The Virtues of Testing
In the world of competitive intelligence, it’s difficult to get hard numbers, but this month we’re pleased to bring you a fascinating peek behind the scenes of a video rollout that was done for an eCommerce site.
I’m indebted to Andy Erickson from Website Werx ecommerce, who graciously gave me his permission to share this information with you. Andy carried out a marketing experiment using video. The experiment took place over a period of 45 days. He created two versions, then split-test a popular product page. One included a 30-second video and the other, a standard photo. The video was also placed on a split-test version of the home page. No changes were made to any pages other than the inclusion or exclusion of the video.
Google Analytics was used to track and analyze the results. Andy looked at the following metrics:
1.Time Spent on Page
2.Bounce Rate
3.Visitor Value (total sales divided by the number of unique visitors to the page)
Drum Roll please….
Let’s look at the home page first. Time spent by visitors on the home page went up by 36%. That’s nice. I mean, if they don’t stay very long, you don’t have much of a chance to get your message across. The Bounce Rate decreased by 36%. Impressive. That means visitors wanted to know more and likely went deeper into the site. Visitor Value went up an astounding 111%. That’s right.
Results for the product page were even more impressive, but also more illuminating!
Time spent on the page with video was a statistical dead heat. That’s interesting. Remember that we’ve now moved from the home page to the product page, so we have some information already. This positioning actually reinforces the fact that human beings can process information from a moving picture 60,000 times faster than words, so it doesn’t take much time for us to make up our minds.
The bounce rate increased slightly, by 14%. Fascinating. That means that the video allowed visitors to make their buying decision faster. So you might say, it seems to have driven visitors away. Actually just the opposite occurred.
Visitor Value went up by a shocking 243%. Do you begin to see what’s happening here? The logic of this buying sequence is irrefutable. The video on the home page encourages visitors to go deep. It acts as an attractor, stimulating curiosity. The video on the product page then becomes a point-of-purchase display and clearly creates the urgency necessary to make sales. Therefore, the video separates the customers from the non-customers.
My question would be, is there a way to make the video work better? Would a more appropriate video increase conversion rates again? That’s where working with the right video provider can make a huge difference.
And don’t assume that because you are not an eCommerce company, that you can’t achieve these kinds of results. The Kelsey study I’ve quoted elsewhere found that video ads on websites resulted in 18% of those who clicked actually visiting a brick-and-mortar establishment and 16.9% of them bought something.
Do you have a strategy for converting visitors to customers that is this simple and efficient and effective and takes zero percent of your time to accomplish?
Um, why not?
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©2011 BrainyVideo. All Rights Reserved.
Article written by Steven Washer
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