EyeView's Blog

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.

The 10 Types Of People Visiting Your Site

One of my favorite math-nerd jokes goes like this: There are 10 kinds of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I’m not sure the divisions between customer types are so clearly delineated, but I thought I would try to identify some of the groups.

Some of your visitors are Readers. Readers love to read. They read everything. Readers read your Homepage and your About Us page. They go through each of your tabs seeing how much stuff you have to read and then they read some of it. If you have more documentation to read, they may even be prepared to give you their email just so they can get something more to read. Readers like certain kinds of products. Books, for example. Back in the day when Amazon was a struggling bookseller, they had one key advantage over bricks and mortar retailers that wasn’t just about inventory. Amazon was a place where you could go to read all about a product that was made for specifically for Readers. Awesome.

If your target audience is Readers, you had better make sure you have something good for them to read when they get to your site.

Then there are Clickers. Clickers like to click things. Remember when you went to the Science Museum for your 4^th grade outing? The Clickers were the ones who ran from exhibit to exhibit pulling levers and flipping switches. If there’s a button, they’ll push it. Then they’ll push it again. They’ll click and click until there’s nothing left to click.

If you want to sell something to Clickers, it’s best to make them reach it by clicking, probably more than once.

In pedagogical circles, they call Readers and Clickers “active learners”. Teachers are trained to help students become active learners so they can go out into the world and discover things for themselves.

The corollary is, of course, “passive learners”.

Passive learners are Watchers and Listeners. Watchers and Listeners watch and listen for as long as there is something engrossing enough to keep them. They’re in no hurry to move on as long as they are engaged. But, make no mistake about passive learners, they’re still great learners. Passive learners allow themselves the time to get the information they need to make good decisions. If you deliver a compelling argument to a passive learner he may just stick around long enough to be persuaded.

The reality is that none of us are solely one thing or the other. We all have periods when we prefer to be active learners and other times when we need to watch and listen. Getting the balance right to convert your visitors means being open to testing different options and being smart enough not to rely on a single medium to get the job done.

How Do You Measure Conversion?

I knew the guys were planning something special, but I was really impressed when they finally showed it to me this week. EyeView’s Conversion Calculator has been specifically developed to help marketers understand the impact increased conversion can have on their revenues.

You simply enter the following information:

•          No. of monthly unique visitors to your site
•          Your current monthly conversion rate (as a percentage of overall site visitors)
•          The value to your company of each converted visitor

Then you can use the handy slide to calculate the increased revenue you would generate with every per cent increase in conversion. Depending on the size of your company, you might find that an increase in your conversion rate of a few per cent translates to tens of thousands of dollars. That would also mean that you could guarantee a return on your investment with EyeView within a matter of days of implementing our end-to-end video solution.

If you want to go to the next stage you can enter your details and get a passcode to reveal EyeView’s tailored pricing estimate and precise ROI details.

I think that this Calculator provides the most compelling case so far for moving some of your marketing budget into tackling the Conversion issue.