Google has made it easier to buy products in YouTube video ads

Have you ever seen a product or service in a YouTube video ad and wished it were easier to learn more or purchase it? Me neither, but Google believes its new TrueView for shopping ad format will result in stronger results for advertisers looking to drive increased interest and sales. 

TrueView for shopping takes advantage of Google’s recently launched cards for TrueView ads, which up until now allowed advertisers to create a feed of links displayed in the video player, but only to other relevant content hosted on YouTube. The difference now being, of course, that advertisers can link out to the pages on their site where the products or services displayed in the ad are available for purchase.

What’s more, if the advertisement is for a brand which sells many goods, for example, they can upload their entire inventory to Google Merchant Center and have the cards in the new TrueView ad dynamically choose products to link to based on “contextual audience signals” like the geography and demographic information of each viewer.

And since this is Google we’re talking about, who loves nothing more than data, they’re providing some numbers to back up the new product – home goods retailer Wayfair saw a 3X revenue increase per impression when compared to previous campaigns, while beauty retailer Sephora found that the new ad format drove an 80% increase in consideration and a 54% increase in ad recall, with an average view time of nearly two minutes.

The new product works across both mobile and desktop, which is good considering more than half of all YouTube videos come from smartphones (Google categorizes tablets as desktop computers). It won’t allow you to buy products directly on YouTube.com or within the mobile apps, but it does make it easier to buy products you may see displayed in an ad on the platform. It should also result in higher cost-per-engagement for Google if they can prove it really does lead to significant increases in revenue for advertisers.

TrueView for shopping was first announced this morning at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco by Google SVP of Ads & Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy.