YouTube ads for ecommerce: formats, cost, Shorts and Demand Gen

In short: YouTube ads for an online store run from Google Ads. To sell, you use a Demand Gen campaign with your Merchant Center product feed; to build reach for the brand, a video campaign. The formats a store uses most are skippable in-stream, in-feed, Shorts and 6-second bumper ads. You pay per view, per click or per thousand impressions, and the price is set in an auction.

Written by the CloudCart team, the ecommerce platform from Bulgaria, for stores that sell in any EU country and across borders. Formats, billing and specs come from the Google Ads Help Center; the store steps follow the CloudCart documentation. Per country, only the video's language, the feed's currency and the landing store change.

How YouTube ads work for an online store

YouTube ads run through three Google Ads campaign types: Demand Gen, Video and Performance Max. You choose by goal: orders, views or reach.

Campaign	Goal for the store	Placements on YouTube	Product feed
Demand Gen	Orders, add to basket, new customers and remarketing	Shorts, in-stream, in-feed, Home feed, Watch next, YouTube Search; plus Discover, Gmail, Maps and the Display Network	Yes
Video	Brand reach, views, ad sequences	In-stream, in-feed, bumper, Shorts, Google video partners	No
Performance Max	Sales from every Google channel on one budget	YouTube is one of the channels; Google decides when	Yes

Video action campaigns, which stores used to sell on YouTube, have been upgraded to Demand Gen (see the FAQ below).

Every video ad lives on a YouTube channel: in Google Ads you pick a video already uploaded there or paste its link.

YouTube ad formats: the table

An online store mostly uses four YouTube ad formats: skippable in-stream, in-feed, Shorts and bumper. The table follows Google Ads Help: video ad formats.

Format	Where it shows	Length	Skip	When you pay
Skippable in-stream	Before, during or after a YouTube video, in YouTube Playables games and on Google video partners	No maximum, under 3 minutes recommended	After 5 seconds	With CPV bidding: when the viewer watches 30 seconds (or the whole shorter video) or interacts. With Target CPM, Target CPA or Maximize conversions: per impression
Non-skippable in-stream	In YouTube videos and on video partners	Up to 60 seconds	No	Per thousand impressions (Target CPM)
In-feed	YouTube Search, Watch next, the Home feed in the app, the Subscriptions feed	No maximum	Not applicable: the viewer clicks the thumbnail to watch	When someone clicks to watch; in a views campaign also when the video autoplays for at least 10 seconds
Bumper	In YouTube videos and on video partners	5 to 6 seconds	No	Per thousand impressions (Target CPM)
Shorts	Between Shorts on mobile, desktop and TV	Under 60 seconds recommended	At once, with a swipe	With CPV: after 10 seconds watched (or the end), a click, a like, comment or share. With Target CPM: per impression

For a store with a catalog, skippable in-stream and Shorts bring sales inside Demand Gen. Bumper ads remind people who have already visited the store of a product. In-feed ads catch people searching YouTube for a review in your category.

YouTube Shorts ads: vertical video

A YouTube Shorts ad is a vertical video between short clips that the viewer can skip at once with a swipe. That is why the first 2 seconds decide everything: the product has to be in frame from the first moment.

Shorts ads run from Demand Gen (YouTube Shorts is a separate channel you can tick) and from Video campaigns. Under Google's video ad specs, vertical video is 9:16, recommended 1080 × 1920 pixels, minimum 720 × 1280. Google also accepts 4:5 and 2:3. Keep the logo, product and text inside the safe zone, because YouTube's buttons and captions cover different parts of the screen depending on the format.

1. Seconds 0 to 2: the product in use. Cream on skin, coffee poured into a cup, a backpack on a shoulder. No logo, no intro.
2. Seconds 2 to 8: one benefit. The problem the product solves, shown on screen. Captions are a must, because many people watch with the sound off, and they let one video serve several languages.
3. Seconds 8 to 15: price and delivery. The price in the viewer's currency (euro, złoty, koruna), the delivery time to their country, and how they can pay: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay.
4. The last 2 seconds: what to do next. The store name and the button in the ad ("Shop now", "Learn more").

Demand Gen: the campaign that sells from YouTube

Demand Gen is the Google Ads campaign an online store uses to sell from YouTube. It shows video, images and carousels on Shorts, in-stream, in-feed and in YouTube Search, and also on Discover, Gmail, Google Maps and the Display Network.

According to Google Ads Help: Demand Gen campaigns, you set the campaign up with conversion tracking and can optimise for a lighter event such as add to basket while purchases are still few. With Target CPA bidding, Google recommends a daily budget of at least 10 times your target CPA.

1. CloudCart: purchase tracking. In Apps → Google Analytics enter your GA4 measurement ID. The store sends the events view_item, add_to_cart, begin_checkout and purchase. If you use Google Tag Manager, install Apps → Data Layer as well, so your tags get the product and order data.
2. Google Ads: the goal. Import the purchase from GA4 or create a "Purchase" conversion action and set it as the primary goal. Keep add to basket as a secondary goal for the first weeks.
3. CloudCart: the visitor audience. In Apps → Google Dynamic Remarketing enter your Google Ads ID in the format AW-… and the conversion label. The store tells Google Ads which products a visitor viewed, added to the cart and bought. If remarketing already runs through Google Tag Manager, do not run both at once.
4. CloudCart: the customer list. In Marketing → Segments build a segment, for example customers with an order in the last 90 days who opted in to marketing, and export it with Generate CSV file. Before uploading, remove everyone who unsubscribed or never gave marketing consent, as the GDPR requires a legal basis for every address.
5. Google Ads: audiences. Upload the list as a Customer Match list, if your account meets Google's requirements. Use it to exclude existing customers from the new-customer campaign and as a seed for lookalike segments.
6. Google Ads: the campaign. New campaign → Demand Gen → goal "Sales", budget, then "Maximize conversions" or "Maximize clicks" for the start. In the ad group choose the YouTube channels you want and the countries you sell to.
7. CloudCart: the offer in the ad. A discount or promo code from Marketing → Discounts, with a clear end date, identical in the ad and in the store. In the EU, a price reduction must be shown against the lowest price of the last 30 days, so check the prior price before you put "-30%" in a video.

Run new-customer and remarketing campaigns separately, with different budgets and videos. How remarketing also works on Meta and by email is covered in ecommerce retargeting.

Product feeds in YouTube ads

The product feed in YouTube ads is your Google Merchant Center catalog, which Demand Gen and Performance Max show under the video as cards with an image, name and price. A click goes straight to the product page.

Per Google's guide to product feeds in Demand Gen, you need a Merchant Center account linked to Google Ads, with "Shopping ads" switched on as a marketing method. A new feed can take up to 3 days to approve. A campaign with one product works, but Google recommends at least 4 products and, as best practice, 50. Product images work best square (1:1). The campaign's location targeting must match the countries set for your products in Merchant Center, and Google matches products to users from the targeted country.

For cross-border sellers this means: targeting Germany needs products for Germany, in a language and currency Google accepts there, linked to a page in that language. How to set up the feed per country, and what a comparison shopping service (CSS) is, is in Google Merchant Center setup for EU sellers. If product cards do not show yet in a country, Demand Gen still runs with video only and a link to a category.

What CloudCart does for the feed

1. The Merchant Center connection. In Apps → Google Shopping you sign in with your Google account and enter your Merchant Center ID. The store is verified with a meta tag, and the catalog goes to Google directly, in batches.
2. Attributes. On the Attributes tab you map variant parameters (colour, size, material) to Google's attributes. The product barcode goes as the GTIN, and the reduced price goes as the sale price.
3. Automatic updates. With automatic updates on, every change of price, stock or image goes to Google when you save the product. The price in the video ad and in the store stays the same.
4. Approval. On the Products tab you see Google's status for each variant and the reason for any disapproval. You fix the product in the catalog and sync it again.

How much do YouTube ads cost

YouTube ads have no fixed price: Google sells impressions in an auction, and you decide the daily budget and the bidding strategy. What you pay per view or per thousand impressions depends on the audience, the competition for it and the quality of the video.

Billing model	What you buy	Good for
Cost per view (CPV)	A 30-second view in-stream or 10 seconds in Shorts, or a viewer action	Video campaign for views, testing which video holds attention
Target cost per thousand impressions (Target CPM)	Ad impressions	Bumper, non-skippable ads, reach in a new country or audience
Target cost per action (Target CPA)	Impressions optimised for a purchase or add to basket	Demand Gen once purchases are tracked regularly
Maximize clicks	Clicks to the store	The first weeks of Demand Gen, with no conversion history

Work out the budget from your margin. A sample calculation: if the average order brings €20 of margin and you are willing to spend up to €10 on ads per order, your target CPA is €10. Following Google's Demand Gen recommendation, the daily budget is at least 10 times that, so €100 a day. With a smaller budget, start with "Maximize clicks" and move to Target CPA once orders come in regularly. How to find the point below which an ad loses money is in ROAS and break-even ROAS.

If you target several countries, give each its own campaign and budget: the auction, the video's language and the feed's currency differ per country.

Video often leads to a purchase later, after a Google search. Judge YouTube after 2 to 4 weeks, with GA4's conversion paths.

AI video for YouTube ads: sizes and labels

An AI video for a YouTube ad is made from your product photos: an AI video model turns them into short moving shots, and the edit adds the price, captions and logo, in the three orientations Google wants.

Orientation	Recommended	Minimum	Where on YouTube
Horizontal 16:9	1920 × 1080	1280 × 720	In-stream, bumper, in-feed, TV
Vertical 9:16	1080 × 1920	720 × 1280	Shorts
Square 1:1	1080 × 1080	480 × 480	Feeds, Discover, Gmail

A practical route for a store: an AI tool such as Krea, where one product photo runs through several video models (Veo, Kling, Runway), then an edit in Canva for text and sizes. Prompts, a second-by-second script and tool prices are in AI video ads for online stores. Ad text for Demand Gen (headlines up to 40 characters, descriptions up to 90) you can draft with ChatGPT or Gemini from the product description, in each market's language. The catalog descriptions, which also feed the data in Merchant Center, are written by Aura Studio in the CloudCart admin.

In the EU, ads with certain AI-created or AI-edited assets need a label. Per Google Ads Help on AI labels, for campaigns targeting the European Union the label shows on the ad itself. You set it with "Manage AI label" when you review assets, or later in Tools → Asset studio → Asset library; Google notes that the setting alone does not guarantee legal compliance. Separately, Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which applies from 2 August 2026, requires anyone who publishes a deep fake (realistic AI video that could pass as real) to disclose that it was artificially generated. The AI Act is a regulation, so the rule is the same in every member state.

How to see YouTube sales in CloudCart

CloudCart shows orders from YouTube ads separately in Analytics → Sales by traffic source. When a visitor arrives from a Google Ads ad, the store reads the gad_source parameter in the address and records the network: value 4 is YouTube Search and 5 is YouTube Videos, separate from Google Search, the Display Network and Discover.

The source is recorded on the first visit of the session: an order placed in a later visit that came from search counts towards search. That is why the numbers in the store's reports and in Google Ads differ: Google Ads also counts views after which the customer ordered by another route. Event setup is in the guide to GA4 and Google Tag Manager for an online store.

Visitors who came from YouTube and left a cart behind show up in your abandoned carts. The abandoned cart email and an email campaign from Marketing → Campaigns to subscribers who opted in finish part of the orders the video started, with no new ad spend.

Mistakes with YouTube ads for an online store

• A reach campaign judged by orders. A Video campaign for reach and views buys impressions. For orders from YouTube, use Demand Gen with the purchase as the goal.
• A TV ad on a phone. A video with a logo in the first 5 seconds gets skipped. The product has to be in frame at once.
• Horizontal video only. Shorts need vertical video. Upload all three orientations.
• Target CPA without the budget. A €10 target CPA on €20 a day leaves the campaign without data. Raise the budget to 10 times the target or start with clicks.
• Different prices in the feed and the store. Merchant Center can disapprove the product. Turn on automatic updates in the Google Shopping app.
• One campaign for all of Europe. The feed's countries, the language of the video and the landing page must match the targeted country.
• AI video without a label. For ads in the EU, mark assets created or edited with AI.

CloudCart takes no percentage of the orders your YouTube ads bring (0% commission on sales), so more revenue from ads does not raise your platform cost.

Frequently asked questions

Questions about the feed or purchase tracking in your store? Write to support@cloudcart.com.