2018 Guide- Use YouTube Video to drive Sales and Revenue- By Sarang Kinjavdekar

You can now use Trueview for Shopping to drive sales. Let's say you are an ecommerce player, you have a Television commercial or a 3 minute video which showcase all your available categories or say the Top selling products.

People , nowadays are always on mobile and always looking for interactive content. User A saw your promotion email and then he was served a display ad followed by your YouTube video. This means, that he is already aware of your brand. Now you want to make sure that while  watching video, he can click to the products he saw in the video and make a purchase. 

At the outset, this looks very difficult. But now, you can do it easily with Trueview for shopping.You can now Incorporate e-commerce experience into video content by using TrueView for shopping. This means, combining the Upper funnel (awareness) to the lower funnel (driving sales) or also the middle funnel (consideration).

With the introduction of TrueView for shopping, YouTube viewers can now click through to a brand's products, which lets consumers easily purchase items that are right in front of them on-screen. This is possible by using the cards functionality on YouTube (see Technology used below for more details). By creating helpful, product-specific videos that speak to the audience's interests, you can  provide YouTube viewers with the exact content that will most likely to build a relationship and end up in sales or a conversion


Basic requirements


Before you set up a TrueView for shopping campaign, first link your AdWords account to your Google Merchant Center account. You should also be familiar with TrueView in-stream ads. Also, You'll need to have access to your product data in Merchant Center and be willing to add custom label attributes to your products (if you want to use custom filters for products)

Availability


Currently it is available only in the countries where the Google Merchant centre works. A complete list of the countries can be found here.


Technology used

The cards can use the same technology as dynamic remarketing, or advertisers can set filters to pull relevant products from their Merchant Feed. This means product cards are dynamically generated for that video ad's particular impression, and work seamlessly to incorporate an e-commerce element for consumers. Working across mobile, tablet, and desktop, the cards can help increase viewer engagement while helping brands reach potential customers, even in unexpected demographics.

How is it useful for you-as a retailer?

• Increase audience engagement around branded video content
• Drive revenue, conversions, and sales

How does it look like- Lets have a look


Below is how it looks like.. Example 1

Example 2

The products on the video can now be seamlessly integrated into the videos. You can have maximum of 6 cards in a single video. 

How to select the products range to appear in Video?


If you have specific products in mind from your Merchant Center account that you’d like to use in your campaign, select the Choose specific products option. You can then search for products by title, by item ID, or by the URL of the item in your online store that was uploaded to Merchant Center.

Note:- You can even select items that are out of stock, however they won’t show until they’re back in stock -- so there’s no need to adjust your campaign as products go in and out of stock.

Campaign Set up Process

Step by Step guide- New Adwords console- Source

Other Things to remember

• Product is Selected at the Campaign Level and NOT at Ad group level
• Dynamic Remarketing Is Available for YouTube Shopping
• If you do not have any specific products to show or the video is very generic, you can make use of retargeting strategy to show the products to different segments based on your remarketing lists. 

You have three options when selecting your products:

1. Choose all products available in your chosen feed
2. Select specific products by searching for titles, URLs or product IDs
3. Create custom filters (one example seen below)

Using Custom Filters option

Status and Troubleshooting


As mentioned above, you can choose specific products to appear in the video. If you can ahead and select this option, you might see various messages as status, below is a brief on how to tackle them

1. Ready to serve: The item is approved and eligible to run on shopping cards on your video ad.
2. Not approved: The item is disapproved in your Merchant Center account. You can check the status in Merchant Center to understand why the item is disapproved. Automated systems identify items that violate our policies and the Products Feed Specification. If you use the item in your campaign anyway, we’ll request an additional manual review, which takes one to three working days. Note that an item can only be manually reviewed once.
3. Out of stock: The item is out of stock. You provide an item’s availability using the “availability” attribute in your product data. If the availability is set to “out of stock” for a country, then the item won't serve in that country. You can still select it for your campaign, and it will start appearing when it becomes available again.

Thanks for reading!!!

Sarang
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