Realize Google’s Full-Funnel Revenue Potential this Holiday Season: Why Demand Gen and YouTube are Your Growth Powerhouses

Introduction: The Peak Season Landscape

The holiday period is always the most competitive moment in the retail calendar. As budgets rise, the auction gets more expensive and CPMs reflect this. The temptation for most brands is to double down on the channels that look ‘safe’ on the surface, but this short-term mindset is increasingly dangerous.

The reality is that the customer journey has never been more complex. Google alone spans everything from discovery to purchase, yet too many advertisers still treat it as a capture channel only. That leaves enormous growth potential untapped - particularly in Demand Gen and YouTube.

Fospha’s daily MMM captures the impact of every impression, view and click on sales, shows that brands investing in these full-funnel channels feed future demand, scale new customer acquisition, and drive measurable downstream returns. During the holiday season, when competition is at its peak, that advantage becomes even more critical.

The roles of YouTube and Demand Gen in the funnel

YouTube and Demand Gen both sit at the heart of Google’s demand engine, but they create value in different ways.

When we refer to YouTube as a channel in this context, we are specifically talking about Video Reach Campaigns (VRC) and Video View Campaigns (VVC). These formats are built for scale: they maximize reach, earn attention, and spark new demand through impactful video.

Demand Gen, meanwhile, uses YouTube as its hero inventory - but it is not just a warm-up or mid-funnel product. Demand Gen is designed to create and convert demand in moments when people aren’t actively searching for you. It uses AI-powered placements across YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Google Video Partners to inspire action, find high-intent audiences, and drive performance outcomes comparable to what marketers typically expect from Paid Social.

Demand Gen’s performance strength comes from 3 core capabilities:

1. AI-driven personalization, matching users with the products and creatives they’re most likely to act on.

2. New-customer acquisition tools - including lookalikes and NCA bidding - to find and convert audiences beyond Search.

3. Creative and audience controls, such as vertical formats for Shorts, letting marketers shape strategy while letting AI optimize for outcomes.

Together, these products form a clear, connected demand engine:

YouTube VRC/VVC create attention and interest → Demand Gen turns that attention into action, creating and converting demand in one system.

YouTube & Demand Gen remain severely under-invested

One of the biggest blockers to effective investment in Google’s demand engine is outdated measurement. When brands rely on legacy attribution models like Last Click or MTA alone, they significantly undervalue what YouTube and Demand Gen contribute. Across Fospha clients, Last Click attribution undervalues these channels by more than 14x.

When all credit is handed to the final interaction, platforms that create demand - or convert it before users ever reach Search - appear inefficient, even when they’re doing the heavy lifting that drives profitable growth.

Yet despite this, both YouTube and Demand Gen remain heavily under-invested. Using Fospha’s saturation modeling (via our tool Beam), we find that brands still have 65% profitable headroom across these channels - 69% for Demand Gen and 60% for YouTube. Most brands can scale dramatically before hitting diminishing returns, but they can’t see this if they’re optimizing against Last Click or MTA.

And when brands don’t invest in demand creation, they risk falling into the bottom-funnel trap: repeatedly targeting the same finite audience, driving CAC up and new-customer acquisition down.

Fospha’s solution: a unified view

Fospha closes the gap with a Bayesian MMM and Unified ROAS (uROAS) framework that measures the impact of every impression, view, and click, including the halo effects on marketplaces like Amazon.

Traditional systems rely on deterministic signals such as clicks and last-touch data, which only capture the narrow part of the journey where users actively engage. Fospha leverages both these deterministic signals and probabilistic ones, by modelling the daily relationship between impressions, views, and conversions across both DTC and marketplaces. This approach reveals the true value of YouTube and Demand Gen across multiple surfaces.

Brands spending across the entire funnel perform considerably better

Our data across hundreds of retailers is consistent: brands allocating at least 5-10% of their budget into upper-funnel activity see stronger blended results overall. The larger the brand, the larger the potential upside. We’ve found that large brands (>$600k in monthly spend) spending at least 10% in Awareness and Consideration see 110% higher ROAS.

It’s a simple principle: growth comes from building new demand, not just harvesting existing intent. And nowhere is that more important than in Q4, when new customers often become the lifeblood of next year’s revenue.

The Proof: Google’s Demand Engine Delivers

Blended improvements from leveraging both YouTube + Demand Gen together

When brands scale both channels - investing in YouTube to build future demand and Demand Gen to create and capture demand - the effect compounds. Fospha finds that brands running this full-funnel approach achieved 32% stronger year-on-year blended revenue growth versus those who kept budgets flat.

The logic is clear: YouTube builds the audience, while Demand Gen drives to conversion. Together, they unlock far stronger blended performance than either can deliver in isolation.

Even more impressively, the most aggressive scalers - increasing spend by 400%+ - saw 145% stronger growth. This is a significant lift - it shows that consistent investment in full-funnel channels doesn’t just pay back; it pays back bigger the more you scale.

The halo effect driven by both platforms

The value of Demand Gen and YouTube isn’t limited to the conversions they capture directly on your website. Both channels also create what we call a halo effect - the influence they have on sales that show up elsewhere, like on marketplaces. For example, a shopper might first discover a brand through a YouTube ad, browse on mobile, and then complete the purchase later on Amazon. Last Click would give bottom-of-funnel (e.g. Search) all the credit, but it’s YouTube that set that purchase in motion.

Fospha's Halo measurement captures a channel’s impact beyond DTC - therefore quantifying the halo effects of YouTube and Demand Gen ads on the sales that are generated on Amazon. When we account for this cross-channel influence, the results are striking. Fospha’s data shows that the Unified ROAS (uROAS) for these channels is much higher once Amazon sales are included - with Demand Gen at +46% and YouTube at +39%.

This means two things. First, full-funnel activity isn’t just creating awareness; it’s directly driving sales that aren’t being picked up by standard reporting. Second, YouTube and Demand Gen are doing some of the heavy lifting for other channels, sparking and nurturing intent that turns into sales across both DTC and marketplaces.

Take Demand Gen’s +46% uplift as an example. Nearly half of its true impact would be missed without measuring the halo effect. These channels expand the funnel in a way that multiplies returns beyond the channel itself.

‍Demand Gen is a new customer powerhouse‍

Demand Gen is particularly effective at finding new buyers. Compared to the average across paid media, it brings in 18% more conversions from first-time customers. That’s critical at a time when acquisition costs are climbing and loyalty is harder to win.

Here's how two Fospha brands have optimized Demand Gen to drive stronger blended outcomes:

1. After launching Demand Gen, Corston Architectural Detail’s Performance Max ROAS improved by 25% and overall Google ROAS lifted 15%. Far from cannibalising lower-funnel campaigns, full-funnel investment made them more efficient.

2. Crew Clothing partnered with Google and Fospha to run structured marketing experiments that proved the long-term impact of Google media investment. By optimizing new customer acquisition and scaling Demand Gen, the brand achieved +69% YoY blended revenue growth, +37% ROAS uplift, and +96% more new customer conversions.

Strategies to Unlock Profitable Headroom in Q4 and Beyond

Forecasting growth potential

Incremental forecasting is a crucial exercise to set budgets and expectations ahead of peak. Fospha’s Beam models performance and forecast results - so you scale what’s working and cut what’s not.

Here's what Beam makes possible:

1. Identify headroom or saturation by channel and campaign

2. Model returns to guide budget decisions during high-pressure periods

3. Stop relying on guesswork and instead use predicted performance ranges to back your calls

Creative and bidding best practices

Execution matters too. Google’s own research highlights a few fundamentals:

• Demand Gen: Run a single campaign each for prospecting and remarketing, set a minimum $100/day budget, and ensure creative diversity across formats. Applying the ABCD framework (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction) can lift short-term sales by 30% and long-term impact by 17%.
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• YouTube: Tailor formats to goals - Shorts and bumpers for quick awareness, in-stream for conversions, and in-feed for mid-funnel engagement. Always include a clear CTA early in the creative.

Brands that follow these guidelines tend to see the strongest performance improvements - not just in YouTube and Demand Gen, but downstream across PMAX and Search too.

Proving the Impact of Long-Term Channel Investment to the Boardroom

Glow and the CFO conversation

The problem with investing in the higher funnel, is that without full-funnel measurement, it’s difficult to prove that Brand spend actually influences bottom-line performance. Fospha’s upcoming Glow product, developed in collaboration with Google, solves this problem.

Glow uses a causal model to prove the long‑term impact of awareness and brand spend. It connects impression-led channels (like YouTube and Demand Gen) to leading indicators and downstream business outcomes, so teams can report, optimize, and forecast brand investment with evidence CFOs trust.

Linking upper-funnel spend to long-term outcomes like AOV gives CFOs the evidence they need to support brand-building investment. That credibility is vital in boardrooms where every dollar of marketing spend is under scrutiny.

Conclusion

The data is clear: brands that treat YouTube and Demand Gen as central to their peak strategy see faster growth, more new customers, and better downstream efficiency. Last Click attribution hides their value, but Fospha’s full-funnel measurement brings it to light.

This holiday season, the choice is simple. Brands that build future demand while capturing today’s intent will outperform. Demand Gen and YouTube are growth powerhouses - and with Fospha, you can prove it.