“What’s Happening: Google Ads is planning to upgrade YouTube Video Action Campaigns (VAC) to Demand Gen in Q2 of 2025. Google says the goal is to enhance advertisers ability to drive growth through a multi-format approach. Predicted benefits include: expanded reach across Google’s network with up to 3 billion monthly users, the opportunity of more creative flexibility utilizing both video and image ads in a single campaign, enhanced audience targeting, and consistent performance. Combining video and image assets within Demand Gen could increase conversions by 20% at the same cost per conversion compared to solely relying on video.
How does this affect us (us and our clients)?: This change comes shortly after the complete migration of Discovery campaigns into Demand Gen campaigns. The merge initiated in October of 2023 and officially took place in March of this year. Considering we’ve had clients utilize Demand Gen and VAC on separate occasions, this is something to be aware of to relay and clarify with clients who intend on or are considering taking advantage of the benefits of VAC. Soon they’ll get the added benefit of Demand Gen! With that, if clients are utilizing VAC, consider testing out YouTube within Demand Gen campaigns and see how performance is comparable to standalone VAC.
POV: Video Action campaigns were already integrated in Demand Gen campaigns, but Demand Gen will soon be the official way to create VAC. The hypothesis is that Google is trying to create a Do-It-All super campaign type for consideration and conversion campaign formats. Demand Gen is the only campaign type within Google that can utilize similar or lookalike audiences, which were officially sunset in Google Ads summer of 2023, but quietly reintroduced with the introduction of Demand Gen campaigns end of 2023. This audience type has been a favorite for a decent amount of clients so it was a bummer to share that news with clients and try to come up with a strong alternative. As Google keeps improving on the performance of Demand Gen and integrating more features, there will be more opportunities to use across clients and therefore utilize the similar audience feature again.
