YouTube, Performance Max and Demand Gen
Search finds people who are already looking for you. These three find the people who aren't yet. They work, in the right order and for the right businesses, and I'll tell you honestly which is which.
Book a free 30-minute consultationWhen each one makes sense
YouTube Ads
For reaching a specific kind of person at scale, with a video that does real work: an explanation, a demonstration, a reason to remember you. It needs good conversion tracking and patience, because most of its results show up later as searches for your name. At Google I ran video alongside search for DeVry University across 18 markets, where it helped bring cost per acquisition down 32%.
Performance Max
Google's all-in-one campaign type that places ads across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Maps. It's strong for e-commerce with a product feed and for businesses with lots of conversions to learn from. It's a poor fit for low-volume lead generation, where it tends to find cheap conversions that aren't good ones. I run it with brand searches excluded and lead quality fed back in, or I don't run it.
Demand Gen
Image and video ads in YouTube feeds, Discover and Gmail, aimed at audiences rather than keywords. Useful for consumer brands and for remarketing to people who already visited. Less useful as a first campaign for a B2B company with a long sales cycle.
The order I recommend
- Search, working properly. Tracking right, search terms clean, bidding settled. This is where the buyers are, and it's the baseline everything else is measured against.
- Remarketing. Showing ads to people who already visited is the cheapest extra volume there is. Demand Gen or Performance Max can do it.
- Then new audiences. YouTube or Demand Gen to people who haven't heard of you, measured by what happens to search volume and conversions in the weeks after, not by clicks on the video.
If someone proposes starting with step three, ask them why.
Questions people ask
Do we need a video?
For YouTube, yes, and it matters more than the targeting. For Performance Max and Demand Gen, Google can assemble ads from images and text, but a real video does better.
Our agency put everything into Performance Max. Is that wrong?
Not always, but often. When one campaign holds the whole budget you lose the ability to see what's working. On the call I'll ask what the account looks like and tell you what I'd check first.
Is this part of monthly management?
Yes. If I manage your account, these campaign types are included when they make sense. There's no separate fee for a campaign type.
Find out what your Google Ads budget is really buying.
A free 30-minute call, and you'll talk to me.