EyeView's Blog

Why I Don't Trust Nielsen

I came across this self-serving blog post at Nielsen.com, thanks to those awesome guys at MarketingCharts.

The gist of the Nielsen post is this. People watch ads on TV. People also watch ads when they watch full-length TV episodes online. Using each of the four metrics deemed important by Nielsen, online TV ads performed slightly better than regular TV ads. The four metrics are:

• General Recall
• Brand Recall
• Message Recall
• Likeability

The conclusion following these results is so delicious that I just have to quote it in full:

“Data shows that web video viewers are more engaged and attentive to the programs they are watching, which is likely a function of the viewing environment and the oft-required active mouse-clicking to initiate nd [sic] continue content.”

It’s not that I don’t agree with their findings. It’s more that I have serious misgivings about how they got them and what they intend to do with them.

“Data shows…”? Really? Which data? I’d like to see those figures and how you got them. Given that Nielsen notoriously extrapolates national TV viewing figures from a relatively small number of homogenous households, I am curious to hear more about their online video engagement statistics.

I’m also in love with the phrase “oft-required active mouse clicking”. It’s like someone from the 1950s has come to watch how we do things in the future. But then everything about Nielsen’s comparison of offline and online ads is so far from current that it’s laughable.

Online advertising isn’t about “Message Recall”. “Likeability” is not an end in itself and should not be measured as such. The majority of online advertising is about actions, not impressions and Nielsen, I’m afraid, has absolutely no way of measuring that.

If you really want to compare TV ads and online ads, you need to measure how many people made a purchase after seeing an ad – a metric that TV networks have been rightly coy about exploring as the results could undermine their entire business model; or at least undermine the high prices they charge, relative to online advertisers.

But we should give Nielsen some credit. They bravely point out that online ads are more effective that TV ads, even if the methodology behind this realization is a little dodgy. The recommendation must therefore be to lower spend on TV advertising and shift budget to online inventory, right? Wrong.

“…the data suggests the benefits of utilizing both platforms in tandem to achieve advertising objectives.”

Way to sit on the fence, Nielsen. It’s almost as if a large part of your revenue comes from TV networks trying to prove to advertisers that they should still be the primary supplier of ad space. Oh, wait, it does.

Check out this report which shows a minority interest sports channel paying $7.5 million dollars a year to Nielsen for the privilege of having its tiny viewing figures calculated, so that it can claim it has viewing figures, so that it can charge more money to advertisers for those figures. I shudder to think how much CNN or NBC must be paying.

If you’re a big advertiser debating where to focus your media buying for the next few seasons, you might want to find a better informed and more impartial source of information than Nielsen.

Another Video Conversion Success Story

Anyone with a school-aged child has wrestled with the problem of tutoring. Whether your son needs help with his trigonometry homework or your daughter needs to stop falling behind with her reading comprehension you will discover that finding a tutor can be as difficult as it is expensive. Whether you have to travel to the tutor’s residence or find a mutually agreeable time in your own home, you can expect to pay anywhere from $30-75 per hour of one-on-one tutoring.

It was only a matter of time until someone came up with a better solution. TutorVista operates out of Bangalore, India with a team of highly qualified professional tutors available round the clock to work with your children improving their academic skills. As long as you have a broadband connection, you can get unlimited tutoring for under $100 per month.

The guys at TutorVista approached us with a problem. They had a landing page that was specifically designed to funnel traffic through their sign-up process. The landing page was already reasonably successful by most standards but they wanted to try and increase conversion for that page to make sure they were getting the most out of their traffic.

A conversion solution was prepared which included a battery of tests to be performed on the landing page to measure optimization around a video which we created specifically for the page. The first test embedded the video on the page for half the visitors and tested it against the existing page and the existing conversion rate. On top of that, we made the embedded video autoplay for first-time visitors, reasoning that the information in the video was useful enough to overcome the issues that sometimes arise from autoplay.

Arun Kumar, Manager at TutorVista, continues the story: “We implemented EyeView’s solution on one of our landing pages that already had a pretty impressive conversion rate. The very first test they ran boosted conversion by over 80 percent. EyeView really works.”

We will be running more tests over the coming months, with the aim of further optimizing conversion for this page, but there is nothing sweeter than hitting the first pitch right out of the park.

Congratulations to TutorVista on having such a great product and congratulations to the EyeView team for taking a gamble and watching it pay off handsomely.

If you want to watch the video, I’m adding it here, but the real magic for TutorVista is happening right on their landing page:

New Online Video Provider Comparison Site

I was excited to be contacted this week by Kris Drey. During daylight, Kris is VP of Product Marketing over at Fliqz, a video hosting service. But late at night, when the moon is full, Kris is launching a new site called VidCompare.com. According to the homepage VidCompare is “a free comparison service for business decision makers looking for an Online Video Platform Provider”.

Although the site is still officially in Beta, Kris and his partner, Alex Polonsky have done a great job reaching out to different sites and creating a directory of companies working with online video at varying levels. Each entry gives a brief outline of the site’s offering and a breakdown of the different services. You can see information about the company’s target market and pricing models as well as a sample video to give you a taste of their player. It’s easy to filter your search and distinguish between white-label players and full-service production houses.

Satisfied users can come back to the site and add a review of the companies they’ve worked with. It’s not a new model, but it’s already proven its effectiveness in other markets.

Whether you’re in marketing for a huge multi-national or a one-person start-up looking to include some video on your new site, VidCompare takes the headache out of researching a bunch of companies to find the best fit.

From my perspective as a vendor, the arrival of VidCompare is a validation of the online video market as a healthily competitive place. We know more and more business are looking to incorporate online video on their sites and presenting the range of possibilities in an accessible way increases visibility and adds transparency to this search.

It’s too early to know how much value the site can provide to vendors in terms of leads, but I’m sure customers will welcome the chance to compare their options and that will ultimately provide benefit to everyone.

So far, it looks great and I will update as the site grows.

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 7 Sins Of Landing Page Design

I was watching Tim Ash’s webinar this week entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design”. It is simultaneously one of the most terrifying and one of the most illuminating lectures I have attended. It’s terrifying because he does a great job of identifying the many traps that people fall into when building out a landing page. But it’s also Illuminating because, unlike other optimization scaremongers, Ash offers tips for redemption for each of the deadly sins he identifies.

I will add the video to the end of this post but with respect to Tim, here are my high level take aways.

Sin 1: Unclear Call To Action

Redemption: Make your Call To Action clear. Ash makes it seem so obvious. You have to know what you want your site visitor to do and then remove the clutter that stops them from doing it.

Sin 2: Too Many Choices

Redemption: Focus, focus, focus. Ash suggests using visual shortcuts to reduce the need for confusing choice-filled text.

Sin 3: Asking For Too Much Information

Redemption: This is all about people dropping out when it’s time for them to fill in a form. Ash asks the key question, “Is this information absolutely necessary to complete the current transaction?” If the answer is “No”, you need to set the question aside at least until later.

Sin 4: Too Much Text

Redemption: Keep it short and sweet. Front load your text with all the good stuff and never use a full sentence when a set of bullets will suffice. The best advice here is to be a ruthless editor of your own work. This is one of the hardest disciplines to master, but well worth learning.

Sin 5: Not Keeping Your Promises

Redemption: Tell the truth, or at least synch up your ad copy with your landing page so that there are no unhappy surprises for your visitors.

Sin 6: Visual Distractions

Redemption: Make your images relevant, not gratuitous and make sure that they don’t obstruct the Call To Action.

Sin 7: Lack of Credibility & Trust

Redemption: Ash recommends that you remove anxiety by featuring well known trust symbols prominently and by drawing attention to clients with better-known brands to borrow their credibility.

There’s so much to take in here that I will be going over this video a few more times. Here is the original video for those of you who want to get the full impact of Tim Ash’s wise counsel.

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.

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?