YouTube TrueView Ads Let You Shop While You Watch Videos

Google’s online video site, YouTube, will be upping its appeal to product-based merchandisers very soon with the introduction of a new ad format called TrueView for Shopping.

Built in the same way as YouTube’s card-style annotations, the mobile-friendly ad format will give advertisers an option to highlight featured products or related information within an ad on a YouTube video. Viewers can click on the ad to purchase the product through the brand’s website.

YouTube TrueView Ads shopping ads are YouTube’s version of Google’s Merchant Center, a place where brands can upload product information and data to appear in Google’s Shopping service and search results. For businesses that would like to try TrueView shopping ads YouTube, they will need to have a Google Merchant Center account set up already. With this new feature, brands are able to target by demographics, geography, and even past views of products on the brand’s site.

In the Google announcement, the company reports that early adopters of the TrueView for shopping have seen strong results. “Online home goods retailer Wayfair, for instance, saw a 3X revenue increase per impression served when compared to previous campaigns. And beauty retailer Sephora took advantage of this new ad format to drove +80% lift in consideration and +54% lift in ad recall, and an average view time of nearly two minutes.”

YouTube’s transition to these TrueView Shopping ads makes sense. Currently, there are at least 1 million YouTube channels dedicated to reviewing products. And that number has grown 50% year-after-year.

What are your thoughts on this new Shopping ad format? Do you think this will be more successful way to advertise for product merchandisers?