Demand Gen product ads format requirements

All Demand Gen product ads must comply with our advertising policies and our Shopping ads policies. This article outlines the additional requirements your products must meet to serve as a Demand Gen product ad.

Demand Gen and Shopping campaigns combine audience targeting features and visually engaging formats to help you better personalize your ads within Google's feeds to inspire customer action. This article outlines the requirements Demand Gen product ad assets (headline, description, or image) must meet for your Demand Gen and Shopping campaigns to serve.

Customers visit the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover, and the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs to browse and explore new content that aligns with their interests. To ensure that we provide a high-quality consumer ad experience on Google’s personalized feeds, Demand Gen product ads must comply with all Google Ads and personalization policies.

In addition, we'll review each Demand Gen product ad asset for compliance with the Demand Gen product ads requirements listed below, which will take priority in the event there's conflict with the Google Ads and personalization policies. Demand Gen product ads requirements may be more restrictive than the ads requirements for other platforms and surfaces, meaning disapproved Demand Gen product ad assets may continue to run on Google’s other properties.

Automated content policy decision

To ensure a good experience for the customer, we may conduct automated reviews of your campaign content. This preliminary review may trigger restriction or suspension of the assets. If necessary, Google may further analyze the assets for a final decision.

Quality checks

Assets that do not meet Demand Gen product ads quality requirements

Examples:

• Clarity, correct spelling, and use of capitalization and symbols
• Blurred, distorted, or poorly cropped images

Demand Gen product ads must meet the Google Ads editorial standards.

Demand Gen product ads requirements

To assess any asset-level disapprovals in your account:

1. In your Merchant Center account, click Products from the navigation menu on the left.
2. Click All products.
   • Note: If you’re using Merchant Center Next, clicking Products automatically redirects you to the “All products” tab.
3. Locate your product on the page, and check the "Status" column of the table to view that product's current approval status.

Prohibited categories

Assets that depict or reference regulated goods or substances, including (but not limited to) recreational drugs, tobacco, and alcohol

Assets that depict or reference images of weapons or criminality, including (but not limited to) guns, firearms, ammunition, explosives, the sale of fireworks, knives, prison, criminals, or arrests

Allowed with limitations:

• Assets that depict or reference the above prohibited categories in a scene from a fictional work of entertainment (video game, TV-show, movie, and more)
• Assets that depict or reference the above prohibited categories but not in a violent or criminal context, including (but not limited to) kitchen and utility knives, historical artifacts, or halloween costumes

Assets that depict cash sweepstakes or cash giveaways, including (but not limited to):

• Cash rewards without legitimate customer action
• Paid surveys and questionnaires
• Cash sweepstakes or cash giveaways

Assets that depict or reference racy or adult content, including (but not limited to):

• Sexually suggestive content
• Unnecessary focus on body parts
• Sexual merchandise and entertainment

Assets that depict invasive medical procedures

Assets that depict content that could cause discomfort, including (but not limited to) bodily fluids and waste

Assets that depict negative life events including (but not limited to):

• Divorce
• Breakups or family separation
• Home foreclosures
• Financial difficulties
• Accidents and personal injuries (non-exhaustive examples include sport, professional/work, medical, and general accidents and injuries)
• Damage to objects or properties (non-exhaustive examples include vandalism or destroyed personal property)

Assets that depict or reference natural or man-made crises

Assets that depict or reference behavioral addiction recovery including, rehabilitation facilities and products that aid in addiction recovery

Assets that depict death or death-related content including but not limited to:

• A dead person or animal
• A funeral home, mortuary, cemetery, mausoleum

Assets that depict trauma or pain including (but not limited to) a person grieving or crying

Assets that depict content that is presented in a way that is likely to trigger a negative reaction

Assets that depict discrimination, or encouragement of discrimination, against people based on their personal attributes

Assets that promote actions that violate other platforms’ Terms and Conditions

Allowed with limitations:

• Assets that reference services, including (but not limited to) funeral home, mortuary, cemetery, mausoleum, and memorial services companies, family and divorce services (attorney/law offices/counseling), insurance, or event support services as long as they are neutrally and positively framed
• Assets that depict or reference the negative events listed above in a scene from a fictional work of entertainment (video game, TV-show, movie, and others)

Assets that depict or reference dating services or matchmakers by asserting or implying user’s personal attributes, including (but not limited to) race, ethnic origin, nationality, religion, age or sexual orientation

Assets that feature visual elements that depict nonexistent functionality (such as a “play” button that cannot be clicked)

Assets that tease the customer into clicking the advertisement with sensational language, misleading claims or intentionally withholding necessary information

Assets that illustrate that someone is trying to contact or has matched with the customer while advertising a dating site

Assets that contain selfie images for dating related content

Blurry: Images that are blurry or unclear

Distorted: Images that are visually oddly skewed or shaped, morphed, upside-down, distastefully out of focus, color-inverted, excessively filtered, distorted, or contain watermarks

 Poorly cropped: Images that are critically cropped or contain even minimally cropped text overlay

Assets containing obscene or offensive language, including (but not limited to) profanity and sexual innuendos

Assets that use placeholder text, distasteful formatting such as nonsensical punctuation or capitalization, incomplete sentences, or don’t use commonly accepted spelling or grammar in a way that makes the subject of the asset difficult to understand

Assets that are longer than 10 words before a delimiter, such as (but not limited to) period, colon, pipe, parenthesis, “or”, “in”, “and”, “for”, or “by”

• Example: “Straight leg 90s jeans blue denim side pockets high-waist ripped women size S” 

Assets that contain excessive details like product codes, SKU, or part numbers that aren’t part of the product name