Run a top of funnel Demand Gen campaign using the creative Meta has already proven, capture everyone who clicks it into a GA4 audience, then feed that audience back into Search. This is an audience test, not a lead campaign. It is funded by moving Waco budget that physically cannot be spent in Waco, so it asks for no new money.
Over Aug 29 to Sep 27 the account spent $13,980 for 738 clicks and 54 conversions at $259 each. The prior 30 days bought 1,984 clicks for $16,375. Pausing Performance Max and the first Demand Gen test removed most of the volume, and the traffic that remains is the most expensive this account has run: $21.19 per click in Core DFW and $30.74 in Austin.
Two campaigns sit at opposite extremes. Core DFW shows for 11% of its available searches and loses 54.8% of impression share to budget. Waco loses 2.8%, because its ceiling is rank and geography rather than cash. That gap is both the problem and the way to pay for the answer.
Every click becomes a known user, and known users are worth more on Search than strangers are. The sequence matters, so the steps are numbered.
Vertical video and stills that already produce booked appointments on Meta, pointed at the existing v6 landing pages with a distinct utm_medium=demandgen so the traffic stays identifiable in GA4 permanently.
An audience defined on session source and medium, with membership set to the 540 day maximum, so someone who watched a window ad in October is still a known user in March.
Through the existing GA4 to Google Ads link. It arrives as a remarketing list usable for bidding, for targeting, and as a lookalike seed.
Applied to every Search campaign in Observation mode with a positive bid adjustment, never in Targeting mode. The same list then seeds a Demand Gen lookalike, so the cheap reach gets better at finding people who resemble the ones who engaged.
Demand Gen already ran in this account and was pulled on Aug 17: $640 in Waco / Temple, $215 in Austin and $154 in DFW for effectively zero conversions. Judged as a lead campaign it deserved to be pulled.
Judged as reach, the same spend brought 496 people onto the landing pages at $2.03 each, while Search was paying $19 to $31 for a visitor. That is a tenfold difference in the cost of putting a Texas homeowner in front of EcoView's offer, and last time nothing was done with those visitors. They were never collected, so when they left they were gone.
Two things change. Creative comes from Meta's proven winners rather than Search assets: on Meta, "EV_Ad Creative_v3" produced 44 leads at about $53 and 16 booked appointments at $145, on a 34% hook rate. And the junk traffic exclusions are now in place account wide (Games, Kids, and Kids and Family app categories, plus Roblox, Minecraft, and installer and job seeker terms), which they were not during the August run.
In August you paused the three Performance Max campaigns because the lead quality was poor. That call was right, and the CRM proved it: the appointment set rate moved from 8% to 33% after the pause. Demand Gen runs on similar inventory, so scepticism here is reasonable and we want to answer it directly rather than talk around it.
Four things make this different.
If lead volume does arrive as a by product, we watch the set rate on it and the stop conditions below apply. Protecting the set rate you won back matters more than the test.
Waco / Temple carries a September budget of $1,998 and spent $1,079 of it. It is losing only 2.8% of impressions to budget, which means the unspent money is not a pacing problem to be fixed. There is no more inventory to buy at any price: the ceiling is rank and geography. Over Aug 29 to Sep 27 the two Waco campaigns took $1,167 and produced zero conversions.
Core DFW, in the same account, loses 54.8% of its impressions to budget.
| Move | Monthly | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Waco / Temple budget released | $1,998 | Zero conversions last window, 2.8% lost to budget, so the money cannot be deployed there |
| To Demand Gen at $50 a day | $1,520 | Funds the whole test |
| To Core DFW | $478 | Goes straight into the 54.8% budget gap |
| New money requested | $0 | The test is self funded |
The Waco to DFW shift stands on its own merits whether or not this test runs. Money is sitting in the one market that cannot use it while the account's best performer is turning away more than half its available demand.
| Phase | Weeks | Markets | Daily | Phase cost | Exit test |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Collect | 1 to 5 | DFW and Austin | $50 | $1,750 | Week 4 gate: 600 users. Cost per click at or under $2.00 |
| 2. Apply | 6 to 9 | DFW and Austin | $50 | $1,400 | List crosses 1,000 users and goes live in Observation. First CTR read |
| 3. Compound | 10 to 12 | Add Waco / Temple | $65 | $1,365 | Lookalike seeded. CTR gap between known and unknown users holding |
| Total | 12 | 3 markets | n/a | $4,515 | About 2,250 users. Continue, or stop with the list retained |
The size of the list follows from August's real cost per click of $1.51, not from an optimistic estimate. $4,515 buys roughly 2,990 clicks, and at August's observed ratio of sessions to clicks that is about 2,250 users. Reaching 2,500 requires cost per click to improve to about $1.35, which better creative may deliver but which we are not assuming.
The 1,000 user minimum that Search remarketing requires is therefore crossed in about week 6, not week 5, which is why applying the list is phase two rather than part of phase one. Waco / Temple joins last because its Search volume is smallest and it converted nothing last window, so it is the weakest place to spend reach money first.
If the test stops at week 12, the audience remains. The list keeps working as a bidding signal for another 540 days from each user's last visit, whether or not another dollar goes into Demand Gen.
Because the list goes on in Observation mode, Google reports Search performance split by audience membership. That gives a direct, same auction comparison: CTR for users on the Demand Gen list against everyone else, inside the same campaigns and the same keywords. No modelling and no attribution argument. If exposure to top of funnel creative makes people click, it shows up there.
| Metric | Baseline | Target by week 12 | Read from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search CTR, list members against non members | n/a | plus 15% relative | Google Ads audience report |
| Account CTR | 3.63% | 3.9% or better | Google Ads |
| Broad list size | 0 | 2,500 users | GA4 audience |
| Demand Gen cost per click | $1.51 (August) | $1.35 or better | Google Ads |
| Cost per Demand Gen visitor | $2.03 (August) | under $2.00 | GA4 |
| Lead rate of Demand Gen sessions | unknown | above 0.5% | GA4 ecoview_lead_submit |
| Appointment set rate, all channels | 33% | no worse | MarketSharp |
Demand Gen clicks can be accidental, particularly in feed on mobile, and an audience of accidental clickers will not click Search ads any harder than strangers do. That is the central risk, and it is why the tight engagement based list exists alongside the broad one. If the CTR gap appears on the tight list and not the broad one, the mechanism works and the collection filter was simply too loose.
Stop conditions. Kill the test before week 12 if any of these hold: the broad list has fewer than 600 users at the end of week 4, cost per click stays above $2.00 after two weeks of optimisation, Demand Gen sessions show a bounce pattern indistinguishable from bot traffic, or the appointment set rate across all channels falls while nothing else in the account changed.
The week 4 gate is set at 600 rather than 1,000 deliberately. At $50 a day and August's cost per click, four weeks produces roughly 690 users, so a 1,000 user gate would abort a test that was performing exactly as forecast.