Demand Gen: The Pre-Search Play

If you're only running Search and Shopping, you're showing up when everyone else does.

By then, the decision is already half-made. And it wasn't made in your favor.

By the time someone types a keyword, your competitors have been building awareness for weeks.

That's the gap Demand Gen fills.

Google's Demand Gen campaigns reach people before they search. When they're browsing YouTube. Scrolling Discover. Checking Gmail. When they're in consideration mode but haven't typed a keyword yet.

Here's why this matters:

YouTube Shorts alone has 650M+ monthly viewers. 72% say Shorts content influences their purchase decisions - 44 points higher than competing platforms.

More importantly: 44% of the audience you reach on YouTube Shorts is unique. You literally cannot reach them on Instagram Reels.

If this sounds like you're missing half the picture - you are.

If you skip Demand Gen, you're invisible to nearly half your potential customers until the moment they search. And by then, you're competing with everyone else who showed up late.

How we see this play out:

A client added Demand Gen alongside their Search and Shopping campaigns. Their Brand Search ROAS hit 10x.

Not because Brand Search got better. Because Demand Gen was warming audiences that later converted through branded queries.

Without Demand Gen, they'd only see the branded search conversion. They'd think that's where the value was created.

It wasn't. The value was created weeks earlier.

The implementation:

Start with video. YouTube is the core placement. 15-60 second content that tells stories about the problem you solve. Not product demos.

Target lookalikes of your best customers. First-party data from email lists and past purchasers.

Budget: 3-5% of total spend. This isn't your conversion engine. It's your awareness engine that makes your conversion campaigns work harder.

And measure the right things. Demand Gen looks terrible in last-click attribution. Measure branded search volume lift instead.

The brands that show up early don't compete on price at the bottom.

They've already won before the search happens.