5 Little-Known Methods to Optimize Google Ads with Demand Gen
Driven by the dual forces of consumer behavior iteration and technological innovation, the digital marketing ecosystem is undergoing an unprecedented paradigm evolution. Today’s consumers no longer follow a linear purchase journey—instead, they seamlessly switch between streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping (4S behavior). This shift has forced marketers to rethink traditional strategies, particularly the long-standing divide between branding and performance marketing. Enter Demand Gen campaigns in Google Ads, a revolutionary approach that bridges the gap between upper-funnel brand awareness and lower-funnel conversions.
For decades, companies like Fielmann, one of Europe’s leading opticians, relied on traditional media such as TV and outdoor advertising to build brand recognition. However, as digital transformation accelerated, Fielmann realized that its upper-funnel marketing alone was insufficient to drive online sales. Consumers now engage with brands across multiple touchpoints—YouTube, Google Discovery, Gmail—often simultaneously. The challenge? Creating demand while converting it into measurable results. Demand Gen campaigns in Google Ads, powered by AI, offer the perfect solution by combining broad reach with precise targeting, ensuring brands remain relevant at every stage of the customer journey.
1. The Intersection of Branding and Performance Marketing
Historically, branding and performance marketing have operated as distinct disciplines, often siloed within organizations. Branding focused on long-term equity building through broad awareness campaigns, while performance marketing prioritized measurable, short-term conversions. However, this dichotomy no longer reflects the reality of consumer behavior. Today’s buyers expect a seamless journey—whether they encounter a brand through an entertaining YouTube Short or a targeted Google Ads Shopping ad.
Demand generation campaigns have achieved domain convergence in Google Ads, driving a paradigm shift in the industry. With AI-driven audience targeting, brands can reach users at the front end of the funnel while driving back-end conversion behaviors such as add-to-cart. For example, Fielmann’s campaign not only increased brand awareness, but also significantly increased shopping cart operations, fully demonstrating the synergistic value of brand building and effective conversion.
At Topkee, we achieve strategic integration through tools such as TTO. As an all-in-one campaign management platform, TTO simplifies audience segmentation, creative testing, and cross-channel performance tracking. The team also uses advanced scoring tools to conduct comprehensive website assessments to identify SEO issues and optimize content; manage multiple advertising accounts, link budgets, and automate conversion events through TTO initialization settings; and use TM settings, a flexible tracking tool, to analyze advertising performance in detail to ensure that the brand remains relevant at all touchpoints. These campaigns successfully stimulated and captured demand, proving that the strategies not only complement each other, but also have dependencies.
2. Fielmann’s Success with Demand Gen
Fielmann’s adoption of Demand Gen campaigns in Google Ads marked a pivotal shift in its digital strategy. Initially skeptical about Google Ads' potential beyond lower-funnel performance (e.g., text and Shopping ads), the company partnered with Google and digital agency Pia Media to test Demand Gen’s full-funnel capabilities. The campaign leveraged YouTube (including Shorts), Discovery, and Gmail ads, targeting a broad audience during the 2024 summer season with visually engaging creatives showcasing sunglasses and prescription glasses.
The Google Ads campaign achieved 12 million impressions and 223,000 clicks at a competitive cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of €9.04, driving a 7.7% increase in purchase intent despite the brand’s 90% awareness. Searches for “Fielmann sunglasses” surged 60%, highlighting Demand Gen’s ability to naturally stimulate demand. In addition to the upper-funnel impact, the series also brought tangible conversions, with “add to cart” actions increasing by 24% and purchase intent increasing by 2.8%, confirming the synergy between brand promotion and performance. AI-enabled audiences helped Fielmann accurately reach young groups and women, while creative automation simplified material production. As its performance marketing manager Vera Lüdemann said, “AI helps us scale high-quality creativity without interrupting the Google Ads campaign workflow.”
This success prompted Feldman to reshape the internal structure, break down data barriers between teams, and deeply integrate Display & Video 360 (DV360) insights to continuously improve Demand Gen strategy. Florian Müller, head of performance marketing, emphasized: "Marketing can no longer operate in isolation - integration is crucial."
3. AI Applications, Industry Practices, and Future Trends in Demand Gen Campaigns
AI is the core driver of Demand Gen's success in Google Ads. Its precise audience targeting helps brands like Fielmann reach young groups and female users, while improving creative scalability by quickly generating high-quality materials. As Fielmann's marketing manager said, AI can keep activities fresh without interrupting workflows, and can also resolve the complexity of massive data and fragmented touchpoints in modern marketing, allowing marketers to focus on strategies through pattern recognition, automatic bidding, and personalization.
In industry practice, Fielmann achieved internal reorganization by dismantling data silos and integrating Display & Video 360 insights, emphasizing cross-team collaboration; Google simplified its product portfolio to reduce the burden of managing multiple systems. Other cases also highlight the diverse value of Demand Gen: B&B Hotels uses AI automation to increase revenue in Southeast Asia, Swapfiets achieves sales growth in the Netherlands through YouTube, and Bonprix uses GA4 and server-side tracking to balance privacy and remarketing.
Visual search and voice search will gradually become mainstream, and Google's Circle to Search and AI Overviews features are subverting consumers' product discovery paths. At the same time, the high frequency of interaction between users and content on the YouTube platform has made emotional brand building and social operations the core focus of marketing. Marketers need to use AI to achieve a highly personalized experience for Google Ads, build trust with transparent strategies, and continue to make breakthroughs in the Demand Gen field.
Conclusion
Google Ads' Demand Gen campaigns represent the future of integrated marketing, seamlessly combining brand building and conversion through AI-driven multi-channel strategies. Fielmann's case proves its dual value of stimulating demand and increasing conversion rates. For marketers, it is necessary to break down barriers, embrace automation, value consumer trust, and make good use of tools such as AI and YouTube to achieve breakthroughs. Consult Topkee's Google Ads experts now to start a Demand Gen-driven brand growth strategy.
