The Google Funnel Has Shifted — Update Your Strategy

This post is part of our Google Marketing Live 2026 series, where we’re breaking down the updates that matter most for your campaigns. If your Google strategy is built entirely around capturing buyers who are already ready to convert, you’re working with an increasingly incomplete picture — and the gap is widening.

Exploratory queries, searches like “ideas for,” “where should I,” and “which is better,” are growing 30% faster than overall search (Google Marketing Live 2026). People are coming to Google earlier. They don’t know what they want yet, and they’re using search to figure it out. For ecommerce brands, B2B marketers, and local service businesses alike, that shift changes where the real opportunity lives.

Discovery Queries Are Growing — and Your Budget Isn’t Following Them

For years, Google functioned as a bottom-of-funnel channel. Someone knew what they wanted, typed it in, and you showed up. That model still works, but it no longer tells the whole story.

When a shopper searches “best running shoes for wide feet” before they’ve picked a brand, or a B2B buyer searches “how do enterprise teams manage project approvals” before they’ve requested a demo, they’re signaling intent at an earlier stage. If your campaigns only activate at the point of purchase, you’re invisible during the part of the journey where preferences are actually forming.

This is especially relevant for ecommerce. Product discovery is happening on Google before it ever reaches a product page. If you’re not present during that exploratory phase, a competitor who is will have a head start on every conversion that follows.

The strategic fix isn’t simply spending more. It’s spending in the right places, with the right message, earlier in the process.

DemandGen Is Built for This Moment

Google DemandGen 2026 is the campaign type designed specifically for upper and mid-funnel reach. It runs across Gmail, Google Discover, YouTube, and, as an opt-in channel coming soon, Google Maps, where ads will appear as Promoted Pins while users browse locations, get directions, or view place pages.

That Maps placement is worth thinking about now, even before it’s widely available. Consider where your brand fits in people’s physical journeys. A local service business might want to be present when someone is browsing nearby options. A retailer might want visibility when a shopper is in the area. An ecommerce brand might want to reach someone as they’re planning a trip and thinking about what they need. The channel is new, but the strategic question is worth asking early.

What makes DemandGen different from a standard display or awareness campaign is that it’s built on Google’s audience signals, meaning your ads reach people based on their interests, behaviors, and browsing patterns across Google’s properties, not just a keyword they typed. For B2B marketers, that means reaching decision-makers while they’re consuming content, not just when they’re actively searching. For local service businesses, it means staying present between the research phase and the call.

Creator Content Is Performance Creative Now

YouTube reaches 91% of US adults, ranks number one in ad retention, and shows more intentional viewing behavior than TikTok or Reels (Google Marketing Live 2026). Those aren’t just brand awareness numbers. They translate directly into measurable purchase behavior.

When a creator mentions a brand on YouTube, viewers are 13 times more likely to search for that brand and 5 times more likely to buy (Google Marketing Live 2026). Those are significant signals, and Google has made it possible to act on them directly inside DemandGen.

Creator videos used as DemandGen ad creative are showing a 20% conversion lift compared to standard creative assets (Google Marketing Live 2026). That number reframes how you should think about creator partnerships. A video a creator posts about your product isn’t just a social content play. If it performs, it belongs in your paid campaign rotation.

This applies across segments:

• Ecommerce brands can use creator unboxings or product reviews as shoppable DemandGen units
• B2B companies can use customer story videos or thought leadership content to warm audiences before retargeting
• Local service businesses can use community-focused or testimonial-style video to build familiarity before someone is ready to book

For clients actively running Search-only campaigns with no upper-funnel presence, DemandGen is typically the highest-leverage place to start. If you’re already working with creators or producing video content, the question to ask is whether that content is also working as paid media. For many brands, it should be.

Keep in mind, influencer marketing can get complicated. Repurposing a creator’s organic content as paid DemandGen requires their explicit permission and usually a formal agreement. An agency partner like Blayzer can help you navigate the creator licensing and usage rights process to your brand’s advantage.

The Long-Term ROI Case for Full-Funnel Thinking

One of the most common objections to upper-funnel investment is that it’s hard to measure. Google has made progress on that front, but the data also asks you to rethink your measurement window.

YouTube delivers 86% higher long-term ROAS than other platforms (Google Marketing Live 2026). The word “long-term” is doing real work in that stat. And it connects directly to another figure: 45% of DemandGen conversions happen outside the 30-day attribution window (Google Marketing Live 2026).

If you’re evaluating DemandGen performance on a 30-day lookback, you’re potentially writing off nearly half of its impact. That’s a measurement problem before it’s a performance problem.

To help address this, Google has added DemandGen Uplift Experiments, a built-in testing framework that measures the incremental impact of DemandGen on your existing campaigns. Reported results show a 10% ROAS lift and 12% sales effectiveness lift when DemandGen is added to Search or Performance Max campaigns (Google Marketing Live 2026). These aren’t theoretical gains. They reflect what happens when upper-funnel investment is working in parallel with, rather than in isolation from, your conversion-focused campaigns.

Journey-Aware Bidding Closes the Loop on Funnel Coverage

The funnel expansion doesn’t stop at awareness. Journey-Aware Bidding extends what Search tCPA campaigns can optimize toward, moving beyond final conversion events to include earlier signals like calls, form submissions, meeting bookings, closed deals, and imported offline conversions from your CRM.

This matters because most purchase journeys don’t end with a single click. A B2B prospect might fill out a form, get on a call, and close weeks later. A local service customer might call, schedule, and pay in person. If your campaigns only register the final transaction, they’re missing the connective tissue of how your customers actually buy.

Journey-Aware Bidding is Google’s push for tighter integration between your ad platform and your CRM or sales data. The more signal you feed back in, the smarter your bidding becomes across the entire funnel. This connects directly to measurement strategy, which we also cover in depth in this post series: Why Measurement Is Now the Competitive Edge in Google Advertising.

You Can’t Buy Your Way Into This — You Have to Strategize Into It

A bigger budget pointed at the bottom of the funnel won’t capture buyers who are still in discovery mode. Reaching them requires showing up earlier, with creative and messaging that matches where they are in their decision process, across the channels where they’re actually spending attention.

That means your Google strategy needs content designed for discovery, not just conversion. It means your creative assets, including video and creator content, need to be evaluated as paid media, not just organic posts. It means your measurement framework needs to account for conversion windows that extend beyond 30 days. And it means your bidding strategy should be informed by the full arc of your customer journey, not just the last click.

The tools to do this exist in the platform right now. The advantage goes to teams that build a strategy around them.

Ready to find out where your current Google strategy has gaps? We’ll audit your full-funnel setup and show you exactly where DemandGen, YouTube, and Journey-Aware Bidding can work harder for your business. Talk to an expert and get your free Google strategy audit today.