The Funnel

Google is adding shopping campaigns to YouTube, Gmail and Discover.

Good news for advertisers running Shopping Campaigns.

In a post on their official developer blog, Google announced that Product Shopping Ads and Showcase Shopping Ads would from March onwards begin showing on Gmail, YouTube and the Discover Feed.

Up until now, the only way to get your shopping ads in Gmail was to run smart shopping campaigns, which led to a lot of complaints from advertisers.

With the change, both product shopping ads and showcase shopping ads that are in your standard shopping campaigns and that target the Google Display Network will be able to appear on Gmail, YouTube and Google Discover.

Producting shopping ads allow you to include an image, title, price, and your store or business name inside your ads, without the need for you to create unique ads for each product you sell.

Showcase shopping ads let you group together a selection of related products and present them together to introduce your brand or business. These ads help the user decide what to buy when they search for more general terms like “backpacks” or “furniture”.

Both these ad formats will not be available in YouTube, Gmail and Discover. To set this up, you simply add those three platforms as an option in the networks section of your shopping campaign settings.

If you choose the search network, shopping campaigns can be displayed in Google Images too.

Using APIs? If you are using the Google Ads API or AdWords API, you will need to set your Shopping campaign network setting to targetContentNetwork to true.

Reporting: When it comes to reporting, unfortunately Google has chosen to lump together metrics for YouTube, Gmail and Discover, so it will not be possible to see results for the individual platforms.

The bigger picture: Shopping campaigns will be able to reach more users in different areas of the funnel following this change. But expect to see lower CTRs since this will be display network traffic reaching users higher up in the funnel and with lower purchase intent than search traffic.

Google's moves are in line with larger trends taking place in search advertising, as retailers slowly shift budgets away from Google to Amazon. In such a scenario, Google has been eager to set up Shopping Campaigns as a reliable alternative to Amazon.

We'll keep this post updated come March to see how the rollout works.