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70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery. Through a ‘see tap shop’ philosophy, the platform provides a straightforward online shopping experience. By clicking shoppable video, photos and stories, consumers can learn more details about products tagged. They can either buy the product or bookmark for later using the save feature. Soon, customers will be able to complete in app purchases. Using Instagram Story Ads, brands can connect with 500 million accounts daily using photos or videos of up to 120 seconds long.
Through livestream shopping, check-out enabled businesses can form richer connections with customers in real time. Viewers will be able to buy or save products added to the shopping video. Prior to streaming, you can add up to 30 products to a collection and pin one item at a time while Live to feature that product. Products shown must be approved before they can be added to live videos. An influencer looking to explore the shop live feature must have featured products approved before they can be tagged.
Since Facebook owns Instagram, businesses can replicate and unify their shops across the two platforms. Businesses and brands can compose collections to show in their ads once they are clicked on. Live stream shopping has been proven to be extremely effective, the app NTWRK saw their sales surge 400% after using the tech to sell limited edition fashion pieces.
TikTok has partnered with Shopify to launch shoppable video ads. Sponsored businesses on Shopify will be able to advertise using TikTok for business ad manager dashboard to run their ads. This will include a “1-click” pixel conversion tracking, target audience tracking, creative tools and $300 credit for eligible merchants. Even small businesses will be able to create shoppable video, so long as they are partnered with Shopify. Through a “shop now” call to action, viewers can purchase the products that they see on screen. In 2019, TikTok trialled shoppable video links with influencers but it is not yet clear whether this feature will roll out to TikTokkers. For now, the feature lies in the hands of pre-approved businesses.
Google’s Shoploop provides a video shopping platform for discovering, assessing and purchasing products. Here, users can view videos from real, relatable people using products available for purchase. The aim is to create an online shopping experience that feels like real life. Customers can select products of interest to save for later or be directed to the brands website to complete the purchase. Shoploop’s current focus is centred towards content creators, publishers and online store owners in the beauty industry.
In June 2020, YouTube introduced the “shop now” call to action on video ads shown. The feature was introduced to drive more traffic from the product listing to the brands website. With this, YouTube seeks to improve the way in which ad effectiveness can be measured.
Each platform offers an online shopping solution. However, as standalone apps, it can be difficult to manage multiple ad formats and directly measure and compare ad effectiveness from platform to platform. As a result, things could get unnecessarily complicated.
Smartzer offers a cross platform solution to these complications. The quick, easy and customisable interactive livestream and interactive video formats allow users to upload content and create immersive, shoppable video ads. These videos can be replicated across any social media platform, e-commerce site and even email newsletters. This removes issues associated with site specific advertising methods. You can efficiently measure the performance of your interactive videos by using the Smartzer analytics dashboard. Here, brands can see data for key video KPI’s like views and clicks as well as behavioural data across distribution platforms, devices and markets. By using Smartzer’s interactive video software brands observed a 50% increase in engagement rate as well as a 15% increase in click through rate four times more likely to lead to a conversion than regular video.
Smartzer encourages interactivity through mobile optimisation. For example, TikTokkers can experience highly engaging ads without glitches by clicking the call to action URL featured on brand campaigns. Through Smartzer’s MINI shop, TikTok ads can be connected directly to the product feed. By clicking the ad, users can see all the shoppable products and a link to the brand’s e-commerce, leading to increased conversion rates and stronger ROI.
To minimise issues, brands should consider moving towards quick and easy, shoppable and social solutions.