YouTube To Incorporate Ecommerce On Site

It has been reported recently by various marketing news agencies, including Warc and Marketing Week that the video sharing site YouTube is to change its current advertising format to make ecommerce even easier on the site. The new format will allow advertisers to include product visuals and information – including pricing – within the video ads that play on the site and allow consumers to click to make a purchase.

The feature is called TrueView and the new format launched at the end of last week. The only thing that will not be performed by YouTube is the final transaction; for this, consumers will be redirected to the official retail site. After having been trialled in the US, two brands found that the new format led to a tripling in revenues compared to traditional ads on the site, and one saw an 80% increase in consideration from consumers and 54% more ad recall.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has prompted the price of ads on the search engine to decline as advertisers can pay less for ads on the video sharing site – this is because the path to purchase is a lot longer on YouTube than on Google, where consumers searching for a product are typically a lot closer to making a purchase.

It is predicted that advertisers will need to pay for a click or full-view ad. It is hoped that the new TrueView format will make ads on the site more effective – this means more advertisers will want to invest and this in turn will drive prices upwards for Google.

Lane Shackleton, the senior product manager for YouTube, said: “One of the things we saw was people going off YouTube and searching Google.com for that product [seen in an ad on YouTube], and then clicking the product listing.”

This new format will “reduce the friction” caused by this, he claims.