Top 10 Considerations in Selecting an eCommerce Product Video Solution

September 02, 2010

by Mark Robertson of REELSeo.com

So, you’re thinking about adding product videos to your ecommerce site. Once you’ve made your decision you’ll quickly realize there are a fair deal of things you need to consider in terms of the implementation of your video solution. In order to help you figure out what you should be looking for, I’ve compiled the following list of points you should address in order to ensure that your video solution works for you.
 

1.) Video Production Method

ecommerce video product Things To Consider When Choosing An Ecommerce Product Video Solution The type of video production you want to use is probably the biggest decision you’ll have to make. Generally speaking, your options are as follows:

* Create your own videos in-house
* Use your manufacturers’ videos (assuming these exist)
* Community videos & consumer generated content
* Outsource to a professional video production company
* Automated product videos

As a business owner your responsibility is to guarantee the highest possible ROI from your video investment. From this perspective, combining your existing videos with automated ones may be your best option:

* You get the biggest bang for your buck – more videos for less $$
* Enables you to update your videos easily and frequently to reflect changes to your products and offerings.
* Some platforms include an analytics panel allowing you to monitor your videos’ performance

Automated videos are offered by several companies.  I recommend that you check out Stupeflix, Activate Media Group and Animoto.

2.) Content Delivery Network – CDN

Whereas users watching video for entertainment may at times tolerate slow streaming & poor delivery, this is far from being the case for ecommerce videos. Users have zero patience for poorly delivered content when you’re trying to sell them something. Your providers’ content delivery network must be reliable – period. Be sure to check whether your provider offers high bandwidth and guarantees smooth streaming around the world.

3.) Pricing Model

Video platform price models abound. In order to ensure you have a clear understanding of your billing and can control your expenses select vendors that offer you a fixed price or one that’s tied to usage or performance. Some vendors that offers a risk-free pricing model where you only pay for videos that were actually viewed by your audience. This type of pricing model is often referred to as Pay Per View and is based on the same principal as Pay Per Click .

4.) Integration & Deployment

Before finalizing with a vendor ensure you understand the integration process required to add the videos to your e-commerce website. If you’re only adding one or two videos this needn’t be a major consideration, but if you’re going to be adding hundreds of product videos to your site, you really want to make sure you don’t have to add code to each product page individually.

The easiest integrations for large scale video integrations are based on addition of code to your product page templates. A parameter for the SKU can be used to automatically match the right video to the right product. This type of implementation also means that adding new videos will not require internal resources.

5.) Analytics & Measurements

By now good analytics are already widely accepted as being vital to any etailers success. More than just having a feeling for the site’s overall performance it’s important to have a good understanding of how every component on the site is contributing to its overall success. This is true for your new video component as well.

The basic requirement is that you have some form of reporting tool offering you information on video views which you can then correlate to your sales data. Some vendors provide advanced analytics that already tie these details into the platform, including measurements for your video’s conversion rates, comparisons of CVR for visitors who watched video and those who didn’t, and support for A/B testing of multiple video versions per product.

6.) Offsite Video Syndication

Video content destinations are among the most popular sites online today. So much so that Youtube is now ranked as the world’s 2nd most popular search engine and the 3rd most visited site on the web. To fully realize the ROI potential of your video investment you may want to syndicate your video content to outside video destinations. This can not only provide you further exposure and increased traffic, but can also have a great impact on the visibility of your video content across search engines. Some ecommerce video platforms include automated syndication to the major video sharing sites as an optional feature.

7.) Search Engine Visibility

Closely related to the former point is the issue of your video’s SEO. Ideally, you will want to be sure that your own video content is picked up by search engines for your own website domain. It’s easy to test the success of this effort, so make sure to choose a vendor that can show you proof with examples from existing clients.

8.) Share/Like Option

You may want to harness the social web to your benefit by adding options to share and Facebook “Like” your videos. This is a great way to further disseminate your content and create interactivity.

Remember to run A/B testing to see whether a clean video, with no “distractions” provides better ROI.

9.) Mobile Compatibility

The mobile web is exploding literally while you’re busy reading this.

With Google’s Android phones alone being sold at a rate of over 65,000 units per day more and more shoppers surf the net from their cell phones every minute. Your videos must be available to mobile devices: iPhones/ iPads, Blackberrys, Androids are a must in my opinion.

10.) Advanced Utilization of Video

It’s always smart to re-appropriate your existing content in as many ways as possible. Check if your vendor supports embedding videos in email campaigns, video banners, and video galleries, in order to maximize your existing video content and expand your reach.
 

Conclusion

This list is in no way exhaustive but it should serve as a starting point for prioritizing how you select your ecommerce video vendor and identify the solutions that best match your needs.

Tags: content marketing , e-commerce video , video seo , web video

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Best Practices in eCommerce Product Video: Top 5 Sales Conversion Boosters

August 09, 2010

Research shows that when product videos are featured, visitors are 85% more likely to convert. The evidence is overwelming that product videos really work. 

However, as any experienced online marketer knows, optimizing conversion rates is never an automatic achievement, no matter how good the approach and tools. Focusing on the details and being consistent in your approach to online video is key. 

Split testing is also an essential component of a good program and should not be done as an afterthought. Tactics like adding appropriate background music, voice-overs, and text can all generate more clicks to purchase among visitors to your web site. The key to knowing what’s appropriate and what enhancements drive desired responses.

Testing your creative and your messaging has long been a standard practice for brand marketers.  Large companies have been built focusing on research, focus groups, polls, etc.  With online video systems like Activate's can bring this power to your online portfolio without the guesswork, the additional time or the agency expenses.

We recommend pilot testing and split testing for each custom video solution developed for our clients. However, here are some general best practices for your consideration that may apply to existing or new videos you are currently working on.

 

Top 5 Sales Conversion Boosters for Online Video Production

 

• Adding voice-overs often results in higher conversions (see example video here using our automated natural voice database).
• With female fashion, a male voice-over might actually REDUCE sales, while a female voice-over can double sales.
• A call to action at the end of the video can increase purchasing activity by more than 20%.
• Adding text almost always increases conversions. Color of the text is significant as well, and we have found that red works better for some products.
• The size and placement of the video player is important – using an actual player embed rather than a video icon or button is best

 

Tags: video seo , viral videos , web video

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Video SEO Critical to E-Commerce Success - QVC vs Overstock.com Example

July 22, 2010

This is the story of two respected e-businesses who deployed video on their websites. One did it with SEO in mind and reaped the rewards in Google rankings and resulting page visits and sales. The other took an enormous cache of video content, uploaded it onto a website and left it there – unoptimized, untagged and unprofitable.

Almost any business moving to the web understands at some level that search engines drive traffic. The 100 best companies in Internet Retailer’s Top Retailers Guide report an average of 30 percent of their traffic is search-engine delivered. And by now, most e-businesses realize the importance of deploying video as a means to increase website visits. It is with this knowledge in mind that retailers such as Zappos, Overstock.com and Newegg have deployed thousands of videos across their websites.

Given the apparently widespread awareness of the power of video online, it is amazing to see that many large retailers are investing in multimedia without taking the steps to put those elements to work for search engine optimization.
The Case for E-Commerce Video SEO

Companies that understand the technical steps to achieving a higher SEO ranking with video will make the most of their investments. For example, Overstock.com applied the required technologies — such as text and markup in the page surrounding the video, site-wide descriptive formats, video site maps and proper video embedding — and its 56,000 videos were recognized by Google.

It is equally important that e-commerce sites deploy video across their entire product catalog. It is not enough to simply post a few videos on the homepage and other main pages. For instance, eBags.com manually produces videos that are indexed on Google, but because it is so expensive to produce each video for its entire (large) catalog, the company can only have a limited number of videos. This results in limited video SEO when users search for products, and other sites with video will pop to the top of the results page.
QVC vs. Overstock – Optimized Video Delivers

QVC clearly understands how to make compelling video. The cable shopping network broadcasts live 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. It has a massive store of multimedia and it has loaded tens of thousands of videos onto its website. But one would never know it by the number of QVC videos indexed on the major search engines. Google has one. There are two others on Bing and four on Yahoo!. That’s a total of seven indexed videos for a company that is #11 on the Internet Retailer 500. QVC’s wasted resources are a reminder that the number of videos a business offers on its site isn’t as important as what it does to properly deploy them.

Let’s compare QVC’s approach to that of Overstock.com. The latter, which sells everything from crib sheets to faucets and jewelry at discount prices, rivals QVC in the number of videos on its site. But those multimedia assets are working much harder for Overstock.com, since the retailer took the extra step of optimizing its videos to increase search engine rankings and drive traffic. There are more than 56,000 Overstock.com videos indexed on Google, and the revenue implications of that fact are clear. Here is just one of many examples; if you do a standard Google search for “La Strada ceiling fan,” you’ll see Overstock.com as the number one result, with a video thumbnail accompanying the text link.

We’ve learned from our customers like Overstock.com that video SEO is an important aspect of their considerations when deploying multimedia website elements. From large businesses like Overstock.com to more targeted verticals like real-estate site Sawbuck Realty, we’re seeing that optimized video delivers. With tens of thousands of videos, Sawbuck Realty, for example, now views this offering as a compelling differentiator in a competitive market and an effective way to enhance search engine rankings.

Aside from the SEO benefits that video provides, commerce sites are offering customers an improved website experience, and subsequently experiencing conversion lifts. In terms of SEO, top retailers consider the ability to get their videos indexed on major search engines an important part of their catalog-wide video deployment. Video and search engine traffic are key drivers for web businesses, and video SEO can do a lot to extract the potential of these rich, multimedia resources to support search engine traffic growth.

Tags: e-commerce video , online videos , video seo , vseo , web video

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