Google Announces New Shorts-Focused Video Ad Options

With Shorts continuing to rise in popularity on YouTube, Google has today announced some new Shorts-focused ad options that’ll make it easier for brands to tap into Shorts for their promotions.

First off, Google’s adding new ad formats for Shorts, with stickers on Shorts ads and animated image ads.

The new Shorts sticker ads will display a single image from your product feed, which, when tapped, present the viewer with a carousel of products to view.

It’s an alternative, interactive presentation for Shorts ads, which could prompt more engagement with your in-stream promotions.

Animated image ads, meanwhile, will display a selection of product images, which each pop-up on screen.

The option could provide another way for brands to tap into Shorts without creating their own video content, by simply pulling in images from your Google Merchant Center feeds.

Google’s also rolling out format buying controls, enabling brands to run their campaigns exclusively in the Shorts feed, or run campaigns that showcase only horizontal creative.

As per Google:

“Already available for Video Reach Campaigns, format buying controls are now available around the world on Video View Campaigns. We’re also in the early stages of piloting Shorts-only buying in Demand Gen with a limited set of advertisers for their performance goals.”

So you’ll be able to hone in on more specific presentation formats and surfaces, providing another way to tap into the popularity of Shorts.

Also Shorts-related, Google’s also experimenting with a new “Creator Partnerships” tab, providing a central location from which you’ll be able to manage your influencer and affiliate marketing efforts.

“Using creator videos in your ad campaigns can improve performance. In fact, based on internal data, partnership ads that live on the creator’s channel drove up to 20% higher conversions on the Shorts feed than ads with advertiser branding alone. To make it even easier to link videos, we’re also introducing a new video linking API so you can manage multiple requests at once. We’re also enabling creators to tag partners in their brand videos so that either side of your partnership can establish that meaningful connection.”

Tapping into the creative talent of established creators can be a great way to maximize the value of short-form video promotions, and this new tab will help you keep track of such within Google Ads.

Google’s also expanding its Shorts audience building process, which will soon include Shorts view durations, while it’s also working to add third party sales lift measurement for Shorts ads.

Again, Shorts is YouTube’s fastest growing offering, now driving over 70 billion views per day, and with YouTube recently expanding the definition of Shorts to all videos of up to 3 minutes in length, that means that a lot more YouTube clips will now be built into its Shorts ecosystem.

Which presents new ad opportunities, and these new elements built into Google Ads will enable more marketers to tap into such.