Shoppable Video
Shoppable Video ads are an engaging way to showcase a collection of items alongside a demonstration of the product(s) in action.
Consider implementing Shoppable Video ads as a mid-funnel strategy to drive engagement. By retargeting users who have been exposed to the same, or similar video ad, the Shoppable Video ad will not only spark brand recall, but will drive higher engagement to the specific product pages linked in the carousel. To create a full funnel strategy, consider adding dynamic retargeting to remind the users who visited a product page, but left without purchasing.
The adaptable design of Shoppable Video can be leveraged for a variety of verticals, in many different ways. The most evident being e-commerce, however whether you need to promote a new collection, sale items, or different product categories, the layout is easy to reproduce for many different use-cases. Carousels can also be powered by product feeds, for automatic updates and to reflect up-to-date inventory. As mentioned, Shoppable Video ads can tailor to more verticals than simply e-commerce. B2B can also leverage Shoppable Video ads in a unique way, by demonstrating product features. Additionally, these ads can be used for tourism, to showcase the many events or attractions a destination has to offer. Similarly, universities and higher education can benefit from showing their campus and facilities, while displaying their courses available for registration.
Process & Research
The opportunity to create Shoppable Video ads first came from implementing videos within display ads, a feature available via rich media. In May 2020, Chrome introduced Heavy Ad Intervention which blocks ads that meet certain criteria; mainly ads that exceed 4MB of network bandwidth. This had to be navigated when designing rich media ads that included videos.
As a solution, compressing the videos to be smaller in size, both in weight and resolution helped tremendously. Additionally, videos that were short-form assisted with weight and the audience's attention span. Typically, we recommended videos within banner units to be between 6 and 15 seconds, which was easily achievable considering YouTube recommends similar lengths to video ads. In addition to readily available assets, publishers typically implement ad refreshes so they can maximize their placements for more advertisers. Lastly, audio is often a key function of video ads to provide storytelling, or soundtrack to accompany the desired effect. However display ads must be muted on load in order for the video to autoplay.
With all these technicalities aside, often best practices for YouTube ads differed from that of videos within banners. For example, if a 15 second video included an end screen (often with a logo and CTA) our team would often remove the end screen to shorten the video length which would reduce the video weight. This way, the video can be repeated more seamlessly and allow for more screen time for the highlighted products or services, while contributing to brand recall with the always-on logo.