Google wants you to buy things straight from YouTube videos
YouTubeHere's how it looks on mobile.
YouTube is rolling out a new feature that will let advertisers easily lists goods that they are selling alongside or within their video ads.The feature is called TrueView for shopping and builds off of the introduction of "cards" in April, which let advertisers overlay more information about their brand, related videos, playlists, and links to their websites on their videos.
Now, YouTube is linking videos ads into the same dashboard it uses for Google Shopping, so instead of manually connecting individual products and ads, advertisers can have product links added automatically.
Essentially, Google its taking the technology and infrastructure it built for Shopping and letting advertisers use it in on YouTube.;
With TrueView ads, which the company launched five years ago, Google only charges advertisers if a viewer doesn't skip their ad and watches for at least 30-seconds or to the end of the video (whichever is less.)
When it rolled out cards, it started charging either for a click or a full-view, and that pricing structure will continue with the new feature.
The key is that YouTube bets the greater emphasis on this shopping element will make its ads more effective. And the more effective the ads are, the more advertisers will want to buy them, and then the more that YouTube can charge per view. TrueView for shopping is optimized for both desktop and mobile.
"Advertisers had used annotations in the past to make their videos interactive, but these didn't work on all screens and viewers didn't always know what to expect," YouTube product Manager Avi Fein told Business Insider via email. "So with cards and TrueView for shopping we created a very consistent experience that creates a much more engaging and interactive format for viewers."
Along with the feature announcement, Google also stressed that people are using YouTube to help them make shopping decisions more than ever.
There are now more than 1 million channels on YouTube focused on product reviews, and views of those videos have grown 50% year-over-year. And that growth is paying out for brands too. For example, Wayfair said it saw a 3X revenue increase per ad impression served over its previous YouTube campaigns.
This rollout comes not long after the Wall Street Journal reported that Google plans to roll out a new "buy" button in its Google Shopping search results that will let users make a purchase without being shuttled to a brands website.
