YouTube and Demand Gen ads for truck driver recruiting

What it does

Search catches drivers who are actively looking; YouTube, Shorts, Discover and Gmail reach the wider group who would switch for a better offer but are not typing job queries right now. Demand Gen campaigns serve video and image ads across those surfaces. For recruiting, short and plain beats polished: a real driver or dispatcher next to the truck, the job type and home time in the first seconds, captions for people watching without sound, and a clear next step. Make vertical versions for Shorts and horizontal ones for in-stream, and record one video per language rather than putting subtitles over a single voice.

Video ads on Google need the video on YouTube, which usually means someone has to upload it to a channel first. AdAce Ads removes that step: you upload the file — MP4, MOV, WEBM, AVI or MPEG, up to 256 MB — to YouTube through the connected Google Ads account, using Google's YouTube video upload API. The video is unlisted by default, the file streams straight to Google and is not stored by the service, and uploading again with the same title does not create a duplicate. The video ID can then be used in Demand Gen or Performance Max ads, and the creative library under “Campaigns” → “Creatives” later shows spend, results and cost per result for each video over 7, 30 or 90 days.

Demand Gen sets locations and languages at the ad group level, which suits multilingual hiring: one ad group per language, each with its own video and texts, and locations by state or city where you hire. You can also choose channels per ad group — YouTube in-feed, in-stream and Shorts, Discover, Gmail and Display — and drop the ones that bring clicks without contacts. In AdAce Ads you work inside an existing Demand Gen campaign: add ad groups and ads and set these options for each group. A campaign created directly in Google Ads triggers an alert about a campaign outside the service and can be imported.

Demographic targeting is off the table for job ads in the US and Canada, but intent is not. A custom segment of people who searched your job keywords on Google — class a driver jobs, box truck jobs, team driver jobs — lets Demand Gen show your video to people who recently looked for this kind of work, and AdAce Ads sets such a segment per ad group. Measure Demand Gen by what it brings, not by views: the lead tracking script records clicks with Google click IDs, interviews and hires go back to Google Ads as offline conversions, and cost per interview by campaign shows whether video recruiting pays off next to Search.

Why it helps

• Reach drivers who are open to an offer but not searching.
• Videos go to YouTube through the connected Google Ads account; the file is not kept by the service.
• One ad group per language with its own locations and channels.
• Audiences built from job searches, not demographics.
• Video performance judged by interviews and hires.

How to set it up

1. Record short vertical and horizontal videos for each language, with captions.
2. Upload each file to YouTube through the connected Google Ads account in AdAce Ads and keep it unlisted.
3. Import the Demand Gen campaign if it was created in Google Ads, then add an ad group per language.
4. Set locations, languages and channels for each ad group and add a “people who searched” segment with your job keywords.
5. Create the ads with the uploaded video IDs and approve them with password and second factor.
6. After two to four weeks compare videos in “Campaigns” → “Creatives” and campaigns by cost per interview.

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