Gen vs Performance Max: Complete Comparison 2025

Combined with their budget suggestions, the math often doesn’t work for smaller budgets. But they mean that Demand Gen is effectively off-limits (or a money suck) for accounts and brands with smaller budgets. By jumping straight into Demand Gen, you risk flooding the top of your funnel without seeing real ROI, which is a terrible way to start a Google Ads account. Instead, it takes advantage of Google’s massive library of audience data points to find people who might be a fit.

This analysis should include demographic information, purchasing behaviors, and customer feedback, which collectively contribute to a more accurate and actionable ICP. While it’s unlikely that a business will capture the entire TAM, understanding its size and scope allows companies to set realistic goals and benchmarks for their demand generation activities. Accurately calculating TAM involves understanding the broader market landscape, including the specific industries, geographies, and market segments that align with the company’s offerings. Loyal customers become great advocates for a brand and often lead to more people being referred into the top of the demand-generation funnel.

Say you want to generate demand through your brand’s social media channels. This strategy covers marketing channels like email, performance based demand generation social media platforms and content distribution. ICPs are fictitious personas, but they build a description of a person who needs your product based on age, job, industry and budget. A core part of a demand generation strategy is to develop buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles (ICPs), to help target the right people. While demand generation is all about building engagement and trust, it’s not just an early-funnel marketing strategy.

Placements and Channels

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Content marketing

For B2B organisations, SEO is not just about driving traffic; it's about capturing high-intent prospects precisely when they are actively searching for solutions to their problems. Instead, focus on sparking conversations, celebrating member achievements, and providing resources that genuinely help users succeed with your product and in their careers. By serving specific ads to users who have already visited your website or engaged with your content, you can nurture warm prospects and significantly reduce your overall customer acquisition cost (CAC). It is also the easiest place to waste budget if either of those conditions is not met. Paid media is the accelerant in your demand generation system, it delivers results fast, but only if the targeting is precise and the landing page is built to convert.

Why B2B Organizations Are Making the Shift

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• A core part of a demand generation strategy is to develop buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles (ICPs), to help target the right people.
• Built-in analytics and reporting make it easy to learn which pages, offers, ads, and traffic sources are driving the most conversions.
• PMAX often requires manual brand exclusions to prevent budget waste.
• Lead generation focuses specifically on filling the marketing funnel with audiences who have a current need and budget to purchase your product or service.
• “I can get great results without being concerned of all the workload people management implies."

Sell more, understand your customers’ journey for free!

It drove traffic and conversions, but the Target CPA was slightly higher than we expected. Google’s suggestion is to set your budget at 15 times your expected CPA, so it could very well be that there’s a financial threshold to Demand Gen that makes it less accessible than other campaigns. From what I understood of this experiment, small budgets tend to struggle even with strong audience signals. Once we started to ramp up that campaign, it improved enough that we could actually measure conversions at a decent ROAS and leads at a healthy CPA. With a six-figure monthly budget covering Search, Shopping, and Meta, you want to make sure you’re also driving net new awareness – video views, website visits, branded search. In larger accounts, it always helps to allocate a portion of the budget to address upper-funnel audiences – especially if you’ve got a good nurture program in place.

For budget, you can select between a daily budget and your campaign’s total budget. Moreover, you can also use Google’s Optimized Targeting, which can help you get more conversions within your defined budget range. Due to this, Demand Gen campaigns mostly cater to users at the top and middle of the funnel.

Essential content types for demand generation

Google will also provide format-level breakdowns (specifically for video ads with product feeds) across different channels. And for these budgets, you also need to add a start and end date, which isn’t the case with PMax campaigns. This might mean automating manual demand gen tasks, implementing new processes to save time, or identifying new tools that will help increase organizational efficiency. If you want your content to drive results, your strategy must include a variety of promotional tactics that put your work in front of the people who will benefit from it.