YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program – A Review for Merchants and Content Creators

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What is Affiliate Marketing?

Let me start by explain the term if you are not familiar with affiliate concept, as it is a performance-based marketing strategy to improve your reach and sales. Merchants (brand / product / business owner) rewards affiliates (influencers, content creators) for driving traffic or sales to their products or services through their marketing efforts.

Essentially, affiliates earn a commission for promoting someone else’s products. the commission may vary decided by merchants and earnings also depends how reliable and strong audience-based is reached. At the end, it can be quite a powerful and effective digital marketing strategy only if it’s managed properly and professionally. Otherwise, the merchants should be aware of taking the risk of negative results of brand reputation, manipulation of traffic source income and exploitation by affiliates.

Why to Use YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program?

YouTube’s significance for brands and creators is rising, audience expectations are also evolving, consumers tend to influence by videos and social ecommerce is driven by its higher conversion rates than traditional blogs. YouTube affiliate links similar to other video contents in video-focused social media platforms, enhance user engagement while boosting sales.

As the nature of affiliate programs, affiliates search and decide to work with a brand, still merchant can maximize their brand’s exposure and sales by getting tagged and promoted by creators across YouTube and creators can use an additional way to earn from their videos. And merchants only pay the selected commission when there is a purchase without any extra fee and effort.

Many Youtubers work directly with brands to promote their products and services, or joining their in-house affiliate programs or being part of affiliate networks like CJ, Shareasale, Admitad etc. All of these options have advantages (avoiding extra fees etc.) and disadvantages (managing invoicing etc.) for each parties.

Additional to BrandConnect and Youtube’s other earning features, Youtube Affiliate Program can be beneficial to simplify the whole process both for merchants and affiliates at each steps from searching brands/influencers to legal binding policies to payment process.

Merchants & Companies – Get More Visibility and Sales

YouTube Shopping affiliate program is available to eligible US-based Shopify merchants through the Google & YouTube app on Shopify so, the access to the program is limited for now. If you are eligible to the conditions below and already working with any content creator, you can prefer to reach them out to inform that your products are available for Youtube affiliate program, so they can start to promote them via their content.

How to Sign?

Merchants must meet the following criteria to participate in the YouTube Shopping affiliate program, it’ll be available on Google & YouTube app at Shopify dashboard, so if you think you met the all criterions below, just install the app. After activating it, the settings can be updated on merchant center.

• Have the target country for your Google Merchant Center account set to the United States.
• Have a .
• Have the Google & YouTube app installed on your Shopify store.
• Have a Google Merchant Center account connected to the Google & YouTube app
  • Cannot disconnect or change the account when your programme is active
• Use the automated product sync on the Google & YouTube app to sync your products to Google Merchant Center.
  • Most third-party feed providers are currently not eligible for the programme.
• Have conversion tracking and auto-tagging turned on for accurate conversions tracking
• Have your shop’s currency set to US dollars and have a US billing address.
• Not be using Shopify’s headless commerce solution, which allows merchants to use a non-Shopify frontend for their online shop.
• Have to follow Google Merchant Center guidelines and provide true and accurate information about products and services.

How Merchants can increase affiliate performance?

If you are as a brand/merchant is eligible to use this program, better to act quickly and use it for your advantage as it’s available for limited shop owners, that can be helpful to gain the brand visibility and generate more sales than your competitors.

Once you enroll the Youtube Affiliate program, the channel owners can find your brands and products and start to promote them. There is no feature for merchants to search for affiliate, contact or engage with them directly, simply they choose to work with you.

As mentioned previously, you can contact your existing affiliates, partners or influencers who have active channel on Youtube.

You should create blog post, social posts, newsletter, banners and videos to announce it.

Additionally, you can make a list of the Youtubers who might be interested to promote your brand and products. And then reach them out to mention about the affiliate program and your business, request from them to tag your products on their existing content to get benefit mutually. Or you can also make an agreement to create new videos specifically for you.

Youtube Affiliate Settings for Merchants

• Commission details: You can set a default commission rate offered on your products at that section. The commission rate represents the fixed commission amount or percentage of a sale amount that is paid to a creator and YouTube for the sales they generate through their channel by featuring your products. It should be decided based on business strategy and financial aspects. You can start with a median commission rates and update it in time depends on the affiliate program results.
• Commission eligibility: There are two fields here Attribution Period (set by Google) and Pending Period (set by Merchants)
  • Attribution period is the time window in which Google attribute a sale to the creator (after clicking on their product tags). You are not allowed to change as it is set to 30 days by default, meaning creators can earn commissions on sales that happen during this 30 day window.
  • Pending period is the duration during which the commission from a purchase remains in a pending state and is reversed if there is a return or cancellation. The default is set to a recommended 30 days but this can be changed to anything between 30 to 50 days. You can keep it as default or increase it depends on your business activity.
• Merchant description: This field important to get more visibility on creator discovery surfaces and engage with them also gain more affiliates, so try to make it clear and comprehensive outline to help them to understand your business.
• Merchant category: It should represent your business, product or services. There are limited category options, so try to find the most suitable ones for you as the creators might search based on those titles.
• Billing info: You will be billing for all locked transactions during the previous month and as automatic payment option, the payment is taken on the first of the month. You can view all invoices, disputes and settings for your payment profiles. The payment will be done through your Google payment account and then the commissions are paid to Youtubers by Google on their Adsense account. So, you don’t need to worry to contact affiliates or handle separated payment process for each of them. This is the most appealing feature to join to Youtube Affiliate Program (or any affiliate network) both for merchants and content creators.

Analytics for YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program

At this section, you can review all your data for the affiliate program. The report shows the total sale, commissions, click or views as well as all affiliate orders. It’s possible to learn the list of creators and the content that your products were tagged also performance of al those tagged products. As additional data there is a section shows approximate audience distribution segmented by gender and age of video viewership.

There are a few limitation at the report, the creators and videos won’t be displayed if they haven2t met these thresholds: Only creators who have driven >100 views to your website since joining the programme will be displayed. Only videos with >100 lifetime product views will be shown.

Influencers & Content Creators – Earn Commission by Tagging Products

YouTube Shopping affiliate program is available for limited channel owner for now. Once you are part of it, you can tag products in YouTube videos, Shorts and live streams, which allows viewers to shop while they watch and you’ll get commission from their purchases. It can be considered as another revenue stream to monetize your content. If you are new and need inspiration about Youtube Shopping promotions, here is the Creator Starter Pack for your review

How to Sign?

To be invited to the program, you must meet these minimum eligibility requirements for Influencers & Content Creators, you can view it at “Earn on YouTube” section on your Youtube Studio account:

• Your channel must be in the YouTube Partner Programme.
• Your channel must have more than 10,000 subscribers.
• You must be based in Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand or the United States.
• Your channel must not be a music channel or Official Artist Channel, nor associated with music partners. Music partners may include music labels, distributors, publishers or Vevo.
• Your channel audience must not be set as Made for Kids and your channel must not have a significant number of videos set as Made for Kids.

How does it work for YouTube channel owners?

The earned commission is calculated as cart total value. So, even though the user clicked the tagged X product with $10 price, but purchased X+Y+Z products with $200, you’ll get commission from that last value as entire basket.

Each product will display its price and the corresponding commission rate, which is a percentage of the total sale. Commission rate may vary for each merchant, but it’s possible to earn high amounts even with 5% rate if there are high-ticket and valuable products on that promoted website.

It’s up to choose which products to feature on your videos, but it’s recommended to firstly to choose the ones most relevant to that content and your audience. You can tag up to 30 products.

Obviously, the transactions should be within the commission period, shouldn’t be cancelled and your affiliate link shouldn’t be disturbed by any other sources.

You are getting paid through the Adsense account.

YouTube Shopping Chrome Extension

Google is also introduced a new YouTube Chrome Shopping extension for creators that makes tagging products on YouTube easier. Affiliates can easily find to save products while browsing a brand or retailer’s site who are part of YouTube Shopping affiliate program and later they can tag their video in Studio. It’s also possible to learn how much to earn from tagging the product in YouTube videos without leaving their site.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is generally an underestimated and likely handled professionally a digital marketing approach. As the YouTube is the biggest content creation platform and second most powerful search engine, it’s not a surprise the feature is now announced. The affiliate program offer is not new in Google’s portfolio but just a discontinued one similar to many other features, you can review the official Google Affiliate Network blogspot site which was ended in 2013.

Youtube Shopping Affiliate Program is at beta/test phase as it was announced on 20th August 2024 in a partnership with Shopify platform and as eligibly requirements it’s only available for limited users. No doubt that, it’s considered as part of rising social commerce trend and they will announce new features, improve their reporting and update the eligibility requirements to expand the program to other platforms other than Shopify and make it available to other countries.

As mentioned previously, it can be competitive advantage for the eligible merchants and a new revenue stream for Youtubers, so I recommend to try it.