Google Announces Shopping Ads On YouTube

Google has announced the launch of shoppable ads on YouTube that allow users to purchase products directly from pre-roll advertisements in videos.

This new feature is called “TrueView For Shopping” and it allows marketers to embed banners in ads that viewers can click to be taken to the product’s site. Additionally, a list will run underneath the ad that shows the products that a viewer is seeing, with links to purchase them.

These new YouTube ads are the result of an integration with Google Shopping’s technology and it is built on the cards platform that was introduced in March. Cards will eventually replace annotations, and they were extended to TrueView ads last month, providing advertisers with the ability to promote their other videos and playlists. Now, with TrueView for Shopping, retailers are able to feature related product ads in these cards. The product images and details are passed via the integration of Google Merchant Center with YouTube.

When marketers link their video campaign with a feed in Merchant Center and set up the cards, products are dynamically added to their in-stream videos based on targeting features including contextual and audience signals, such as topic areas, demographics and geography. YouTube for Shopping also allows marketers to use Google’s dynamic remarketing to show ads for relevant products to users that have viewed them on advertisers’ websites.

Google’s blog post announcement states that brands that have participated in early tests of TrueView for Shopping “have seen strong results for driving interest and sales.” The company explained that online home goods retailer Wayfair saw a 3 times revenue increase per impression served in comparison to previous campaigns. Additionally, beauty retailer Sephora experienced a +80 percent lift in consideration and +54 percent lift in ad recall, with an average view time of almost two minutes.

Google’s addition can be seen as a method for competing with Amazon, as many shoppers search for products directly on Amazon as opposed to starting with Google. If Google is able to turn YouTube into a place where consumers begin product searches, it may be able to gain more direct marketing advertising revenue.

“Our motivation overall is that there is a pretty big generational shift happening when it comes to videos,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president for ads and commerce. “For the longest time, I would look at catalogues to figure out what to buy. My teenage sons are much more likely to search for videos. This shopping format tends to be an extremely natural addition to how people think about buying.”

Ramaswamy explained that almost two-thirds of brands see Google searches rise by as much as 13 percent after consumers watch their ad on YouTube. With the new TrueView for Shopping ads, the need for a follow-up search can be eliminated.

Google will be paid in the same way that it is for traditional TrueView ads, where advertisers pay anytime a user watches an ad for 30 seconds without skipping. For marketers that have a Google account representative, they can contact them to start running TrueView for Shopping ads now. For others, they will have to wait until the ad product becomes available in the front end interface of AdWords in the coming months.