Google has announced that its product listing ad format is coming to YouTube video advertising, allowing brands to link directly to products that are featured in their ads.
The TrueView for shopping feature, announced by Google this month, is linked to Google’s Merchant Center and will be rolling out into Adwords in the coming months. So what opportunities does it create for video advertisers?
Link directly to products within your ads.
TrueView for shopping has been announced as a feature that allows advertisers to showcase product details and images, and provide links to those product pagers within a video ad.
This is likely to see brands think much more carefully about how their video content can generate a direct sales action. For example, if a furniture retailer was looking to showcase a particular product, they may produce a video ad with a strong focus on interior design and feature that product. Similarly, a grocery retailer could use video to feature a particular recipe, providing a link to purchase the ingredients.
These YouTube ads are integrated with Google’s Product Listing ads and are built on the cards platform that YouTube introduced in March. Cards were introduced as the eventual replacement for annotations, and were extended to TrueView ads in April. This gave advertisers the opportunity to promote other video content and playlist and now, the feature is being rolled out to provide direct links to product pages.
Optimised for mobile
With 50% of video views on YouTube coming on mobile, Google has made a point of ensuring that the ads are fully mobile and tablet friendly.
Of course, it also means that the onus is on the advertiser to ensure that any landing page that they link to is also optimised for mobile devices.
Dynamic remarketing is included
Once an advertiser links its video campaign to a feel in Merchant Center and sets up the relevant cards, products are dynamically added to their in-stream videos based on standard TrueView targeting features.
There are also updates to dynamic remarketing functions in YouTube for Shopping. Advertisers will be able to use dynamic remarketing to show ads for relevant products to users that viewed them on advertisers’ websites.
Choose your own CTAs
Advertisers will be free to define the information that is displayed in the product ads, including the call to action. This means that you can use different CTAs in your desktop or mobile ads, and you can opt whether or not to include pricing information.
You won’t be able to include product ratings and merchant promotions at launch, but that could change.
Early results are promising
The platform has been tested by a handful of guinea pigs, and both Wayfair and Sephora have reported promising results. Wayfair reported that revenue per impression tripled compared to previous campaigns, whilst Sephora claims it saw an average view time of nearly two minutes. The latter also reported an 80% lift in consideration and 54% lift in ad recall with TrueView product ads.
