Roughly two years back, we learned that people spend one billion hours on YouTube every single day. It’s likely a mistake to think your audience isn’t using YouTube at this point. And for ecommerce companies searching for fresh approaches to target potential customers through Google Ads, taking TrueView for Shopping campaigns seriously is a must.
Ecommerce marketers have the power to display products from their shopping feeds right beside TrueView ads on YouTube. This presents a fantastic opportunity to leverage video content, boosting your YouTube marketing strategy for increased sales. Let’s explore the choices you have for picking which products to feature alongside your video ad content, and how to fine-tune your selections. To gain a really comprehensive understanding of what goes into building a successful Google Shopping campaign, grab our free guide today!
Campaign-Level Product Selection
If you’re already running shopping campaigns for your ecommerce business, you’re probably familiar with how product selection works. While priority settings operate at the campaign level, you can build ad groups with diverse product selection options. However, with video campaigns, our flexibility is much more restricted. This is because, for these campaigns, advertisers have to choose their products at the campaign level.
TrueView for Shopping campaigns should be viewed as video campaigns first, and shopping campaigns second. Keeping this limitation in mind, the product filters available to us will guide how we promote our videos and structure our campaigns. Before creating your campaigns, think about the content you already have and any marketing videos you might need to produce. Mapping out your product selections beforehand will simplify the campaign building process.
Pinpointing Specific Products
Just like a standard shopping campaign, Google defaults to using all the products in your merchant account. However, you’ll probably want to feature only specific products alongside your videos. Luckily, the campaign setup makes homing in on exact products quite simple. Just begin your product search using the title, URL, or shopping ID from your product feeds.
If your search uses broader terms instead of exact URLs or IDs, the results you see will depend on matches with your feed titles. From there, you can start adding any products you think make sense to appear alongside your video, keeping in mind the campaign’s intended targets. You might spot yellow warning triangles next to some of your products, like the ones shown here:
These triangles indicate that the product is currently out of stock. You can still include out-of-stock products in your videos, but keep in mind they won’t appear until your feed updates with new available quantities. If you’re dealing with a large number of out-of-stock products, ensure you’re balancing your selection with enough in-stock items to cover all your bases.
The Heightened Importance of Shopping Feed Custom Columns
If you prefer not to feature all products or search using feed data, custom filters become your sole option for selecting products for your video ads. Prior to June 2018, creating custom filters for this purpose was possible. The layers we once had allowed us to create some truly unique product groupings.
Did the phrase “used to” jump out? Sadly, those days are behind us. While I apologize for getting your hopes up only to dash them, understanding this change is crucial if you’re already running TrueView for Shopping campaigns. Since the launch of the new Google Ads interface at the start of June 2018, we can no longer create custom filters in this way. Our only remaining option is using the custom columns within our product feeds.
While custom labels have always been important for Shopping feeds, they are absolutely essential now that they’re our only product selection method. You might be using all five columns for your regular search-based shopping campaigns, and that’s understandable. However, if you’re truly committed to video marketing (and you really should be!), take a look and see if you can free up one of your custom columns for your YouTube campaigns. The labels used for direct-return campaigns could be completely different from those you’d want to use for products geared towards awareness and consideration goals. Keep this in mind when working with your existing custom labels.
Final Tip: Prioritize Video Content
While you have numerous product options, let your content guide the ultimate decisions. The products you choose to display should align with the aims of your video content and your targeting strategies. Keep in mind that although you can select up to ten products per campaign, only six will be visible at a time. If showcasing a wider range of products is a priority, leverage custom filters or consider creating additional campaigns.
Finding the perfect product selection to truly elevate your video campaigns might require some experimentation. But once you land on the winning combination of compelling video content and the right products, you’ll unlock a video marketing strategy that not only builds brand awareness but also generates revenue.