EyeView's Blog

The Three Types Of Video For Business

I was inspired by this great post to consider again the uses of online video for business to see if they could be categorized in a way that was helpful for marketers.

Online video has exploded in popularity and entered the mainstream, but video for business usually has to do more than just entertain. I want to look at the three kinds of online video that I have seen and identify what makes them different from each other.

Viral Video

Viral video was the first type of video born from the boom in online video. Viral videos can be expensively put together on a huge marketing budget such as the latest sensation from Evian or they can be cobbled together for the cost of some candy and a few bottles of diet soda.

The success of a viral video is measured by how many people see it. When you make a viral video, you have to consider distribution and promotion. You have to make sure it’s a little unusual or at least unexpected. It certainly has to be original. Viral video is not easy, but, done well, it can raise your profile and bring you traffic.

Conversion Video

Conversion video sits on your business site with a singular goal – to increase the number of conversions from bystanders to buyers, from spectators to subscribers, from visitors to vendees (alliteration is awesome!). Once you set a clear conversion goal, you should measure the impact of your conversion video on that goal.

Conversion video must be accessible, it must be engaging and it must have a clear call to action. Conversion video may not have the style and originality of viral video but it has the virtue of being accountable and, done well, revenue generating.

Educational Video

Education video covers the spectrum of how-tos, tutorials and demos. Educational videos are a great addition to your company’s site because they increase engagement. Educational video can also be a great differentiator for your site which can help build loyalty. A consumer is more likely to purchase equipment from the company that cared enough to teach him how to use it.

Educational videos may also help you to cut down on time spent fielding customer support queries. Educational videos must be clear and precise, but they are less restricted by duration than other types of video. The benefits to your company from educational video may not be felt immediately, but they can help distinguish yourselves in a crowded market.

Conclusion

I’m always thinking about video and the best ways for companies to make the most of it. I think dividing online video into these three groups might help to identify the goals for your video and therefore the best way to measure its success.

Video Ain't What It Used To Be

Video just isn’t video anymore. Or, rather, video isn’t just video anymore. Video has come a long way since the first skateboarding cat did the rounds on YouTube. If video has to do something more than entertain the viewer for 20 seconds then it has to offer more than a one-way viewing experience.

When we sit down to talk with our customers about video they understand that video has to work for them. Our reports consistently show that the longer a viewer spends watching a video, the more likely he or she is to respond to the call to action and achieve the conversion goal set by the site. Viewer engagement is the key to successful video and we are always looking for new ways to engage with the viewer.

The example below explores a number of different ways for the viewer to engage. The narrative of the video is broken up into a series of chapters each with its own link on the left hand side of the player. Some chapters are further divided into sub-chapters. The viewer can choose to watch in any order skipping around to find the items of interest. This reflects the way the viewer might access similar information on a web page.

In addition, this particular video offers a choice of languages. Try switching between the languages using the drop-down menu on the top right of the player. You will notice how the contextual menus on the left side of the player all change to match your choice. Listen and you will hear that the voiceover has also changed. Have a closer look at the content of the video and you will see that the language of the screenshots inside the video has also aligned itself with the language you chose.

Even before you consider the content there is a whole list of things you can do with your video to ensure that your viewers will remain engaged.

After this video went live for eBay it was seen over fifty thousand times in the first few weeks. Each view averaged six sub-chapters proving the video’s ability to engage the viewer and persuade them to watch more.

Video is not just about the content of your video anymore. You need to consider the presentation and delivery of your video as an essential part of its success. You spend an enormous amount of energy refining your message, but what are you doing to ensure that people are paying attention when you talk?

Trigger Happy

Relax, this is not going to be a blog post about gun control. Here at EyeView, a trigger is the name we have for the part of a webpage that lets you know there is a video to be watched. When you click on the trigger the video starts playing. The trigger can be a static graphic or it can be animated. It can just be a picture or it can have text. If it has text there is an unlimited number of variations to the text that you might try.

Once we have proven for a customer (using A/B testing) that the very fact of introducing a video to a site increases conversion, we like to make sure that as many people as possible elect to watch that video. Here we will look at a number of different triggers that we are currently experimenting with. The intention is not to present definitive evidence of which triggers are more effective at driving views, but to look at the different options. Of course even if you think you know which of two triggers would be more effective, the only way to be certain is to test them against each other simultaneously with real site visitors.

Leaving the comparison testing aside for a moment, let's just take a look at some really interesting triggers that the team here have been working on. Over the next few weeks we'll be testing these "in the field" and I'll be able to report back to you which ones were most effective and for which sites.

Try this one for starters:

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The trigger sits on the page like any other element, but then every few seconds it rattles commanding your attention and giving you the call to action you need to click and start watching the video. Notice also that this trigger shows you exactly how long the video is going to last. Is this more or less likely to encourage someone to watch?

Next up is a different kind of trigger. This one has been designed to reflect the messaging of the site and to encourage visitors who need more information to watch the video that will help them decide to download.

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This next trigger is a cheeky introduction to the video that uses some of the elements of the video to encourage people to watch. The trigger uses the same kind of animation as the video itself and maintains the tone of the surrounding site. With all those arrows pointing to the play button, it couldn't be clearer.

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Finally for this post I am going to showcase a simple trigger. This one is elegant and minimalist with a little extra encouragement for you when you roll the cursor over it. Go on, give it a try.

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That's just a selection of the things we are working on here. Depending on the response I get to this post I may put up some more for you to look at another time. Let me know in the comments which ones you prefer and why you think they'd be more effective.

Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin And Me

Chris Anderson started it. Not content with being the inspiration for a million tedious PowerPoint slides with his concept/article/book The Long Tail, Mr. Anderson has turned another of his coffee-break notions into a best-selling book.

The book is titled Free: The Future Of A Radical Price. I haven’t read it yet although it’s on order from Amazon (at the not-radical price of $not-free). Based on the wealth of information surrounding the book’s launch, Anderson seems to be making the point that you can make a lot of money in business by giving things away for free. It’s an interesting hypothesis and I’m looking forward to all 288 pages of explanation and qualification.

In the meantime, Malcolm Gladwell reviewed the book for The New Yorker and laid into Anderson and his idea. Gladwell was particularly upset over Anderson’s vision for the future of journalism, hardly surprising given Gladwell’s (and, to be fair, Anderson’s) primary source of income.

Then Seth Godin weighed in with a post titled simply “Malcolm is Wrong” and it all kicked off.

For my part the whole argument is kind of academic although I can’t help noticing that none of the people arguing whether or not ‘things’ should be free actually make ‘things’ (ideas and opinions are not 'things' and the market for them has always been volatile). The discussion of whether or not the output of serious journalistic endeavors should be free is entirely spurious. The business of newspapers has never been news. The business of newspapers is selling advertising. A competitive market that drives down the price point for subscription all the way to free in order to sell more advertising is not in the slightest bit radical (sorry, Mr. Anderson) or even unusual. It’s business.

It strikes me reading Gladwell’s petulant review that he doesn’t understand the business he's in. No wonder he’s so upset.

One of the joys of working with EyeView’s broad range of customers is that each of them comes to us with a clear understanding of their business. They know exactly what income streams are important and they build their business models to support them.

Once the hoo-hah dies down, and the debate over Free has subsided, our customers will still be looking for new ways to boost conversion and increase revenue. If that means giving stuff away for free, so be it, but that’s just one weapon in the marketer’s arsenal and hardly a revolutionary one.

Do you understand your business and do you think the idea of free is radical?

Conversion Optimization - A True Story

I like to think of EyeView as a private conversion laboratory. Come visit us in the renovated dungeons under EyeView Towers and see the hordes of conversion science geeks in their white coats scurrying about. Once we have persuaded people to let us experiment with video on their website, we tinker and we tweak until we deliver the results we promise – optimized conversion.

Our latest customer (or victim) was eToro. Forex is a notoriously difficult sell to new users as it often seems forbiddingly complex. eToro has revolutionized the world of forex by developing a platform that relies on user-friendly graphics to deliver complicated data in easy-to-understand formats.

Given the complexity of the subject matter, it’s not surprising that eToro turned to video as a great tool for getting across a lot of information. In addition to a really cool video, we were able to provide a measurable impact on their business.

Below you can see two screen shots. The page on the left represents eToro’s landing page as it was. The page on the right represents the same URL with the video embedded.

We set up the test as follows. For all new visitors to the site, 50 per cent would be the control group receiving the old page with the existing banner while the other 50 per cent would get the page with the video. We even took it one stage further and made the video play automatically for first time visitors in the “page with video” test group.

Click on the image below to follow the link to eToro's site and see which group you are assigned to. Let us know in the comments.

   

The results were nothing short of spectacular. Comparing like with like, we saw that the page with the video playing automatically generate 33 per cent more conversions than the existing page. For a company like eToro where each converted user has a defined lifetime value this meant a significant upturn in revenue for that landing page.

eToro are delighted with the conversion increase their video has brought and I made sure that the boys back at EyeView’s lab were allowed an extra 30 minutes of daylight as a reward for their efforts.

How Long Is Your Online Video?

The latest comScore report on online video offered up some fascinating facts about people in the US and what they are watching.

In April 2009, 78.6 per cent of internet users in the US watched some kind of online video. That number blows me away. It highlights the familiarity and comfort that the vast majority of internet users have with online video.

In the same month visitors to YouTube watched over 6.8 billion videos at an average of 63.5 videos per person. That means every visitor to YouTube watched over two videos a day every single day of the month. Online video is not a secret. Everyone’s watching.

People understand video. They like watching video. They expect to spend some of their time online watching video. If you have something you want to say. Say it through video.

Another key indicator for me is the average length of and online video. According to comScore, “the duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes”. That’s much longer than I would have guessed. The rise of Hulu has definitely had an impact on these figures since they demonstrated the public’s appetite for streaming full length TV episodes. In April 2009, Hulu showed 2.4 per cent of all videos in the US but that translated to 4.2 per cent of all minutes spent watching video online.

After many years working in online video, these numbers are starting to challenge the one fundamental tenet I thought existed – less is more. It seems people are willing to watch videos that last way longer than 30 seconds. They may even be willing to watch long enough to hear your message through to the end and for you to deliver a compelling call to action.

What are you going to do about that?

Eating Our Own Dog Food

The phrase to eat one’s own dog food may have originated with Microsoft, but it has entered the popular lexicon because it rings true to so many people. If you want others to believe in your product, you must be an enthusiastic consumer yourself – even if your product is dog food.

Here at EyeView we recently undertook a critical re-examination of the video on our homepage. We stopped being a provider for a few minutes and instead became our own customer. We already had a video in place that was working. The conversion goal for the page was to have visitors submit their details in on our Contact Us page in order to generate new leads for the business.

We looked at a number of different elements that we felt should be tightened up to see if they would have an impact on our conversion and then we tested them.

First of all we looked at the messaging in the video. We went through our internal messaging policy and made sure that the script of the new video was fully aligned.

Part of the conversion funnel was to drive traffic to the Contact Us page. We were concerned that not enough people were visiting the Contact Us page after watching the video. We decided to make the call to action much more explicit in the video based on the principle of “See it. Hear it. Click it.” We moved the call to action button inside the player and made it clickable. We also had the narrator clearly invite visitors to push the button to drive home its importance. We made sure that this button matched the existing call to action button outside the player to avoid confusion.

To make sure we made the biggest impact on new visitors we set the video to play automatically. But this only happens the first time you visit. If you are a returning visitor the video player waits to be prompted before relaunching the video.

To see the new video in its natural habitat, visit EyeView's homepage here.

In summary, we proposed a number of changes and then we went out and tested those changes, measuring their impact against the old video. The improvement was felt immediately. These carefully considered tweaks boosted our conversion rate by over 46%. A resounding success, by any standard, but it doesn’t make us complacent.

We are already planning the next round of tests including an off-player call to action button that is synched up with the video to draw attention to it at exactly the right time.

As long as we continue suggesting changes, we will continue testing them. We’re hungry for conversion success and we’re fortunate that we make the most delicious kind of dog food.

Testing, Testing,... one, two,... one, two,...

In case you’re still unclear, I’ve been thinking a lot about testing recently. Testing takes me back to my 6^th grade science classes. How did we determine the effect of salt on boiling water? We tested it. How did we prove that the extension of a spring is proportional to the weight hanging off it? We tested it.

Testing is good, and not just for proving things people already know. Testing also helps us to establish credibility for the things we think we know. Testing may even provide evidence to contradict things we were sure we knew.

There is a vast wealth of advice available for marketers that consists almost entirely of supposition, subjectivity, anecdotal speculation, conjecture, inference and guesswork. Some of the hypotheses proposed online will eventually be tested, but until that time it’s impossible to estimate how many will be proven true and how many false. One thing is certain - just because something worked in one instance, there is no guarantee it will work again or as well in another.

For example, we could say that video increases conversion until we were blue in the face and it would be meaningless. Instead we go out and prove it time and again for each of our customers for each of their landing pages.

This is an actual screen capture from our report platform that shows the increased conversion of one of our customers’ landing pages when it was tested simultaneously, with 50% of the visitors getting the page with video (Embedded Player) and 50% getting the existing video-less page (No Changes). As you can see, the page with the video converted over 30% more visitors than the page without. Tested and proven.

At EyeView, we made ourselves a rule - No Guessing. We promise our customers that when we present a strategy to increase conversion it will not be based on our ‘stamp of authority’. It will not rely on our ‘combined years of experience’. It will not leverage our ‘inside understanding of your industry’.

When EyeView delivers a video solution that claims to increase conversion we will show you exactly what we did and precisely where it worked. The reason we can do that is because we tested it. We tested it when it didn’t work and we carried on testing it until it did.

Always remember that when you make an assumption, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and… er… ‘mption’.

The Three Levels Of Engagement In Online Video

I watched a great webinar yesterday that Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin ran over at HubSpot. You can catch up on all their great tips here: http://www.hubspot.com/archive/online-video-webinar/.

After the webinar was over, I began to think about the people who watch online video and just how much of each video they watch. Does everyone who presses the play button stick around to the end? Within minutes I was able to find exactly this kind of data in our platform’s reporting suite. Even more importantly, we are aggregating this information for more than 250 videos that are live right now.

Here are the three levels of engagement that we identify. Our platform allows us to get a lot more granular than this, but I think this is a great starting point for investigation.

Level One

The lowest level of engagement takes in viewers who don’t get much further than clicking the play button and barely watching the first 12-15 seconds. What should you be doing in the first 15 seconds of your video to reach these guys?

Level Two

Once they get past the first milestone the next level of viewers can watch up to 70 per cent of your video. These guys like to watch video, but they don’t stick around to the end. Perhaps they think they already get the point. Perhaps they’re just impatient. What kind of messaging should you include in your video that doesn’t rely on viewers watching all the way to the end.

Level Three

These are the most engaged viewers and we see a clear correlation between viewers who watch more than 70 per cent of your video and a significantly increased chance of conversion. People who watch more online video are more likely to convert. What can you do with your video that will encourage viewers to keep watching through to the end and respond to your call to action?

There’s plenty of food for thought here and I’d love to hear what you think we should be doing for each of these groups.

At EyeView, we’re already starting to suggest answers to these questions, but the only way to see if we get them right is to test and test again. We’ll be bringing you the results of those tests as we move forward.

Bing, SEO And Me

It’s hard to be a blogger and not comment on the most momentous release of the year, if not the past few years.

With all the hoohah surrounding the launch of Bing, Microsoft’s revamped search engine, I thought I would examine my response to it in each of my roles as consumer, marketer and conversion optimization specialist.

Consumer

As a consumer, my instant reaction to Bing was, “meh”. Genuine indifference. I remember switching from AltaVista to Google back in the late 90s and telling some of my friends about it. I was using Yahoo! as my home page and Google as my search engine of choice for a while before I switched and started using Google as my homepage. These days the Google toolbar means I don’t need my browser to start there so I tend to begin with Wikipedia as a kicking off point, at least when I’m surfing from home.

Would I switch to Bing as my search engine of choice? My answer to that is a definite “maybe”. The point being that, as a consumer, it doesn’t matter all that much who provides my search results as long as they’re no worse that the results I’m already getting. I don’t really know of anything I’m missing, that could make them better. They may try to sell Bing as having better results, but I’m pretty satisfied with my results as they are and I don’t know what I’d do with better ones.

I’ll probably go with whichever results page looks nicer. I’m that shallow.

Marketer

As a marketer, Bing is my worst nightmare come to life. I don’t mean that as an attack on Microsoft, it’s just that competition creates confusion. Until now, the majority of my traffic from search engines came from Google. That meant I could concentrate my SEO spend in one place in order to increase the amount of traffic from that same source. If Bing succeeds the way it would like to, I am going to have to split my concentration across two platforms to ensure I’m getting to all the right people. If that only meant sharing my current budget for traffic across two vendors, I might be OK with it, but my worry is that with different algorithms, I would need to increase my total budget to maintain the same level of effectiveness in both Google and Bing. Ouch.

Conversion Optimization Specialist

And now I’m back to “meh”. That’s right. As far as conversion is concerned, I couldn’t care less where the traffic is coming from. I’m much more concerned with increasing the conversion rate for site visitors regardless of the path they took to get there. I have no way of knowing whether the leads coming from Bing will be more likely to convert that leads coming from Google. Until I have that statistic, I’m going to stick to the stuff I do know:

Video increases conversion. Great video greatly increases conversion. Measuring conversion increase is increasingly important whichever search engine your customers prefer.