TrueView for Shopping: A Quick Guide to Product Selection | Marketing

Almost two years ago, we heard that people spend one billion hours on YouTube every single day. If you still don’t think your audience is on YouTube, you’re probably wrong. And if you are an ecommerce business looking for different ways to target potential customers with Google Ads, you need to get serious about TrueView for Shopping campaigns.

Ecommerce marketers can showcase products from their shopping feeds alongside TrueView ads on YouTube. This is a great way to use video content to enhance your YouTube marketing strategy to drive even more sales. Let me show you what your options are for selecting which products you want to showcase alongside your video ad content and how to optimize your selections.

Products are selected at the campaign level

If you are already running shopping campaigns for your ecommerce account, you are most likely familiar with the product selection process. While priority settings are at the campaign level, you can still create ad groups with a wide variety of product selection options. With video campaigns, however, our flexibility is much more limited. This is because advertisers must choose their products at the campaign level.

TrueView for Shopping campaigns are video campaigns first and shopping campaigns second. Keeping our product selection limitations in mind, the product filters we are given are going to determine how we want to advertise our videos and structure our campaigns. Think of the content you already have, or any marketing videos you may need to create, before building your campaigns. Planning out your product selections ahead of time will make building the campaign a lot easier.

Searching for specific products

By default, Google will choose to use all products in your merchant account just like a normal shopping campaign. You, on the other hand, will likely want only specific products to show up for your videos. The campaign setup makes searching for exact products pretty easy. Just start searching for your products by the title, URL or shopping ID you have used in your product feeds.

If you search for broader terms instead of exact URLs or IDs, you will get a list of results depending on what matches with your feed titles. You can then start adding whatever products you think would make sense to show alongside your video depending on what the campaign targets are going to be.

You may notice yellow warning triangles next to your products like the ones we see in this image:

The yellow triangles mean the product is currently out of stock. You can still add out of stock products to your videos, but they will not show up until your feed refreshes with new quantities in stock. If you have a lot of out of stock products, just be sure to balance your product selection with enough stocked products to cover all bases.

Shopping feed custom columns are more important than ever

If you don’t want to use all products, or search by feed data, custom filters are the only option for selecting products for your video ads. Up until June 2018, advertisers were able to create custom filters to select products for video ads. The layers we used to be able to create allowed us to make some pretty unique product groupings.

Did you notice how I said “used to”? Yeah, those days are gone. I got your hopes up before I squashed them. I apologize for that, but it is important to know if you are already running TrueView for Shopping campaigns. As of the beginning of June 2018, we can no longer create custom filters this way due to the new Google Ads interface. The only option we have now is using the custom columns in our product feeds.

Custom labels have always been important for Shopping feeds, but now that these are the only option for selecting products, they’re more important than ever. I understand you may be using all five columns just for your regular shopping campaigns for search. But all you need to do here is look and see if you can reserve one of your custom columns for your YouTube campaigns if you are really invested in video marketing (which you all should be). The labels you use for direct-return campaigns could differ greatly than labels you might want to use on products for awareness and consideration goals. Keep this in mind before using your current custom labels.

Parting advice: pay attention to video content

While you have many options for your products, let the content be the main decision maker. The products you show should try and match the goals of the video content and your targeting methods. While you can select up to a maximum of ten products per campaign, only six of them will show at a time. If you want the ability to show more products, utilize the custom filters or think about creating additional campaigns.

It may take a little time to find the right product selection to really boost your video campaigns. But once you find the right products to go with a great video, you will have video marketing that not only builds awareness but also drives revenue.