Google's Demand Gen brings shoppable CTV ads with QR codes to YouTube
Shoppable ads reached YouTube's Smart TV app on Thursday, months after Google first showed the format at Google Marketing Live 2025. Advertisers running campaigns through Display and Video 360 can now turn a Google Merchant Center product feed into a carousel of clickable items, each carrying a QR code that sends viewers to a purchase page. Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns both support the format, and Google paired the launch with two other Demand Gen additions: Attributed Branded Searches, a metric that counts branded search volume on Google and YouTube driven by a campaign, and Travel Feeds, which pull pricing, ratings and availability from a brand's Hotel Center account into dynamic video ads.
Campaigns gain a purchase path built directly into the TV ad itself, closing a gap that has long separated CTV reach from measurable sales. LG Electronics's results give a sense of the upside: a 24% higher conversion rate than paid social and a 91% lower cost per acquisition through Demand Gen. Attributed Branded Searches gives planners a way to credit upper-funnel CTV spend for the branded search activity it generates, a metric that has been hard to isolate from linear TV budgets. Google framed the update inside a broader CEO letter from Neal Mohan, who noted YouTube Shorts now draws 200 billion views a day.