I was looking through our client dashboard the other day where I noticed an interesting case.
One of our clients spent over $420K on Google last month… and more than 80% of that came from Demand Gen.
That caught my attention because…
This is something you rarely saw a few years ago.
Back then, Search & Shopping often dominated spend for the majority of ecom brands.
Demand Gen (YouTube Ads) worked more as a “supporting” channel, getting a small part of the budget.
Apparently… this is not always the case anymore.
We’re seeing more accounts where Demand Gen takes the largest share of spend
And I think it comes down to one thing:
The platform has become far more effective.
Google rolled out major improvements to Demand Gen in 2025 and 2026.
Some notable ones are:
Channel controls: You can choose which surfaces to serve your ads on
Better match: Targeting has become a lot sharper with gemini. It’s getting much better at matching your ads to the right person.
More inventory: There are more placements in rotation now, and plenty of them are giving profitable returns
This year, we’ve seen a ton of new winning placements & creative formats inside our accounts.
Image ads on Discover are a great example.
Every week, I'm seeing more of them rip inside client accounts.
They've quietly become one of the strongest and most reliable cold traffic funnels we're running.
Because of all that:
A lot of brands that couldn't get Demand Gen to work before… are now scaling it hard.
In my opinion, it’s slowly becoming the new Meta Ads for ecom.
Big claim, I know.
But we’ve got clients spending $20k-$30k/day on Demand Gen, generating more revenue than they do on Meta.
Just to give you a few examples:
A brand we grew from $10k/week to $63k/week in spend within 30 days.
Another brand we grew from $85k to $850k spend in 40 days.
Don’t get me wrong…
Meta is still THE platform for eCom brands. And for a Google Ads account, Search and Shopping are still important.
But it's pretty insane how aggressively brands are scaling on Demand Gen.
We've always been looking for more ways to scale cold traffic on Google.
And Demand Gen is definitely the biggest one at the moment.
On top of that, Google's also pushing a bunch of new features on Demand Gen right now
You can tell they want this to become their version of Meta ads.
So it’s only going to get better in the next few years
And I think there will be a lot more money to be made with this campaign type over the next few years.
If you want to see how far (and how fast) your Google Ads account can scale with the right Demand Gen strategy…
We’ll take a look at your account and give you a practical roadmap to grow your brand.
Jackson
Founder and CEO of Echelonn.
How we can help:
Get a free Google ads audit: For brands spending more than $20k/mo. or making over 1 million annually, we’ll identify the key bottlenecks in your account, and turn it into a free 90-day scaling plan. Click here.
Tell me more about yourself: Answer this 20-second survey so I can personalize your experience and make these emails more useful to you. Click here.
How did you like this article?
P.S. Got a friend interested in Google ads? Share the love and send them our way.
If you’re that awesome friend, you can subscribe here.
