Google Just Admitted Its Own Minimum Spend Is a Joke
A Google product manager told PPC Land that $100 a day is the real floor for a Demand Gen campaign. Not a suggestion, the floor. Google's own API will happily let you launch one at $5 a day, which is a little like a car dealer selling you a car with no gas in it and telling you to figure out the rest.
For an apartment operator, this matters because Demand Gen is the YouTube and Discover feed product a lot of agencies pitch as the next thing after Performance Max, the one that's supposed to build awareness for your community before someone ever hits Zillow or your ILS listing. If your agency has been running a leasing awareness test at $20 or $30 a day because that felt like a reasonable toe in the water, Google's own PM is telling you that spend was never going to get out of the toe-in-the-water phase. Twenty dollars a day doesn't buy enough signal for the algorithm to learn who actually tours. It just buys you a line item that looks like you tried something.
The second problem is quieter and worse. There's no stated refresh schedule for when a video or image asset goes stale inside Demand Gen. Fatigue is real in any paid social or video product, your leasing creative has a shelf life same as anyone's, but if nobody can tell you the signal Google uses to flag an asset as tired, you're trusting a black box to decide when your floorplan video stops working. That's fine if someone is watching the dashboard weekly. It's not fine if the answer is "the platform handles it."
- 01What is our actual daily budget on any Demand Gen campaign right now, and is it at or above $100?
- 02If it's below $100 a day, why are we running it as Demand Gen instead of a cheaper format?
- 03What signal or metric do you use to decide a video or image asset is fatigued, and how often do you check it?
- 04How many distinct video and image assets are in rotation per property right now?
- 05Can you show me the last 30 days of creative refresh activity on our highest-spend Demand Gen campaign?
- 06Have you tested Demand Gen against standard YouTube in-stream for the same property, and what did cost per tour look like?
Source: PPC Land, October 4, 2026
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