Creative preferences in Demand Gen campaigns

Demand Gen campaigns offer many features that are designed for social advertisers who want to serve visually-appealing, multi-format ads to people who are in a buying mindset. Learn more About Demand Gen campaigns.

Demand Gen campaigns now offer creative-level controls for video assets, empowering you to choose which video appears in each format. This ensures optimal creative delivery and enhances your storytelling capabilities. Learn how these creative preferences work and discover best practices for maximizing their impact.

How it works

With creative preferences, you can control where your video assets serve, anchoring your video assets to a specific format. There are 3 ad formats available:

In-stream plays before, during, or after other videos. After 5 seconds, the viewer has an option to skip the ad.
In-feed encompasses Youtube (watch-next, home, search), Discover and Gmail feeds.
Shorts or YouTube Shorts is YouTube’s short-form video feed. Users can skip the ad anytime.

Learn more About video ad formats.

How to set creative preferences

Create a new Demand Gen Video ad or modify an existing ad.
Add videos to the ad.
To choose where your videos show, enable the setting to “Choose where your videos show."
1. Note: If you don't make any changes , your videos will show on “all formats'' as is the default serving behavior for Demand Gen ads today.
You can now use the “show on” setting to choose where you want your video to show, by selecting or deselecting the formats.

An illustration of format preferences in Demand Gen campaigns.

To ensure that your videos only show on the formats you choose, select at least one video for each format, or select one video that you’d like to use for all formats. If you don’t choose a format for each video, other videos will show on the formats which don’t have a video preference.

If you only have one video in the ad, that video will serve on “all formats.”
To have full control of your preferences, you must have a video assigned to each format (in-feed, in-stream, and shorts), or a video for all formats . This offers the most control and will require at least 3 videos to accomplish.

Finish populating your ad by adding logos, text and URL settings.
Preview how your ad will look by toggling the “By Property” to “By Format” in the top right corner of your ad preview.
Save your ad.

Best practices for creative preferences

Add assets that meet format requirements

If an asset doesn't meet the requirements for that format, it can't be chosen for that format. A note will appear that describes the reason why the video didn’t meet format requirements. Learn more about Video ad requirements.

Iterate using segment by format

Analyze your previous campaign performance with report segmentation. At the campaign level, segment by ‘ad format’ to see what ads work best with each format. Adapt your creatives so the winning attributes continue to shine for their respective formats. Learn more About Demand Gen campaign metrics and reporting.

Note: This feature will be available in Google Ads Editor and Google Ads API later this year. Modifying ads with ad format preferences in Google Ads Editor or Google Ads API would result in losing the ad format preferences, reverting all videos to show on "all formats."

Was this helpful?

How can we improve it?