Discovery Ads for Events: Now Demand Gen, and How to Use It
Google Discovery ads no longer exist under that name. Google upgraded them to Demand Gen campaigns, and for a theater, museum or concert venue that is good news: the same visual, scroll-friendly ads now reach more places, with video and better audience controls. This guide explains what changed, how to build an event campaign around Demand Gen, and how to prove it sold tickets.
TL;DR
Discovery campaigns are now Demand Gen campaigns. Google upgraded the remaining ones from January to March 2024, keeping historical data.
Demand Gen ads run on YouTube (including Shorts), Discover, Gmail, Maps and the Google Display Network, so they fit visual, awareness-stage promotion for a show or exhibition.
Feed the system: image and video in every orientation, a daily budget sized to your target cost per purchase, and conversion tracking that counts ticket purchases.
Judge results on trends, not single days, and expect a lag between a click and a ticket purchase.
Table of Contents
What happened to Discovery ads?
Discovery ads were Google’s image-led format for people browsing rather than searching. Google announced the move to Demand Gen in August 2023, and said the remaining Discovery campaigns would be automatically upgraded between January and March 2024, with historical data and learnings retained. If you are searching for “discovery ads” today, Demand Gen is the campaign type you will find in your account.
The upgrade was more than a rename. Compared with the old Discovery campaign, Demand Gen added short-form video, carousel, portrait and square-image formats, lookalike segments, ad previews and experimentation. Google describes it as an AI-powered campaign that uses visual creative to generate demand and drive conversions.
That last point matters for arts marketers. Most patrons do not search for a show they have never heard of. Search ads catch people who already want a ticket. Demand Gen reaches the people who would want one if they saw the right poster at the right moment.
Where Demand Gen ads appear
According to Google’s help documentation, Demand Gen ads appear across YouTube (including Shorts), Discover, Gmail, Maps and the Google Display Network. Google also expanded this inventory in 2025: Google Video Partners was renamed Google Display Network in March 2025, channel controls were added, and opted-in image ad groups began serving on the Google Display Network in April 2025.
Google’s ad specifications page says Demand Gen can reach up to 2.9 billion people across YouTube feeds, Gmail’s Promotions and Social tabs, and Discover. Treat that as the ceiling of the inventory, not a promise about your city. Your real audience is whoever sits inside your targeting.
In practice, here is how those surfaces map to event goals:
Surface | What the patron is doing | Good fit for |
YouTube feeds and Shorts | Watching or scrolling video | Season trailers, behind-the-scenes clips, artist features |
Discover | Browsing a personalized content feed | Exhibition imagery, announcements |
Gmail Promotions and Social tabs | Checking the inbox | Reminders for single-night engagements |
Google Display Network | Reading sites and apps | Broad reach, retargeting site visitors |
When Demand Gen is the right tool for an event
Demand Gen is a demand creation tool. It works best in three situations:
Launching a new production or exhibition that nobody is searching for yet.
Filling the middle of the on-sale window, after your email list has bought and before the last-minute rush.
Reaching lookalike audiences: people who resemble your existing buyers but have never visited.
It is a poor stand-in for search. If someone types your venue’s name plus “tickets,” a Google Search campaign captures that intent far more cheaply. The strongest event plans use both: Demand Gen to create the interest, search to harvest it. We cover the video side of that sequence in our four-phase YouTube strategy for ticket sales.
Setting up an event campaign
Google’s own walkthrough for a conversion-focused video campaign starts with the goal: select Sales, Leads or Website traffic, then set bidding, budget, dates, locations and audiences. For a ticketed event, choose Sales and point it at your purchase confirmation. Use Website traffic only if you cannot yet measure purchases, and treat that as a temporary fix.
A sensible build order:
Define the one action that counts. A completed ticket purchase, not a page view.
Set the dates around your curtain-up date. Plan the flight backward from the performance, not forward from today.
Choose locations (see the targeting section below).
Pick audiences and let Google’s AI expand from there.
Upload creative in every format the campaign accepts.
Send traffic to a page built for the show, not your homepage.
Your landing page does half the work
A beautiful ad that lands on a generic calendar page wastes the click. Send people to the specific event page with the date, venue, price range and a visible buy button. Keep the mobile experience fast, since most Discover and YouTube feed traffic arrives on phones. If you want to see how display and first-party data work together after the click, read our piece on driving tickets with display ads and first-party data.
Creative that earns the click
Demand Gen is a creative-led format. Google’s guidance is that each campaign should have at least one ad with three vertical, three square and three horizontal images, plus one video in each orientation. That is a lot of assets, and it is deliberate: the system tests combinations and shows each person the version that fits the surface they are on.
For video, Google recommends the ABCD framework: Attention, Branding, Connection and Direction. Here is how that translates to a performance listing.
Attention: Win the first three seconds. Open on the most striking moment, such as the dancer mid-leap or the painting at full scale, not on a logo.
Branding: Put the company or venue name on screen early, because viewers often scroll before the end.
Connection: Show why this night is worth leaving the house for: a cast, a story, an atmosphere.
Direction: Say plainly what to do next, with the date and “get tickets” in the final frames.
Build creative variants, not one hero asset
Creative diversity carries real weight. Make a version for each audience you suspect exists: first-time visitors, families, subscribers who have lapsed. Change the image crop, the headline, and the lead moment of the video. Then let the results tell you which story sells. Do not retire an ad because it has had a few slow days; give it enough impressions to learn from.
How to target audiences and locations
Targeting for an arts organization has two layers: where people are, and who they are.
Locations
Most venues draw from a drive-time radius, so start there. In Google Ads you can enter regions, ZIP codes, a radius around an address, and more. The location option you pick also matters: “Presence” limits ads to people in or regularly in your targeted locations, while “Presence or interest” can show ads to people who have only shown interest in them. For a regional theater selling tickets to a Saturday matinee, Presence is usually the cleaner choice. For a touring exhibition or a destination museum that draws visitors from other states, widening the setting can make sense.
A practical way to set the radius: pull your ticketing data and look at the ZIP codes of past buyers. Build the target from where your real patrons live, then test one ring further out.
Audiences
Google describes Demand Gen audiences as segments of people with specific interests, intents and demographics, as estimated by Google, including those who have interacted with your business. For arts organizations, a starter stack looks like this:
Your own data: website visitors, past purchasers and email subscribers, uploaded as customer lists where policy allows.
Lookalikes: Google says Demand Gen uses Lookalike segments to reach new, qualified audiences outside an existing customer base. Seed them with real ticket buyers, not all site visitors.
Interest and intent segments: theater fans, concertgoers, museum visitors, people researching weekend activities.
Start with your first-party data and lookalikes, then add interest segments as the budget grows. Keep audiences distinct enough that you can tell which one is producing buyers.
Budget and bidding
The most common reason an event campaign underperforms is that it is starved of data. Google’s guidance is specific: for Maximize bidding, set a daily budget of at least $100. For Target bidding (target CPA or target ROAS), the budget should be at least 10 times your target CPA, so the AI has enough conversions to learn from.
A worked example: if a ticket purchase is worth it to you at $25 in ad cost, a target-CPA campaign needs at least $250 a day. If that is out of reach, start with Maximize Conversions at $100 a day and tighten later. Begin with a strategy aligned to your main goal: efficiency (target CPA) or volume (Maximize Conversions).
Then be patient. Google recommends waiting for at least 50 conversions before the bidding algorithm leaves its learning phase, and changing budgets or bids by no more than 15% per week. For a short run, such as a three-night engagement, that argues for starting earlier than feels necessary. A campaign launched two weeks before opening night may never finish learning.
If you are weighing how to spend across channels, our guides on getting higher return on ad spend and understanding ROAS walk through the math.
Tracking ticket sales
If the platform cannot see purchases, it cannot find more purchasers. Google says to track conversions with the Google tag or Google Tag Manager, and to optimize for shallow actions, such as page visits, alongside deep ones like ticket purchases so the system gets more signals. Its guidance on low-volume campaigns also points to tracking lighter actions such as add to cart to give the AI more data.
For venues, the practical version is:
Make “purchase” the primary conversion, with its value (ticket revenue) passed back where your ticketing system allows.
Add “view event page” and “begin checkout” as secondary signals.
Confirm that tracking survives the hand-off to your ticketing provider’s checkout. This is where many cultural organizations lose their data. Our walkthrough on fixing ticketing-platform ad tracking and enabling server-side conversions shows what that repair looks like.
Set up cleaner conversion measurement in GA4 so event sign-ups reach your ad platform as usable signals.
It is also worth reading how Google Analytics and paid media uplift can disagree, because they will.
Optimizing as the event approaches
As opening night nears, the temptation is to react to every dip. Resist it. Google advises evaluating performance on long-term trends rather than daily fluctuations, accounting for conversion lag and comparing results against your goals.
Conversion lag is real for events: someone sees your ad on Tuesday, talks to a friend, and buys on Friday. That means the most recent days always look worse than they are. Tips on conversion rate optimization can help you separate a true conversion problem from delayed registrations.
A simple cadence for the final weeks:
Weeks 6 to 3 before the show: build awareness, test creative variants, collect conversions.
Weeks 3 to 1: shift weight to the best-performing creative and audiences; add urgency such as limited seats if true.
Final week: keep budgets steady, make changes of 15% or less, and lean on retargeting site visitors and cart abandoners.
Our perspective
We work only with cultural organizations, and the pattern is consistent: the venues that win with Demand Gen treat it as one stage in a funnel, not a standalone button. Creative gets people to stop. Targeting decides who sees it. Measurement decides whether you keep funding it.
The measurement part is where most arts marketers are shortchanged. Every ad platform is happy to report its own conversions, which can feel like a platform grading its own homework. We would rather see ticket sales tied back to your ticketing system, so a Demand Gen impression on a Wednesday can be connected to a purchase on Saturday, whatever the checkout provider. That is why we build campaigns around budgets and goals first and the channel second.
If your Demand Gen results look thin, check three things before you blame the format: whether purchases are tracked correctly, whether you gave the campaign enough budget and time to learn, and whether your creative has real variety. Those three fixes recover more performance than any setting change.
— Trevor
Let us run it for you
Building assets in every orientation, wiring tracking into your ticketing system and tuning bids all take time that most arts marketing teams do not have. Opti Arts runs paid campaigns for theaters, museums and concert venues across Meta, Google, YouTube, Spotify, connected TV and display, with strategy shaped around your budget and goals. You can see the full range on our campaign solutions page.
Want to see ticket sales as they happen? Our Breakeven dashboard tracks sales and campaign performance in one place and works with any ticketing provider.
FAQ
Are Google Discovery ads still available?
No. In Google Ads, Discovery campaigns are now called Demand Gen campaigns, and Google upgraded the remaining ones automatically between January and March 2024. Your historical data and learnings carried over. Any guide that tells you to create a “Discovery campaign” is describing the older interface.
How much should a theater or museum spend on Demand Gen?
Google recommends at least $100 a day for Maximize bidding, and at least ten times your target CPA per day for target bidding. Smaller budgets can work, but they learn slowly. For a short run, start early so the campaign reaches the 50 conversions Google suggests for the learning phase.
Is Demand Gen better than Search for selling tickets?
They do different jobs. Search captures people already looking for your show or venue, while Demand Gen builds interest among people who have not searched yet. Most events benefit from running both, with Demand Gen filling the top of the funnel.
What creative do I need?
Google recommends at least one ad with three vertical, three square and three horizontal images, plus a video in each orientation. Open video with the most striking moment, name your venue early, and end with the date and a clear call to buy.
How do I know Demand Gen actually sold tickets?
Track ticket purchases as your primary conversion with the Google tag or Tag Manager, and confirm the tag fires through your ticketing checkout. Allow for conversion lag, since many patrons buy days after seeing an ad. Judge results over weeks rather than single days.
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