PPC-Advice.com

Options for Adding Video to your Landing Pages

Landing page testing is important in determining your target market demographics and conversion bottlenecks, and has long been a realm for creative changes to text, images, and promotions, but what about video?  Some claim video on landing pages can have a dramatic effect on conversion rate, and it’s never been a better time to test that theory heading into slower months.

Historically, e-commerce has been known to slump going into the summer months, and conversion rates become harder to maintain with the decreased traffic.  The going theory is that people spend more time outdoors, go on vacation, work “summer hours”, and therefore are less likely to spend money online.  Makes sense to me, but is that an excuse for poor ROI during slow months?  Absolutely not.

Slower months are the perfect opportunity to test new ideas because people are less inclined to buy.  Imagine if you could turn those fewer, less motivated visitors into paying customers during your slow months to achieve break-even ROI or better?   All of a sudden you have the tools and business intelligence you need in the high-traffic months to win easier conversions.  Or so my theory goes…

Enter the Wacky World of Video

Thankfully, there are several interesting options for webmasters that want to introduce video on landing pages and high-profile front lines.  Technologies and implementations may differ, but they all have the same goal - to maximize impact.  A few different technologies available include:

• Integrating YouTube videos into your CMS or landing page.  Often the cheapest and best way to go for small businesses that don’t necessarily want to cripple their hosting plan.  YouTube also has mass appeal, and may result in higher video plays because of the recognizable technology platform.
• Click to play video.  Can be implemented quite easily on any hosting plan because visitors only stream video after it is requested, saving you bandwidth and decreasing the initial noise on a landing page.
• Autoplay video.  If you’ve got the beefy servers to host your own video and have it play automatically for each and every visitor to your site, go for it.  The only downside is that bandwidth isn’t free, so keep an eye on your transfer limit, and make sure your visitors can support a skip-free (read buffer-less) video experience.

The credibility of video technology on a landing page can be huge in retaining visitors, but might have a negative effect on your overall keyword spend.  Consider the following:

• Users that are browsing PPC ads in Google, for instance, may click through to your site, stay only a mere few seconds, then bounce back if they don’t like what they see.  With video, users are less likely to bounce as quickly because of the novelty of the tech.  Expect to pay for those clicks that don’t bounce as quickly!
• “The TiVo Effect”: Visitors may not want to be bombarded by video or any other rich-media when searching for a product or service.  Even with click to play video on a site, there is no guarantee that visitors will convert more often or quicker than they would have without.
• Suitability:  If you’re selling broadband internet services to users on dial-up, my guess would be that video on a landing page wouldn’t do much to sell customers on your service.  It’s almost like saying, “Hey you!  If you buy our broadband, you could watch this video… you poor sap!”

As with any element on a landing page, testing is required to determine whether video is a good fit for your clientèle and conversion.  A simple A/B or multivariate landing page test can help you determine a winner in a relatively short amount of time, and the slowing summer months might actually help you overcome an impending slump in revenue!

Buzzworthy? Bookmark to: