Google has extended promotion assets to Demand Gen campaigns, allowing retailers to attach discount tags to ads running in YouTube Shorts and YouTube in-stream video, provided the campaign draws on a Google Merchant Center product feed. The change appears in Google's "About Demand Gen campaigns" help page, which now carries a new feature bullet and two new FAQ entries on the subject, and was first reported by PPC News Feed on November 3, 2026.

In Short

Google now lets shops put a sale badge, such as a percentage or money-off discount, on video ads that play in YouTube Shorts or before and during YouTube videos, through its Demand Gen campaign type. Only advertisers who send their product catalogue to Google's shopping system qualify, which leaves out lead-generation businesses and any retailer running these campaigns without a product list. The badge can sit on videos that already exist, and the option surfaced more than three weeks before Black Friday, but Google has published no performance figures, and its main help page on the badges does not yet mention this campaign type at all.

What the help page now says

The addition sits in the feature list of the help article Google maintains for Demand Gen, titled About Demand Gen campaigns, between a line on product feeds and the section on bidding and measurement. It reads: "Add promotion assets to your campaign to feature discount tags on YouTube Shorts and in-stream formats when using a Google Merchant Center product feed." The bullet links to Google's separate page on promotion assets.

The same help article now lists promotion assets, limited to YouTube Shorts and YouTube In-stream, in the creatives row of its overview table, and the product feeds row refers to them too. Two FAQ entries spell out the terms. The first, on supported formats, names YouTube Shorts and YouTube In-stream as the formats eligible for promotion assets. The second asks whether the feature is available for all Demand Gen campaigns. It is not, according to Google: only campaigns using a product feed from Google Merchant Center qualify, an answer phrased in the future tense.

A third FAQ entry states that sitelinks and promotion assets are available for Demand Gen campaigns, without the feed qualification. Read on its own, that line suggests wider availability than the entry directly above it allows.

The page carries no date. The change was spotted by Hana Kobzová, who runs PPC News Feed, and reported by that site on Tuesday, November 3. "Retailers running feed-based Demand Gen can now apply discount tags from promotion assets directly on YouTube Shorts and in-stream ads," according to PPC News Feed, which added that the tags display sale offers in video formats "without requiring new creative materials." The site's write-up also stated that "Promotion assets on these platforms are limited to Demand Gen campaigns with product feeds."

Google's most recent monthly Demand Gen Drop, published in October, was built around first-party data and a 20% conversion uplift claim tied to tag gateway setups and did not mention promotions.

Two YouTube formats out of a wider inventory

Demand Gen serves ads on YouTube, Discover, Gmail and the Google Display Network, according to the same help article, which breaks YouTube down further into Shorts, in-feed, the Home feed, watch next and YouTube Search, and also names Google video partners as a surface. PPC Land's 2024 guide to Demand Gen placements described in-stream ads as those that play before, during or after other videos, while Gmail ads appear in the Promotions and Social tabs.

Of all those surfaces, only two are named as eligible for discount tags: Shorts, the vertical short-form feed, and in-stream. The help article does not say what happens to a promotion asset when the same campaign serves on Discover, Gmail, the Display Network or YouTube in-feed placements. Nor does it address in-stream ads viewed on television screens, although Google's product feed documentation separately sets an image size requirement of at least 500 by 500 pixels for product ads on connected TV.

Shorts and in-stream are also the two YouTube surfaces where Performance Max already displays promotions. Google's About promotion assets page describes occasion labels appearing below Performance Max Shorts and in-stream surfaces on YouTube. Demand Gen now reaches the same two placements, though with a condition Performance Max does not carry on that page: the feed.

What a promotion asset carries

Promotion assets are not new. Google rolled out their predecessor, promotion extensions, globally on November 16, 2017, on the Search Network. At launch, the format was free to add and came with 12 preset occasions, each with a fixed window. Black Friday ran from October 15 to December 15, and Cyber Monday shared the same dates.

Nine years on, the Black Friday window in Google's current documentation is unchanged. The page lists Christmas from November 1 to January 15, alongside several occasions that can run at any time of year. An advertiser can show either a monetary or a percentage discount, and can attach conditions such as a promo code valid for a set period or a minimum spend. Scheduling can be narrowed to specific dates, days of the week or times of day. Occasion-based assets must be created or edited within six months of their start date to remain eligible to serve, and the asset displays up to two lines of text.

Promotion assets remain free to add, according to Google, whose page describes charging in terms of clicks on the ad. Not every promotion type travels to video, however. QR code and barcode promotions do not serve on Search, Shorts or in-stream video ads, according to the same page.

A documentation gap

The promotion assets page does not mention Demand Gen. Its introduction presents the asset as adding value to Search Network text ads, Shorts and in-stream video ads, and it goes on to name Performance Max and Performance Max for store goals. Product feeds and Merchant Center are absent from its requirements.

Google's dedicated page on using a product feed in Demand Gen campaigns is silent too: its text contains no reference to promotions of any kind. The only Google page that documents the new capability is therefore the Demand Gen overview itself.

That leaves several questions without a written answer. The bullet speaks of adding the asset "to your campaign," but no page sets out whether occasion windows, scheduling rules and promo-code conditions apply to Demand Gen in the same way as to Search, or how a tagged video is reported. Merchant Center also runs a separate promotions programme of its own. The Demand Gen text refers to the Google Ads asset, not to promotions submitted in Merchant Center, and does not say whether one can supply the other.

The feed condition

The requirement narrows the audience considerably. To run a Demand Gen campaign with a product feed, according to Google's documentation, an advertiser needs a Merchant Center account linked to Google Ads, with "Shopping ads" enabled as a marketing method in Merchant Center. New feeds can take up to three days to be approved. Google recommends at least four products in a feed and describes 50 as best practice. In setup, the advertiser switches on a "Run a product feed campaign" option and then picks either a feed label or all available feeds.

A product feed changes how Demand Gen ads look. Products render automatically in a carousel, and on Shorts a "video and products" ad pairs a vertical video with items from the feed. A discount tag on top of those placements means the price message, the products and the video arrive in the same unit.

Budget expectations come attached. Google's product feed page recommends a daily budget of 10 times the target CPA for target-based bidding, and at least $100 a day for Maximize-based strategies such as Maximize Conversions. That matches the figure Google product manager Alejandro Osio gave in an Ads Decoded episode on October 1, which called $100 a day the floor for a Demand Gen campaign, 20 times the $5 daily minimum the Google Ads API has enforced since April 1, 2026.

How many advertisers clear the bar? Feeds are still a minority practice in Demand Gen. Data from smec, published in July, showed product feed use in Demand Gen rising to 35% in 2026, from 26% in 2025 and 16% in 2024. On those figures, most of the Demand Gen advertising in smec's data ran without a feed and would not qualify for the tags. Lead-generation advertisers, which typically have no product catalogue in Merchant Center, are outside the scope entirely.

A promotions push before the holidays

The timing is plain enough. The change was reported 24 days before Black Friday on November 27, 2026, and 27 days before Cyber Monday on November 30. Google's Black Friday occasion window for promotion assets has been open since October 15.

It is also the latest in a run of moves putting discount messages on more Google surfaces this autumn. On October 6, PPC Land reported that Google Ads would begin auto-applying website coupons to some campaigns from October 12: offers found on advertisers' websites are attached as promotions to Search and Performance Max campaigns using location assets, with enrolment by default, a single account-level opt-out and a recheck of sourced offers within 24 hours. Google's promotion assets page now describes these automated promotions as sourced from advertisers' websites, validated and displayed automatically, and served within Search and Performance Max campaigns that use location assets.

Google's own holiday advice pointed the same way. The YouTube holiday playbook for 2026, which cited a 30% creator ad lift for Demand Gen with no source, recommended promotion assets in its food and beverage chapter, describing them as a way to add dollar or percentage-off discounts to existing campaigns as clickable tags.

What has not been published

Google has not released any figure on how discount tags perform on Demand Gen video. That absence matters, because the company's Demand Gen performance claims have often rested on internal data. In August, Google said hundreds of product improvements had lifted Demand Gen conversions or conversion value by 30% on average, on its own internal test data, footnoted only to Google's internal global data for the second half of 2025. No equivalent claim, sourced or otherwise, accompanies the promotion assets change.

There is also the matter of control. Demand Gen has seen its settings move around this year: in September, Video campaigns gained the Lookalike reach controls that Demand Gen had lost. The promotion asset is optional, and nothing in the Demand Gen documentation says it is added automatically. Whether that remains the case is a fair question, given that automated promotions on Search and Performance Max were set to start this autumn with enrolment switched on by default.

For retailers, the practical shift is narrow but concrete. A price claim can now appear on a feed-based Demand Gen video in Shorts and in-stream placements, without re-editing the video. Whether the asset behaves on Demand Gen as it does on Search, in charging, reporting and eligibility, is something Google's documentation does not yet say. Until the promotion assets page and the product feed page catch up with the Demand Gen overview, one bullet, two table entries and two FAQ answers are the whole of the official record.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google and retailers running Demand Gen campaigns with a Google Merchant Center product feed. The change was spotted by Hana Kobzová and first reported by PPC News Feed.

What: Promotion assets, which add monetary or percentage discount tags to ads, can now be used in Demand Gen campaigns on two formats, YouTube Shorts and YouTube in-stream, but only when the campaign uses a Merchant Center product feed. Google's promotion assets page and its Demand Gen product feed page do not yet mention the capability.

When: The change was first reported on November 3, 2026. The help page itself carries no date.

Where: Google's "About Demand Gen campaigns" help page, in a feature bullet, the overview table and two FAQ entries. The tags apply to YouTube Shorts and in-stream placements, not to the other surfaces Demand Gen serves on.

Why: The change brings Demand Gen in line with Performance Max on the two YouTube surfaces where promotions already appear, ahead of Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. Google has published no performance data on the tags, and the feed condition excludes lead-generation advertisers and retailers without a Merchant Center catalogue.