MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

We received a lot of questions about testing and using video at our recent Web clinic on testimonials. Some examples:

• How do I use video to help my landing page increase sales or subscriptions?
• Which kind of videos work best? Short or long? Autoplay or Userplay?
• Should I edit my videos or just leave them raw?
• Are there specific bandwidth or file format issues that might hurt my conversion?

Before we answer, it’s worth noting where we are today with video as compared to just a year or two ago. Much like the ramping-up period for RSS feeds and corporate blogging, the examples have been around for a while but bottom-line numbers remained elusive.

For the past few years of testing here at MarketingExperiments, the results we’d seen from video had usually been underwhelming, mainly due to bandwidth. So our response to questions about video was often that “they generally hurt conversion.”

More recent test results are hinting that online video has grown up. Fast.

For example, SiteSell.com recently shared that adding video to their landing page increased conversion to around 20%. What’s interesting here, besides the increase, is that the video was used as core content stating the company’s value proposition, not just tucked away in a sidebar.

Another example is a recent Sherpa case study where a UK Entertainment Brand site embedded a 1MB video into an email and achieved a 50% increase in conversion. They also split tested the subject lines: the email that mentioned the video had a 14.6% higher open rate than the one that did not.

And in our own research, a redesigned page that featured a video testimonial yielded three times the click rate of the control (discussed in the testimonials clinic).

So while we’ve seen video reshaping the Web in terms of content for a while, we’re now seeing more numbers on the marketing side. And now that test results are justifying further exploration with video, and the audience is much larger than early adopters, our analysts are working to answer many of the same questions as you — including those four queries above.

However, like other aspects of marketing, there are few if any easy answers. The real answer is you have to test and retest.

Much like long copy vs. short copy, call-to-action button styles and colors, or form length, the answers will change with the context in which these elements are used. To find out if a longer video will outperform a short clip, you’ve got to test it and break down the variables involved: the content of the clips, the audience and its expectations from the page, the goals for the page and video, and so on. The same applies to bandwidth, editing, autoplay, etc.

Before you can answer the broader types of questions, consider the context of your videos and look at friction and usability; for instance:

• What are you asking/expecting visitors to do with your video?
• Do they need to watch all of it to get through your conversion process, or is it an add-on to complement a registration process?
• Is it a testimonial, a how-to or a product demo?
• What need is the video trying to fill, and is it in the proper place in the conversion process?
• Does the video create friction with longer page load times, or by interrupting the site flow or eyepath?

The most reliable answers are specific to the usage and take the context into account. You’ll get those answers from tests that are set up and measured with the right research questions (see our recent clinic on testing).

Let us know if you’d like us to cover this topic in more detail in an upcoming clinic. And if you’re getting results from your own video tests, feel free to post about those here, too.

Austin McCraw, audio/video producer for MECLABS, contributed mightily to this blog post.

We were surprised (as we sometimes are during tests) to find that a newly designed offer page advertising an online subscription product which included a video from the founder of the company, explaining the product, converted much lower than the same page without the video:

Figure 1: Percentage of users who continued through each step of a subscription offering, by offer.

This was confusing to us. Shouldn’t the founder of a company personally explaining the features and benefits of a product sell the product better than a plain text/graphic page?

What we found was this:

A portion of the users could either not hear the sound or watch the video altogether, therefore missing out on the main point of the offer.

Those that did watch the video (indicated by the fact that they also made it to the next step of the registration process) were much more likely to continue the process.

If a user actually watches a video, it appears it does increase the overall conversion rate, however if they miss it somehow, due to technical issues, then they are not as likely to purchase or take action.

The short answer appears to be — Yes.

In a recent set of tests, in which we distributed 28 short, entertaining video clips through YouTube and Google Video, we converted almost 1.5% of viewers into subscribers.

That may not sound like a huge conversion rate. However, all of these video clips were non-commercial. They were simply entertaining, with no sales message included.

In other words, the video clip was simply part one in a three-step process.

1. Watch the video.

2. Go to the site url featured at the end of the video clip.

3. Sign up for the site’s newsletter.

The use of online video in this way, to drive site traffic and convert visitors to subscribers or buyers, is still in its infancy.

If you would like to know more, and study the full set of data from our recent tests, register for our free webinar, this Wednesday, at 4:00PM EST — Can viral video clips drive targeted traffic to your web site?

That is to say, if you create a video clip to run on TV, will it be received just as well on the web or on a mobile device?

Marketers everywhere might hope that the answer to this question is yes. It would certainly cut down on budgets if a single video could be run across all media with equal success.

But common sense says no. As does this article in MarketingVOX, citing results from a recent survey sponsored by the Cablevision Advertising Bureau.

Here is a short excerpt:

More than 60 percent said they prefer watching video on TV rather than a computer or iPod. Only 12 percent of those with video-enabled phones said they used it for video. Only 30 percent said they had an additional screen device (beyond a TV and computer) used for watching video.

So while marketers dream of teens and those in their early twenties being glued to their iPods and cell phones, eager to watch another commercial video, the truth seems a little different. And you have only to look at some of the short amateur video clips that have burst onto the scene through services like YouTube to see that while they were immensely popular on the web, they would likely not go down as well on TV.

In other words, each medium, or screen, suits different approaches to video, and they are not necessarily interchangeable.

As we have mentioned before in this blog, we are undertaking a significant study ourselves on the potential of video as a marketing tool online. The question of the right video for the right screen will doubtless be an issue that merits exploring.

Here are a few examples of what we feel are great viral videos:

1. Terry Tate, Office Linebacker

We like this (maybe we can relate) but why in the world did Reebok take the page on their site down that it points to?

2. The German Energy Drink Commercial:

Make sure your volume is turned WAY up.

3. What are You Thinking About?

We laugh every time we watch it!