Demand Gen Specs: Demand Gen Ad Specs, Image Sizes and Asset Requirements

A Google Demand Gen ad takes headlines up to 40 characters with at least one headline of 30 characters or fewer, descriptions up to 90 characters, and a business name up to 25 characters. Images come in four ratios: 1.91:1 horizontal at 1200 x 628, 1:1 square at 1200 x 1200, 4:5 vertical at 960 x 1200, and 9:16 vertical at 1080 x 1920. The square logo is 1200 x 1200. Images are capped at 5 MB and logos at 150 KB, with up to 20 image assets per ad. Horizontal images, square images and a logo are required; the vertical ratios are optional and are the ones most worth adding.

Those are the numbers, verified against Google Ads Help in August 2026. Two of them have changed in ways that matter, and one field most spec sheets still list is no longer in Google's asset table at all. Here is the complete sheet, followed by what to do with it.

Demand Gen text asset specs

The rule that catches people out is the short headline requirement. Demand Gen allows 40 characters, which is wider than the 30 you get in Performance Max and responsive display ads, but at least one of your headlines has to come in at 30 characters or fewer. That slot exists because some feed placements have very little horizontal room, and writing five confident 39-character headlines will leave the asset group flagging as incomplete for a reason the interface explains badly.

Your business name has to match your domain or your verified business name, so it is not somewhere to park a tagline. And the call to action is automated in Demand Gen rather than a dropdown you control, which is a real difference from Meta, where the CTA button is a lever you can test.

Does Demand Gen still have long headlines?

No. Google's current Demand Gen asset specification lists business name, headline, description, final URL and call to action. The 90-character long headline field, which came over from the Discovery campaigns Demand Gen replaced, is not in the current asset table. Plenty of spec posts and agency checklists still list it, so if a template asks you for five long headlines, the template is out of date.

This matters practically, not just pedantically. If you have been writing Demand Gen copy on the assumption that a 90-character headline slot exists, your best long-form value proposition has nowhere to go except the description, which is also capped at 90 characters and reads differently in a feed. Long headlines do still exist in Performance Max asset specs and in responsive display ads, so the two campaign types now want genuinely different copy rather than the same set pasted twice.

Demand Gen image sizes and aspect ratios

Image files are JPG, PNG or non-animated GIF, at 5 MB or less. Logos are capped at 150 KB, which is much tighter than the image limit and is the reason a beautifully rendered logo export sometimes refuses to upload. Total image assets per ad are capped at 20 across all ratios.

One note on the logo minimum: Google's image asset documentation gives 128 x 128 as the floor while the campaign specs page gives 144 x 144. Either way the answer is to upload 1200 x 1200, because a logo at the minimum looks poor in every placement it appears in and there is no upside to shipping one.

What size should Demand Gen images be for YouTube Shorts?

Use 9:16 at 1080 x 1920, with 600 x 1067 as the absolute minimum. This is the ratio most advertisers skip and the one that costs them the most. Demand Gen serves across the Discover feed, YouTube feeds, YouTube Shorts, Gmail and the Google Display Network, and Shorts is a vertical, full-screen, high-attention surface. If your only image is a 1.91:1 horizontal, Google has to crop it to fill that frame, and an automatic crop of a wide product shot is how a hero image ends up as someone's elbow.

The same argument applies to the 4:5 vertical. Both vertical ratios are technically optional, and both are where the inventory has been moving for years. Supplying all four ratios composed properly, rather than one file resized four times, is the difference between a campaign that serves everywhere and one that quietly gets pushed to the placements where your artwork happens to fit.

Demand Gen carousel ad specs

A Demand Gen carousel takes 2 to 10 images, and every card in the carousel shares the same aspect ratio, so you pick one ratio and build the whole set to it. The image specs above apply per card. Carousels sit alongside single image ads, product feed ads and uploaded display ads as the formats Demand Gen supports.

Carousels reward a sequence rather than a gallery. Ten photographs of the same product from slightly different angles gives someone no reason to swipe. A build that works reads as steps or as a comparison: the problem on card one, the mechanism on cards two and three, the proof on card four, the offer at the end. That is a copywriting job as much as a design job, and it is where most carousel builds fall apart, because producing ten coherent cards is roughly ten times the work of producing one image.

Demand Gen video specs

Video is optional in Demand Gen. If you supply none, Google can assemble video from the images and text you gave it, and that generated asset will run whether or not you ever look at it. It is worth opening the asset group and watching what got built in your name before it spends anything.

What is the minimum to publish a Demand Gen ad?

One headline, one description, a business name, a final URL, one horizontal 1.91:1 image, one square 1:1 image and a square logo. That is the whole floor, and it is dramatically lower than what makes a campaign work.

Demand Gen builds ads by mixing your assets into combinations and matching them to people across feeds, so the number of distinct assets you supply is the number of experiments the system can run. One headline and two images is not an experiment. Google's own recommendation is 5 headlines, 3 descriptions and 3 images in each of the horizontal, square and vertical ratios, and that recommendation exists because thin asset groups reliably underperform.

How many Demand Gen assets should you actually upload?

Fill the slots. All 5 headlines, each making a genuinely different argument rather than rewording one benefit. Between 3 and 5 descriptions. At least 3 images in every ratio including both vertical ones, composed for that frame. One 1200 x 1200 logo.

Variety matters as much as volume. Five headlines that all say "save time" hand the system five versions of one idea. A useful set covers the outcome, the price or offer, the objection, the audience and the proof. If you are stuck for angles, write against the questions customers actually ask rather than the features you want to talk about, the same discipline that makes scroll stopping ad creative work in any feed.

Demand Gen logo specs

Every Demand Gen ad requires one logo, and Google publishes a single sanctioned shape for it: square, 1:1, recommended at 1200 x 1200 pixels with a 128 x 128 minimum and a 150 KB file size cap. That cap is worth noting because it is thirty times smaller than the 5 MB allowed for image assets, and a logo exported as a full color PNG with a photographic background will breach it long before it looks wrong.

The detail that catches people out is what happens to the shape after upload. Several Demand Gen surfaces render the logo inside a circular mask, so a square logo lockup with type running edge to edge gets its corners cut. Build the logo on a square canvas with genuine padding, keep the mark centered, and do not put anything you need to read within roughly ten percent of any edge. A wordmark that only works as a wide horizontal lockup is the wrong asset here; supply the icon or the stacked version instead.

One logo is the requirement rather than the recommendation, and unlike images there is no benefit to uploading variants. Spend the effort on getting one square file that survives a circular crop at small sizes.

Demand Gen specs in DV360 (Display & Video 360)

The creative specs are identical. Demand Gen in Display & Video 360 serves the same YouTube, Shorts, Discover and Gmail inventory as Demand Gen in Google Ads, so the image ratios, the 5 MB image cap, the 150 KB logo cap, the video requirements and the text limits above all apply unchanged. If you are searching for a separate DV360 spec sheet, there is not one, and that is the answer rather than a gap in the documentation.

What differs is the management surface. Google moved Demand Gen into DV360 and then spent a long time without programmatic parity: full Demand Gen support in the Display & Video 360 API entered closed beta on 14 April 2026 and reached general availability on 10 June 2026, rolling out to all DV360 partners by 24 June 2026. That release added Demand Gen line items, ad groups and ad formats to the API, so teams can now create, retrieve, update and delete Demand Gen resources through the same workflows they use for the rest of their DV360 inventory.

For a creative team the practical consequence is small but real. Asset production does not change at all between the two platforms, so one Demand Gen asset set covers both. What changes is that a DV360 buyer running Demand Gen alongside programmatic display now has to supply two quite different creative packages from the same campaign brief: the Demand Gen ratio set described above, and the fixed pixel banner sizes the Display Network still uses. Those are covered separately in our Google display ad sizes reference.

Demand Gen vs Performance Max asset specs

The headline limits are the trap. A team that runs both campaign types usually writes one set of headlines and pastes it into both, which means either the Demand Gen headlines are needlessly short or the Performance Max ones get truncated. Write them separately, or generate both sets from the same source page so they carry the same message at each campaign's own limits.

Common Demand Gen asset mistakes

• One image stretched to four ratios. The same horizontal file resized to 4:5 and 9:16 produces awkward crops and dead space. Compose each ratio, keeping the product and any text away from the edges.
• Skipping the vertical ratios. Optional in the interface, decisive in delivery. Leaving 4:5 and 9:16 empty hands your Shorts and feed impressions to an automatic crop.
• Text baked into the image. Overlay text gets sliced by automatic resizing and turns illegible at small sizes. Put the message in the headline and description fields where the system can adapt it.
• Missing the sub-30-character headline. Five long headlines and no short one leaves the asset group incomplete.
• Logo over 150 KB. The tightest file limit in the spec, and the one that stops uploads for no visible reason.
• Ignoring the auto-generated video. It will run. Watch it first.

Getting the assets built without a design queue

Demand Gen rewards completeness, and completeness is a production problem before it is a strategy problem. Nobody ships a one-image asset group because they think it will work; they ship it because the designer has a queue and the campaign was supposed to launch Monday. Adscreator takes a product or landing page URL and returns headlines inside the 40-character limit with a short one under 30, descriptions inside 90, and on-brand images rendered at 1200 x 628, 1200 x 1200, 960 x 1200 and 1080 x 1920, so a full asset group can be built in one pass. Adscreator is not open for purchase yet; planned pricing is flat at $39 per month on Starter, or $29 per month billed yearly, with no credit meter, so filling every ratio for every theme costs the same as filling one. Build them with the Demand Gen ad maker, export the files, and upload them in Google Ads yourself.

One last thing worth saying about this campaign type. Demand Gen traffic is cold. Someone watching a Short did not go looking for you, so the landing page has to do work a search landing page never has to do, and the fastest fix is almost always to put real customer proof on the page they land on rather than to rewrite the ad again. If your Demand Gen numbers look like strong click-through and weak conversion, the assets are probably fine and the page is the problem. And if you also run standalone Display campaigns alongside this, the banner set is a separate job with its own dimensions, covered in our guide to Google display ad sizes.