EyeView's Blog

Conversion Conference - First Thoughts

It’s been a hectic couple of days here in San Jose. The inaugural Conversion Conference, set up by Tim Ash from SiteTuners, is generally agreed by both attendees and presenters to have been an unqualified success.

From my perspective it was gratifying to spend time with so many conversion professionals. Everywhere I went people were talking about testing methodologies and the comparative advantages of A/B and multivariate testing. It was conversion geek heaven.

The speaking tracks were broken up into four groups: Persuasion, Best Practices, Hands On and Testing. Having sampled at least one presentation of each group I found them to be relevant and useful.

The conference kicked off Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Tim Ash himself. Tim is one of the pioneers of Landing Page Optimization and he delivered an entertaining introduction breaking down the basics into easily digestible and practicable suggestions.

Straight after Tim, two presenters tag-teamed a session called The Power of Split Testing. Both Brooks Bell and Lance Loveday delivered valuable insights into the basis of this vital art. Brooks, in particular suggested the 5 Ts that must be considered when it comes to A/B testing:

• Traffic
• Technology
• Time
• Trust
• Team

Throughout this and every other session I was in, people were tweeting furiously to get the word out to their networks. By tuning in to the conference hashcode, #ConvCon, I was able to get real-time updates from the parallel track. It was a sign of the conference’s quality that there was always something interesting going in each of the two meeting rooms and seating space was almost always at a premium with listeners sometimes spilling out into the corridor.

Day two started in fine fashion with a presentation from Bryan Eisenberg delivered at breakneck speed. Bryan’s energy, undiminished by his impressive weight loss, woke everyone up and led into another day of fascinating sessions.

All in all, I feel that the conference more than justified its existence. There was a clear need for a dedicated conversion conference and I’m thrilled to note that the next one is already scheduled for October. I have the feeling that most of this week’s attendees will come back and that, once word gets out, there will be more people lining up to visit the show. 

For now we will have to rely on the presentations from this show which Tim Ash has promised to make available to everyone who attended. In addition, all the sessions were filmed. I’m not sure what Tim intends to do with all this footage, but, if you want to see it, you had better contact him yourself and request it.

Online Video Stories Of The Week

Over at Online Video Watch, Corey Kronengold comments on Brightroll’s announcement that they have been profitable for the past 12 months. Corey is not entirely trusting but he acknowledges the positive message this sends to the industry.

At comScore, December’s video viewing figures showed a new entry in the top ten video content properties as how-to syndication platform, 5min.com, hit 30 million US uniques for the month.

Fierce Online Video’s Jim O’Neill satisfied continued demand for iPad stories with a piece on Hulu’s rush to become iPad-friendly in time for the tablet’s launch or soon thereafter. There’s no doubt this story will run and run and the implications for the future of online video have yet to be fully determined.

At ReelSEO, Mark Robertson was delighted to report on the efforts of many of the online video platforms to support SEO as part of their offering. YouTube has been the de facto search engine for video until now, so it’s great to see these platforms supporting the indexing of video across all search engines.

Finally, today, no review of online video this week would be complete without mentioning the Superbowl. In what was a fairly lackluster year, the stand out commercial for me was this one for Snickers featuring Betty White (now with added Abe Vigoda). Geriatric genius!

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!

You Don't Need 300 Million Users To Make Money (... But It Helps!)

First of all, congratulations to young Mr. Zuckerberg and the rest of the team at Facebook. According to his blog post yesterday, the site now has over 300 million users. This is a remarkable feat by any standard and places Facebook firmly in the pantheon of internet gods. Given that the announcement about reaching 250 million users only came in July, we can see that Facebook continues to experience remarkable growth as it becomes an essential part of many people’s lives.

Perhaps even more importantly for Mr. Zuckerberg, he was able to announce that Facebook had finally become “cashflow positive”. An interesting choice of words that is open to interpretation as Alan Patrick of Broadsight amusingly points out on his blog. At least one thing is clear and that is whatever interpretation of “cashflow positive” Facebook uses for this past quarter, it is not likely to have made much of dent in the $700 million that has already been invested in the site.

So, if it takes one of the world’s most popular sites five years, 300 million users and $700 million of investment to make money, what hope is there for the rest of us? Plenty. And the reason is this. You don’t need 300 million users to make money. What you do need is a clear conversion strategy for the users or visitors you do have.

Facebook has built its user base with fantastic word of mouth and viral expansion through every demographic. The rest of us are using a combination of PPC, SEO and other SEM tactics to generate traffic to our properties. But even without a viral tsunami we can all still do more to optimize the value of the traffic we generate for our sites.

You may even find that your real online business is not an ad-supported behemoth like Facebook, but a lean and keen revenue-generating machine with a real product and an open and defined strategy for turning your visitors into purchasers or subscribers or downloaders. Facebook needed 300 million visitors in order to start making money. My bet is that you can achieve the same goal with far fewer.

Online Video Will Not Save Advertising

There is a lot of speculation as to why advertising dollars have failed to follow eyeballs into online video. Tania Yuki over at comScore offered her two cents last week on this thought-provoking conundrum.

Yuki describes online video as a party crasher knocking on the door of Big Advertising with a bunch of unruly (and unsavoury) friends expecting to be welcomed into the fold and recognized as one of the guys. As Yuki describes it -- brand advertisers responded blankly and fairly, “who are you and what are you doing here?”

Yuki goes on to talk about the disconnect between agencies and content producers contributing to the lack of enthusiasm on the agencies’ part for online video.

I would take this even further and suggest that disconnect is between old-fashioned outbound marketing and the strength and importance of inbound marketing. Agencies are still trying to use video outside of a brand’s site to drive interest and build recognition for that brand. It’s the old problem of putting ads for cat food on TV when you know that only one in three households owns a cat. Most of the time you are trying to sell something to someone who will never need it.

The new reality is that everyone currently spending money on video is already spending more money on generating traffic for their property. By using video to attract business they are competing with their existing spend and, most of the time, wasting their energy.

I believe the future for online video is worlds away from the current advertising model. Following the principles of inbound marketing, an effective online video on your landing page will complement rather than cannibalize your SEO spend and be viewed by people who have already chosen to visit your site to learn more.

In other words, rather than trying to sell cat food to dog lovers, you first go out and attract the attention of cat owners and when they find you, you can tell them why your cat food tastes best.

Online Video Up. Ad Revenue... Not So Much.

Recent figures released by comScore show that even in the traditionally slow, summer month of July, audience figures for online video are still outperforming expectations. According to the report, more than 158 million US internet users watched online video during the month. This is the largest figure recorded so it comes as no surprise that the number of videos watched, 21.4 billion, was also an all-time record.

Over 40 percent of videos are watched on what comScore euphemistically calls “Google sites”. While that figure is more than 10 times the size of its nearest competitor, it still means that 60 percent of online video is being watched in places other than YouTube.

With US video viewers watching an average of 135 videos each in the month of July, there is no further proof needed that online video watching is as mainstream for internet users as reading email or checking last night’s sports scores.

Interestingly, the most wide-reaching ad network has a potential reach of only half the online video viewing audience with no ad network actually delivering more than 20 percent of that audience. This implies that the overwhelming majority of online video viewers is watching without the interruption of ads and will probably expect this to continue.

While the world of video as entertainment, which is reliant on ad revenue, may be concerned by this slow-to-improve statistic, companies that are using video for branding, exposure, SEO and conversion have less to be worried about.

5 Optimization Tips In 5 Minutes

First of all there are semantic issues here that tend to be confusing. When I talk about optimization, I mean optimizing your website to make sure that visitors to the site have the best possible experience and are more likely to complete whatever conversion goal you have set for the site.

I understand that for some people optimizing their website is all about using tags and keywords to ensure that more people who are not on the site will find it when they are searching and that’s fine, but the following tips are not about that.

These are my five tips to making sure that the people who arrive at your site do what you want them to do.

1. Know what it is you want your visitors to do

It seems so obvious but so many sites mess this up. Are you selling something or are you collecting email addresses. Do you want people to watch a video or do you want them to download a PDF. Choose one goal per landing and concentrate on that. You can add steps that lead up to your goal, but you must remain focused on the prize and not get bogged down in the steps.

2. Clear out the clutter

If your main source of revenue isn’t advertising, then get rid of it. That goes for banner ads, Google ads, video ads. If they’re not serving your message, they’re not serving you.

3. Test your Call to Action

So much has been written about the call to action. Where does it go? What words should you use? What color should it be? What words should you avoid? My advice is the same I give to new parents. Listen to everything, try some of the things, use the ones that work and discard the rest. I’m not suggesting that you A/B test your children, but I do think you should be willing to try different combinations for your call to action until you find the one that works best.

4. Location, location, location

If you have never heard the maxim, it’s the answer to the question, “What are the three most important factors when buying property?” While the offline property market may be struggling, the battle for online real estate is very much on. Make sure you use every pixel wisely. Position your messages carefully. Make sure the page flows in a way that guides your visitors to the goals you have set.

5. Use your words

There’s an old proverb that says “you can’t dance at two weddings”. Web copy is constantly getting invitations from rival bridal parties. On the one hand your web copy has to deliver the right mix of SEO-worthy keywords. On the other hand, the same copy has to also drive readers to complete the conversion goal you have set. Get creative. Remember that your conversion copy has to be found and read while your SEO copy just has to be. Use the fold (the natural page break created by the height of your screen) to separate the two kinds of copy.

These are my top 5 tips in 5 minutes. What else have you tested to optimize your site?

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.

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.

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.