Create a TrueView for shopping campaign

30/11/2019

TrueView for shopping campaigns make video ads interactive by connecting viewers directly to your products and providing information that brings customers closer to making a purchase.

These ads use your existing Merchant Center product data to generate shopping cards, and up to 6 shopping cards may appear on a video ad at a time. You can filter your inventory or select specific products to limit which products can show with your video ads.

In this article, we'll walk you through how to set up a TrueView for shopping campaign in Google Ads.

Before you begin

Before you set up a TrueView for shopping campaign, first link your Google Ads account to your Google Merchant Center account. You should also be familiar with TrueView in-stream ads.

TrueView for shopping can run on in-stream ads in countries where Google Merchant Center is available.

The new Google Ads experience is now the exclusive way for most users to manage their accounts. If you’re still using the previous AdWords experience, choose “previous” below. Learn more

If the information in this article doesn’t reflect what you’re seeing in your account, you may have a different version of goals. For information on your version, please see this article.

Here are step-by-step instructions for creating TrueView for shopping campaigns:

Sign in to your AdWords account.
Click the Campaigns tab, click +Campaign, and then select Video.
Enter a campaign name and change your campaign subtype to "Shopping."
Next to "Merchant identifier," choose the Merchant ID for the products you want to use in this campaign.
If you want the shopping cards to use all products in the linked Merchant Center account, leave the "Product Filter" setting to the default option, "None - use all products."
If you want to choose a subset of products to advertise in your campaign, you have two options:
1. Select Choose specific products to search for individual products from your Merchant Center account. See instructions below.
2. Select Create custom filters and enter attributes, such as brand or product type, of the products you want to advertise. See instructions below.
Set your budget. Choose networks, locations you want to target, and the language of your customers.
Click Save and continue.
Enter an Ad group name and follow the steps to create an ad group in creating a TrueView video campaign. Note: “In-stream ad” will automatically be selected for the ad format.

Tip

After you create your campaign, you can make changes to your product filter later on from your campaign settings. Select the campaign, click on the Settings tab, and then click Edit next to “Product filter.”

How to use “Choose specific products”

If you have specific products in mind from your Merchant Center account that you’d like to use in your campaign, select the Choose specific products option. You can then search for products by title, by item ID, or by the URL of the item in your online store that was uploaded to Merchant Center.

You can even select items that are out of stock, however they won’t show until they’re back in stock -- so there’s no need to adjust your campaign as products go in and out of stock.

What each status means

When using the “Choose specific products” option, you can view more information about the products in your search results by clicking on “Details.” You’ll see details for your items, which are versions of the product in each country where it’s available. The “status” column shows if an item is ready to serve for each country.

Note: You may see a yellow icon next to the word “Details” for some products. This icon appears when a product is “Not approved” or “Out of stock” in any country where it’s available. If your campaign targets a specific country, it can run as long as there’s at least one item that’s “Ready to serve” in that country.

Here are the statuses that can appear:

Ready to serve: The item is approved and eligible to run on shopping cards on your video ad.
Not approved: The item is disapproved in your Merchant Center account. You can check the status in Merchant Center to understand why the item is disapproved. Automated systems identify items that violate our policies and the Products Feed Specification. If you use the item in your campaign anyway, we’ll request an additional manual review, which takes 1 to 3 business days. Note that an item can only be manually reviewed once.
Out of stock: The item is out of stock. You provide an item’s availability using the “availability” attribute in your product data. If the availability is set to “out of stock” for a country, the item won't serve in that country. You can still select it for your campaign, and it will start appearing when it becomes available again.

How to use “Create custom filters”

Note: Using the new AdWords experience, creating custom filters has been simplified by removing the multiple attributes used for selecting products. Now you can choose from the more flexible Custom Labels in the Google Merchant Center. Other Product Filter options (“None - use all products” and “Choose specific products”) remain unchanged. At the end of May, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit custom filters in the previous AdWords experience. Eventually, the previous AdWords experience will no longer support custom filters. To continue running a campaign that uses custom filters created in the previous AdWords experience, switch to the new AdWords experience and update your custom filter selection in your campaign settings.

To advertise a subset of products based on attributes from your Merchant Center account, such as brand or product type, select Create custom filters. In the drop-down menus under “Matches all of the following,” select attributes and enter corresponding values that match your product data.

Keep in mind:

The text that you enter in the attribute field should match the text exactly as it appears in your product data.
Use the +AND button to add up to 7 attributes to a custom filter.
Use the +OR button to create another custom filter.
You can only use one product type, brand, or AdWords grouping per custom filter. You can use multiple AdWords labels per custom filter. If you’d like to include multiple product types or brands for example, use the +OR button to add another custom filter.
You can only add one value per field. You can’t enter more than one value separated by commas.

Support for custom filters created in the previous AdWords experience

By late May, custom filters in the previous AdWords experience will no longer be available or modifiable in existing campaigns. Soon afterwards, these campaigns will no longer be supported and will no longer show ads, making it necessary to switch to the new Google Ads experience and update custom filter settings. Other product filter options (None - use all products or Choose specific products) are not affected.

To continue running a campaign that uses custom filters created in the previous AdWords experience, you will need to switch to the new Google Ads experience and update custom filters in your campaign settings. Learn more about custom filters in the new Google Ads experience by reading how to use “Create custom filters.”

If your custom filters matched a small group of products, you may want to consider reconfiguring your campaign using the “Choose specific products” filter.

Note: Once you have updated to custom filters in the new Google Ads experience, you will not be able to edit those filters in the previous AdWords experience.