EyeView's Blog

Conversion Optimization - Opinion or Science?

I have always thought it would be fun to be a consultant. I’ve got opinions, plenty of them. You name a subject and I can give you my opinion on it. I’m good like that. It’s a useful skill in conversation. I’m much in demand for dinner parties. I can say something semi-intelligent on a broad range of topics. I have an ever-expanding stream of anecdotes that I can apply to bolster my point of view. I am, like many others, a seething cauldron of eloquent subjectivity.

But that all stops when I get to the office. When we talk about optimizing conversion with our customers, we don’t bring a bunch of stories and best-case scenarios. We bring evidence – data captured from live traffic – that proves objectively what is happening for that customer on that landing page with that traffic from those sources.

Furthermore, we don’t rest on our laurels. We encourage our customers to ask “What have you done for me lately?” and we push ourselves to provide an answer. We do this because optimization of your site’s conversion rate is not a one-time cure.

Causing an increase or improvement is easy enough. If a picture is hung at a crooked angle, anybody can nudge it and improve on what there was before. Getting it perfectly straight requires something more. It requires measurement and testing. Getting it perfectly straight when the wall and perhaps the whole house is rocking from side to side requires planning.

There’s little room for subjectivity and opinion when it comes to optimization. If you want to ensure that your landing page is always performing in the most effective way, you need someone to build a plan that draws on the classic Scientific Method's cycle of hypothesis, experiment and conclusion, repeated for as long as necessary.

So, when you talk about optimizing conversion, are you giving your opinion or looking at the latest results of a scientific test?

New Video Marketing Quiz Lands With A Bang

We’re really excited to launch the newest Video Marketing Quiz with all new questions.

Following the success of the last quiz, we wanted to top ourselves and present some of the data generated by the tests we run in the most engaging way we could imagine.

Since the last quiz we have seen the format picked up and imitated by Omniture/Adobe, which just makes us think that we created an exciting product.

To mark this launch we are giving away hundred of dollars in Amazon vouchers to the people who take the quiz and the Tweet their results.

Every hour for the first eight hours after the launch today at 10 am ET, five lucky tweeters will be selected and sent $20 to spend any way they wish.

It doesn’t get more exciting that that!

Enjoy the quiz and get tweeting!

Viral Videos Suck... or... This Too Shall Pass

First of all I want to thank Nalts and his excellent blog for bringing this video to my attention. It’s another epic mini-movie from OK Go that showcases the band’s innovative use of short-form video to market themselves and their music.

It’s very entertaining. It’s also fairly useless.

Let’s take a look at their last huge viral success. The video for Here It Goes Again rode the first wave of YouTube’s explosion into global consciousness. You’ve seen it. Four indie nerds doing a synchronized routine on treadmills. It’s very entertaining. According to YouTube’s figures it has been viewed almost 50 million times. That’s just from OK Go’s own channel. The same video on EMI’s channel has added another 1.5 million and there are probably a few hundred thousand more views with other unauthorized duplicates.

So the band have produced a video that’s been seen around 50 million times. What did they do with that? Not very much. There seems to have been very little strategy behind the whole thing. If you watch the video on YouTube there are no live links allowing you to purchase either the video itself or anything else by the band. The video serves no purpose other than to entertain. Even if you were to ascribe every purchase of the song’s parent album Oh No to a viewing of the video, you would still end up with a dreadful conversion rate. Fifty million videos viewed has translated, to date, into less than 250,000 albums sold. That’s an embarrassing conversion rate of less than half a percent.

It makes me want to scream. If only their YouTube page was linked to iTunes. If only there was a link to purchase a video ringtone of the video for ten cents. If only the page was designed to drive 50 million viewers towards some kind of action. Any kind of action. If only 99.5 percent of those views weren’t totally wasted.

Damian Kulash, lead singer with OK Go sees it differently. He believes that the video’s huge viral success helped the band to sell out concerts on five continents and win a Grammy. I don’t doubt any of that, I just wish he’d tried the video ringtone idea as well (and cut me in for a percentage).

Which brings us back to now. This new video from OK is very entertaining. Before it even went live on YouTube, Kulash was complaining in the New York Times, no less, about his record company’s refusal to allow video embedding. Kulash was concerned that without the possibility of his video going viral, the band would be unlikely to replicate the success they have achieved. Fortunately for us, EMI caved in and we can now embed the video.

In the two days since it launched, it has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. The video page still carries no advertising or identifiable call to action. Sales of the new album are, as yet, unknown.

I think the video is very entertaining. It still makes me want to scream.

Great Resources for Conversion Optimization

People are always asking me what (and who) I read to keep up professionally, so I thought it was time for a post highlighting some of the most useful sources of information I turn to regularly to keep me up to day with the world.

Due to the nature of our EyeView’s business I find my blog reading time split evenly between content that is focused on conversion and optimization and commentary on the latest developments in online video and video advertising. So will split this post into two and deal with each area separately

So here is a list of the top 5 go-to reads for conversion and optimization. For each I’ll list a URL and Twitter ID where appropriate.

The best introduction you can have to the world of conversion is Bryan Eisenberg. Eisenberg is published all over the place, but is blogging regularly now at BryanEisenberg.com. There is very little in the world of optimization that Bryan hasn’t already written about, but you can be sure he always finds a fresh topic for his meaty posts. In addition to his work online, Bryan has co-authored two of the most informative books I have ever referred to – Always Be Testing and Waiting For Your Cat To Bark? Bryan tweets as @TheGrok.

The guys at Conversion Rate Experts don’t blog as regularly as I would like them to, but when they do, you can bet they have something weighty to say. With offices in London and New York, this team of conversion consultants have built their reputation on making a difference for some high-profile customers. They are definitely worth listening to.  

Brian Massey has cleverly dubbed himself The Conversion Scientist. It’s a great title, but it wouldn’t be worth anything if he didn’t back it up regularly with some real science. You can follow Brian on Twitter where he is @bmassey.

Raquel Hirsch and Chris Goward at Wider Funnel put out consistently great material that always offers food for thought and usually a practical way to apply that thought. Chris publishes a daily conversion optimization tip on Twitter as @chrisgoward and Raquel moderates a number of conversion optimization groups on LinkedIn.

 My last entry for now is a bit of a cheat. SEOmoz doesn’t focus too hard on conversion optimization, but the sheer breadth and volume of quality content that is posted there means that they are host to some of the best and most informative discussions on the subject. You can follow the SEOmoz twitter stream here and pick through the SEO stuff for some conversion optimization gems.

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.

Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.

We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.

We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.

This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:

• If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
• If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
• Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)

            

          EyeView's Video Marketing Quiz                                        Omniture's Pick The Winner Quiz

IAB Digital Video Guidelines - Impressions vs Performance

Here’s a little gem that I missed at the end of last year. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has updated its guidelines regarding online video.

The IAB comprises more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. According to their site, “the IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising.”

The IAB is concerned with standardizing the measurement of ad impressions so that publishers and advertisers are always talking the same language. Faced with the rapid growth of video ads, the IAB was compelled to update its “Video Ad Impression Measurement Guidelines” from 2006 with a new addendum dealing with Auto-play.

The IAB defines “Auto-play” as follows: A video ad or a video ad linked with video content that initiates ‘‘play’’ without user interaction or without a user actively starting the video (essentially automatically starting without a ‘‘play’’ button being clicked by the user).

The new IAB guidelines require approved web publishers to disclose the fact that they using videos with auto-play to prevent unscrupulous advertisers running such ads well below the fold and recording “impressions” that may never be seen by visitors.

In a world where there is still much confusion over online advertising, this attempt to introduce standards into the wild, wild web is welcome, or at least it would be if it weren’t for two fundamental flaws in its logic.

The first comes from the IAB’s continued definition. There is no requirement to disclose the use of autoplay “if the user has a reasonable expectation that they are entering a video environment.” Even today any user should have a reasonable expectation that the commercial site they are visiting is a “video environment”. In the next 12 months this will become even more apparent as video achieves online ubiquity.

The second problem is even more basic. Using impressions to value video ads will not remain the standard for much longer. Apart from a handful of big-name, brand advertisers, companies will soon expect their video campaigns to provide ROI based on performance and how successfully they drive users through the sales funnel. As online advertising swings towards performance advertising, the effectiveness of video will be judged by increased conversion, not by impressions. There will no need for a standard definition of an impression once everybody has abandoned the world of impressions for performance.

The motivation for disclosure is becoming obsolete. Performance advertisers demand measurement by performance, not impressions.

6 Predictions For Online Video For 2010

The end of the year is always a time for reflection. This year I left behind my life with a major online video sharing site and started working for a company that is just as enamored with online video but approaches the medium with higher expectations. If video sharing sites represent the youthful excesses in the life of online video, then the next iteration is all about online video growing up, taking responsibility and earning its way.

Here are my predictions for the coming year in Online Video. I hope you enjoy my perspective.

1. Video Sharing sites will continue to grow in size but diminish in importance. In other words YouTube will be huger than ever but the story will be even more fragmented than it was this year. Apart from unpredictable viral hits like Susan Boyle, no YouTuber will ever again achieve the prominence that subscription grinders like Fred, Hot For Words and Michael Buckley have. YouTube has taken over from MTV as the number one place to watch music videos. YouTube is already more relevant as a search engine than as an entertainment destination site. It’s almost like Google could see into the future when they bought it.
2. Some small and medium businesses (SMBs) will embrace video more than ever before. The cost of entry for online video has been so reduced that every commercial site will experiment with the medium. Most will do so with no way of measuring whether the experiment was successful.
3. Some large businesses will continue to invest large sums in telling their stories with video. They will continue to be happy to do so despite not knowing how effective these videos are because however large the budget they are still cheaper than creating and buying airtime for TV ads.
4. Some SMBs and some large businesses will demand that their investment in online video brings a measurable return. They will operate under the assumption that marketing spend needs to be justified and they will seek out video solutions that combine analytics with video creation and implementation. They will find such solutions and they will be very happy.
5. Video will become a more important weapon in the affiliate marketer’s arsenal. As affiliates acknowledge the persuasive power of video over less dynamic media, they will push advertisers towards supplying video versions of banners and other collateral. Affiliates will be a major force driving video to becoming more accountable in the sales funnel.
6. Everyone reading this blog will appear in at least one video posted on the internet between now and this time next year. Happy New Year.

Happy Holidays From EyeView

As we come to the end of an amazing year, it’s great to look back and reflect on the changes we’ve seen. The year 2009 will be remembered as a breakout year for online video as it left the confines of video sharing sites and crossed over into mainstream acceptance. In 2010 every commercial site will include a video presentation at some point in its interaction with potential customers.

The final sign of acceptance will be when video is made accountable not just as a ‘nice to have’ marketing extra, but as a fully functioning tool in the marketer's arsenal with its own ROI and the expectation of revenue generation.

EyeView is proud to be leading the charge towards accountable video with our award-winning optimization program and our fantastic roster of clients.

Thank you to everyone for making 2009 so exciting and let’s see if we can’t do it all again in 2010!

Brits Vs. Yanks - A Conversion True Story

There seems to be some debate about who said it first, but whether it was Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw the quip still holds true that England and America are “two countries separated by a common language.”

But even when the language is the same, the accent used to express it can vary widely, and our response to that variation may impact our willingness to listen to the message being delivered.

We have long been interested in testing the impact of different accents. We usually do not change the content of a video for British or American audiences, but the accent in the voiceover is a different matter entirely.

Ginger Software markets a product aimed at improving your written English. It identifies spelling and grammar errors and is particularly useful for students, people with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, and business people for whom English is a second language. Once we had proven that the inclusion of video on Ginger’s site increased their conversion rate, we decided to test whether there was a difference in conversion when the audience heard an American or a British accent delivering the voiceover. Given that the product is tied so closely to people’s perception of correct English, we thought this would be real grudge match between two great nations. And the results didn’t disappoint.

We ran an A/B test where 50% of the global audience saw the video with a voiceover in a British accent and 50% saw it with the voiceover performed with an American accent. The conversion goal for each version of the video was to get visitors to download Ginger’s software.

Looking at the global population, we saw that the British voiceover was 4% more effective at converting visitors into downloaders. On its own, that would be interesting enough, but we wanted to look further into what was happening in each country.

It seems that the often-heard comment by Americans that things sound smarter with a British accent actually translates into action. For US audiences, the conversion rate for the British accent was 5.5% higher than the American one – above the global average. In Canada, the British accent still outperformed the American, but by a mere 1.5%.

Irish viewers watching the British version converted 12% more often than those hearing an American voice while the response of the Australians was even more extreme. Viewers “down under” converted 32% more often when pitched with Pommie tones than with an American twang.

The Brits didn’t have it all their own way. In India, the American accent was 12% more effective at converting visitors. But the most surprising statistic of all came when we looked at the comparative performance of the two accents in the UK. For audiences watching the video in the UK, the voiceover with the American accent was 8% more effective at making visitors download Ginger’s software than the British accent, representing a significant swing away from the global trend. This was a wonderfully counter-intuitive response to the test that really drives home the importance of knowing your audience and optimizing your video geographically to ensure you get the best results.

There is nothing to say that the results obtained here would be replicated for other videos on other sites, but there is no denying the value of testing to ensure you get the maximum revenue from your traffic wherever it comes from.

When A/B Tests Attack!

We went back to one of our most successful optimization projects to see if we could further improve on the high standards we had already set.

Previously we had embedded a landing page video for TutorVista and experienced tremendous success. With clear confirmation that the video was key to boosting their conversion we decided to experiment further. When we have a clear champion like with that first test which increased conversion by over 80%, we test new alternatives in the hope that we can squeeze even higher conversion rates from the incoming traffic.

This time we tested a graphic element that was part of the call to action at the end of the video. The video was embedded next to a call to action button that said Subscribe in the panel to the right. In the first version (below on the left) we finished the video with a giant arrow on the player pointing towards the Subscribe button to reinforce the closing words of the video’s voiceover.

The competing version of the video went one stage further with a dynamic arrow shooting out of the confines of the video player and coming to rest right next to the Subscribe button (below on the right). The idea was to drag the viewers’ eyes as close as possible to the conversion goal for the page.

Whenever we run a new test for a site we always try to predict which way the test will go, but this one surprised us all. The arrow on the left that stayed within the player and gently insisted on directing attention to the Subscribe button converted at a significantly higher rate than the dynamic flying arrow that left the player.

There may be more tests to run for this kind of element that gleefully breaks the fourth wall of online video, but for now the “old school” version remains on top.