to automatically show relevant products, helping to meet your max conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS goal.
  • Simplicity: Instead of creating an ad for each item you promote, connect your Google Merchant Center feed to a new Demand Gen campaign. Images and product details in your product feed will be used as a large set of creatives for ads that are automatically surfaced to potential customers.
  • Flexibility: Pair your tailored products with specific audience segments, while leveraging image and video formats (short + long form) to promote your products.

Prerequisites

  1. Set up your account for Google Merchant Center. Learn more on how to Sign up for Google Merchant Center.
  2. Create a feed for your Google Merchant Center account. Learn more about feeds and product data specifications. New product feeds can take up to 3 days to approve, so take this into account when planning your campaigns.
  3. Learn how to link your Merchant Center Account to your Google Ads accounts.
  4. In Google Merchant Center, ensure that you enable “Shopping ads” as a marketing method.
  5. We recommend that your products are represented with square images (1:1) to ensure that your product ads receive the best coverage possible. Images within a 0.6-1.4 ratio will receive sufficient coverage.
  6. Familiarize yourself with the Google Ads policies, Shopping ads policies, and product feeds for Demand Gen policies.
  7. Learn more about troubleshooting your product feed.

Best practices

Use these best practices for optimal results for your prospecting or remarketing campaigns with product feeds Prospecting campaigns will help you achieve a range of objectives, like generating website traffic, engagements, and sales. Remarketing campaigns typically focus on specific goals.

Location / Region targeting

If your Google Merchant Center feed is configured to target multiple regions but you would like to target a subset of these regions in your campaign, select the target locations during campaign construction or campaign settings. During serving time, Demand Gen will match products and users from the targeted country. Note, make sure that your campaign location/region targeting matches the locations you set for your products in your Google Merchant Center account.

Product groups

When choosing which products to include in your campaign, it’s important to include enough products so that the system can effectively personalize the ads to each user.

In general, we recommend including as many products as possible that are relevant and a good match for your selected audience and other assets you added to the campaign. While campaigns with as few as one product are supported, Google recommends at least 4 to maximize eligibility across all Demand Gen ad placements. Recommended best practice is 50 products.

Feed Labels

Use feed labels to advertise products from specific product data sources. Feed labels let you advertise all products with the same feed label in a campaign. You can select only one feed label per campaign. Feed labels allow more flexibility in campaign targeting. For example, product data sources using the same language could be given the same feed label, making it easier to target those product data sources in one campaign.

Product filtering

 Product filtering during campaign construction only supports one filter method such as “product ID” or “product type”, and supports OR logic during product selection. Use post construction filtering to add subdivisions or exclusions to your existing product filters (AND logic). For example, if you filtered by product type during campaign construction but want to filter by product type AND a specific custom label, you can add the custom label subdivision in post construction filtering.

Bids and budgets
  • If you're reporting conversion values, use the target return on ad spend (tROAS) bidding strategy. tROAS provides automated, real-time bidding for you to hit your target ROAS, by analyzing your conversion values and using them to predict future conversions and associated values.
  • Benchmark your KPIs against your social channels, as Demand Gen ads run on feed-based ad placements with social-like ad formats.
  • Recommended daily budget for campaigns with target based bidding strategies (Target CPA or Target ROAS) is 10 times the CPA.
    • For campaigns with max based bidding strategies, like Maximize Conversions, is at least $100 USD.
Tip: Just like standard Demand Gen campaigns, allow 1–2 weeks without making bid/budget changes for your campaign to ramp up.

Creatives

 Assets for product feed ads are primarily populated from your Google Merchant Center catalog. You will still need to add the following ad details:
  • (Recommended) Image and products ad: Add images with your product ads. The images can appear as an alternative or a fallback when product details can't be shown and can help your ads serve to more users.
  • (Recommended) Video and products ad: Add videos with your product ads to expand your reach on YouTube placements that showcase rich and shoppable ad formats. Upload videos in 3 aspect ratios (landscape, square, and vertical) to optimize for serving. A vertical video will enable your ad to serve on YouTube Shorts, which averages more than 50 billion daily views.
  • Ad headline and description: Use your ad-level headline and description to show your storefront or overall offering. Note: You're only able to use one headline and description.
    • Example: “Free shipping on all products” or “10% off storewide”.
  • Note: Add images with 500 x 500 pixels or greater resolution to your Google Merchant Center catalog to serve product feeds on Connected TV (CTV) for YouTube Shopping ads.

Tip: We recommend setting up both an image and products ad and a video and products ad for best performance and full format / placement coverage.

Google Merchant Center
  • Make sure the product specifications are accurate in your feed.
  • Make sure your product feed has items available for the countries that you’re targeting. Product availability for your campaign is based on the settings in your product feed.
    • While Demand Gen campaigns don't support Regional Availability and Pricing (RAAP) feeds, you can use several workarounds to manage product ads for different regions. Learn how to Troubleshoot product feeds for Demand Gen.
  • Keep critical product info such as product offer title, image, url, price, and sale price up-to-date.
  • (Recommended) Use the Google Merchant Center attribute short title [short_title] to power your thumb-stopping product ads.
    • Use quick and snappy titles, which are usually less than 65 characters, that can attract user attention as they browse.
    • Avoid attributes that are specific to product variants, like sizes or gender.
  • Use the item_group_id attribute for large merchant feeds that have identical or similar items. This attribute allows you to group product variants in your feed, so that we don’t show duplicate product images in your ad.
  • New product feeds can take up to 3 days to approve, so take this into account when planning your campaigns.

We recommend that your products are represented with square images (1:1) to ensure that your product ads receive the best coverage possible. Images within a 0.6-1.4 ratio will receive sufficient coverage.

Product Click Tracking

Track your product performance by using valuetrack parameters such as {campaign_id} and {adgroup_id} in the ads redirect attribute for your product in Google Merchant Center. Learn more about how to Track your value product performance.

Note: The Google Ads tracking template supports product tracking. Learn more about how to Accurately track product feed clicks.

Instructions

Set up your campaign

Note: The instructions below are part of a new Google Ads user experience that will launch for all advertisers in 2024. If you’re still using the previous version of Google Ads, review the Quick reference map or use the Search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page you’re searching for.

Step 1 of 5: Create a new campaign or add your product feed to an existing campaign

Create a new campaign

You can duplicate, delete, and create a new campaign (or ad group) from the navigation menu on the left.

  1. Select on the 3-dot menu next to “Campaign” in the navigation menu and select Add new campaign.
  2. Add the campaign name.
  3. Select on the toggle to “Run a product feed campaign” and select your Google Merchant Center account.