Shopping Ads: How to increase sales from YouTube

While video is a fantastic method of communicating your brand’s personality and staying in touch with your loyal fans, Google’s new shopping ads format is making it easier for retailers to generate direct sales from YouTube, too!

In the last few months, Google have released a TrueView for Shopping feature which allows products from the Merchant Center shopping feed to be shown directly in videos.

This is especially beneficial for retailers wanting to reach new audiences who are already researching specific products, watching unboxing videos, looking for product comparisons/reviews and following tutorials/how to guides before purchasing.

How do they work?

A maximum of 6 products (in the form of shopping cards) will appear per video, and advertisers can select all products, specific categories or choose individual products to feature on these cards.

Google automatically selects videos on which to feature these shopping cards in line with the product titles, descriptions and other attributes featured in the feed.

Before and after – the new TrueView for Shopping ads utilised by Sephora.com

How to setup Shopping ads on YouTube

Create a new Video campaign, select the Shopping option

Select which products you want to feature in your ads from Merchant Feed attributes, URLs, Item IDs and product titles

How to take your campaign to the next level

If TrueView for Shopping campaigns are set up and performing well, advertisers can take this one step further to also implement dynamic remarketing on YouTube.

A dynamic remarketing campaign allows brands to utilise the same Merchant Center and shopping feed information to dynamically generate product cards when website visitors have viewed products. The same remarketing audiences and lists that are utilised within AdWords (all users, basket abandoners, past purchasers, etc.) will also be available for targeting on YouTube via dynamic remarketing campaigns.

Further tips for maximising revenue from remarketing can be found on our blog.

Measuring Campaign Success

Like with all pay per click marketing campaigns, there are a number of metrics to measure depending on company objectives.

Many video campaigns will be judged on audience reach, click through rate and video played to (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%), but TrueView for Shopping campaigns can be assessed via revenue and ROI performance!

YouTube is a very popular site for researching audiences, and with 28% branded video viewers making a purchase after watching a video, retailers can also track post-watch sales and revenue to measure the full value of video and ad content in the purchase journey.

So there we have it – Shopping ads made simple. If you’ve got a YouTube channel and a Merchant Center account setup, you’re free to generate additional revenue from Shopping ads on YouTube!

We’re more than happy to help you set this up or answer any further questions you have, so get in touch if there’s anything you need.