14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, Google’s financial chief, Patrick Pichette, expressed his enthusiasm about how well things were going on the video-sharing website, claiming that YouTube had a great contribution to the quarterly advertising revenues.
It now seems that the company has decided to take a step forward and has announced the launch of a new feature to the TrueView Ads.
Viewers who, despite the initial uproar against the unwanted ads, had become so intrigued by the content that they do not skip them anymore will have the option to buy the advertised products from within the video, now that the "Click to Shop" button has been introduced.
This means that those who are persuaded by the 3-minute or less advertisements played before the video can just click on the button, which will take them directly to the shopping page of the site in question.
It seems that Google is intent on increasing its ad revenues with a little help from YouTube’s 1 billion active monthly users. Furthermore, for a more engaging shopping experience, the ads will also start displaying a list of the products advertised as well as the prices for each of them.
With the release of the new feature, Google plans to entice more users so that they do not skip the ad during the pre-roll. The company gets paid by advertisers only if viewers watch the ad for 30 seconds or more.
No extra fees will be required from advertisers, for now
According to AdAge, Google won’t charge more for the ads if the consumer clicks on the embedded banner on the screen, but it is very likely that, if this experiment goes as planned, advertisers will be willing to pay more for the skippable ads.
"One of the things we saw was people going off YouTube and searching on Google.com for that product and then clicking the product listing. In this case we're just reducing the friction," says YouTube's Senior Product Manager Lane Shackleton.
The possibility of buying from within the video is meant to help people save time, given that they won’t have to look for the advertised product online, they can just click on it.
Google has also mentioned that they have been testing this feature for some time now and that companies have registered significant increases in ad impressions.