eCommerce Video Thumbnails Matter Enormously
It’s the first impression that counts. In the video e-commerce world, the first impression often is a static thumbnail with a white triangle on top. Will the user click or not, that is the question.
Video thumbnails are everywhere. First, because most eCommerce sites will not autoplay videos on their pages to avoid distractions in the shopping process and therefore prefer to present the video as a player with a thumbnail. Second, when video is introduced on a commerce page, the video player itself does take significant bandwidth and may slow down the page if video starts streaming. Thumbnails solve the page performance problem because video will only stream if the play button is clicked on. Finally, there are more and more video delivery formats where the video content is accessible as a popup or overlay, triggered from a video banner similar to the one here below:
Maximizing click-throughs is an art. Let’s take a few examples from video pioneer eBags.com and analyze some of their choices.
1. Picking a thumbnail for a Product video
As you can see above, out of the five possible choices, eBags opted for a close-up of their Macroloader product. In general, if a video is a product review, it’s a good idea to select a good thumbnail of the product.
Sometimes the product has an awkward shape and would not be easily recognizable in a single thumbnail. In this case, an attractive shot of the presenter works well as shown below for the Travel Hammock product.
2. Picking a thumbnail for a How-To video
A little harder would be selecting the right thumbnail for educational videos. In this case, it’s hard to pick an image that summarizes the problem and suggests a solution. Once again I like the eBags approach because it is very tactical and down to earth as evidenced in this selection for the eBags Universal Plug Adaptor.
Notice how the thumbnail summarizes the problem (unfamiliar electrical plug) and the proposed solution (the black adapter).
3 . Picking a thumbnail for a Branding video
Even harder than How-to’s because of the branding implications. Three different examples to illustrate the various approaches.
First, a Jansport video that narrates the company beginnings and history (below). The selected thumbnail is… the peak of a mountain, which symbolizes coolness, endurance, challenge and lifestyle.
Second example - the Nike video for the Edge Elite Backpack. For a recognizable brand like Nike, eBags chose the thumbnail with the Nike logo, a true click magnet.
Finally - my favorite of all. The Lovcat handbags video. Here the marketer is picking a thumbnail that’s sort of mysterious, inviting you to find out more.
Next time you publish your commerce video, mind the thumbnail!
One more reason to publish your commerce videos to YouTube: Insight
YouTube has recently launched an improved analytics interface which will give you basic yet insightful demographics information about your video content.
While the critics will say that YouTube isn’t a viable video commerce platform for serving video content on a respectable eCommerce site, publishing your video content is essential to reaching out to a new audience and establishing a presence on one of the most trafficked Web sites on the Internet today. With YouTube’s Insight, marketers have one more reason to push their video content to YouTube, in addition to what they might be doing with an entreprise-class video management platform.
I finally got a chance to sit down and take a look at what Insight has to offer. To set the right expectation, please remember that YouTube is a B2C video platform and we therefore shouldn’t expect Omniture, Coremetrics or Fireclick type of Analytics. With that in mind, I was impressed with the dataset from YouTube, primarily because the types of data available simply cannot be found anywhere else.
The interface itself is very simple, divided in four main tabs: dashboard, views, popularity and demographics. Most of the useful information is available from the dashboard view, which is shown here above. There, you can find a simple views report, top level as well as detailed for each video, with a nice calendar function to explore different time ranges.
Clearly, the value is in the demographics data. To the best of my knowledge, no Web analytics company can provide this type of metrics, and for a good reason. Google is exposing their internal demographics data from Adwords/Adsense, thereby giving invaluable information for free to YouTube users. By pushing your commerce videos to YouTube, you can get a solid idea for what videos are most popular by age segment and geographical location.
I spent over 30 mins slicing and dicing YouTube data for a top retail site which graciously opened up the interface for me. I was like a 5 year-old in a candy store trying to understand why video XYZ was getting double, triple, tenfold the traffic of the average clip. While I can’t share any of the details here, I’ll comment on two points that clearly came out.
1. Celebrities tend to attract a lot of eye balls. Brands too, if and when the brand has already some market awareness. Make sure you include these keywords when uploading to YouTube, rather than the more descriptive “Running Shoes”, “DVD players” or “Fall fashion preview”.
2. Average viewership on YouTube appear to be fairly low (with the exception of #1 above). I would even say minuscule in some cases, compared to video on the actual ecommerce site. This confirms my earlier belief that YouTube should be part of your video commerce strategy, but not your video commerce strategy.
Overall, I highly recommend pushing existing videos onto YouTube. For the few eyeballs, for the thrill of going viral (sometimes), and… for the data.
Related: Read Glenn Gabe’s take on YouTube Insight on the Internet Marketing Driver Blog.
Video Commerce Consortium Issues Its First Whitepaper
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Earlier today the Video Commerce Consortium published its first white paper, entitled Building an Effective Video Commerce Strategy. As a member of the VCC, I got a chance to review the document shortly before publishing and was impressed with the depth of analysis. Well written and document, this paper is the first of its kind to describe the nascent Video Commerce industry and provide a methodical framework for starting a video commerce program. Using examples from ShopNBC, Circuit City or Wetseal, Justin Foster does an excellent job of building a business case for eCommerce video. |
The idea behind Foster’s business case is to project positive ROI numbers from top retail sites onto an existing retail site seeking to deploy video, with a top-to-bottom approach that aims at concentrating the initial video effort on high margin, high volume products. One of the central thesis of the document is the need for a three-prong strategy that harnesses the power of video to increase onsite conversion rates, acquire users outside of the traditional ecommerce boundaries, and build a lively community of users. This is arguably a solid and generous contribution to the video commerce space. Here embedded the full document you may obtain from the original white paper link.
Building an Effective Video Commerce Strategy - Get more Business Plans
Video Commerce Analytics with Eric T. Peterson
Last month, Web analytics thought-leader Eric T. Peterson spent a few minutes with me to talk about Video Commerce analytics. Eric is the author of Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators. In addition, Eric founded Web Analytics Demystified Inc. in 2007, a successful consulting form with prestigious clients across all internet segments. Eric is a long-time member of the web analytics community and a frequent speaker who is often cited in articles about web analytics.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Xavier Casanova: Hi everyone, I’m Xavier Casanova from videoretailer.org, and today I’m going to interview Eric Peterson who is the founder and CEO of Web Analytics Demystified, a leading consulting firm for analytics. So Eric, I have a few questions for you regarding the use of analytics and video, and there’s a lot of things that are still to be defined when it comes to measuring how people interact and how people use video. And so, in your opinion, first of all, why is it important to measure how people interact with videos?
Eric Peterson: That’s a good question. Like anything you do on the internet, you need to measure interaction and engagement with video because you need to know what you are getting back out of your efforts. If you are spending money to produce videos, if you are spending money to convert existing videos into a web writing format, if you’re taking the time to put them up on youtube and other repositories, you need to know what you are getting back for that. Are people watching the videos? Are they interacting with the videos, if there’s a flash or interactive component. Are those videos actually driving people back to the website, if it’s designed to sell products or drive some kind of converstion event, is that event actually happening? So I think you have to measure video in the same way that you measure your paper click marketing, your banner advertising, your emails. It’s another communication medium in the digital channel.
XC: And so one of the questions that people, actually, frequently have is, “Okay so, I have to measure video, I get it. I understand. Now, what to measure? What are the things that I should be looking at when assessing the effectiveness of my video content.”
EP: Sure. Bare minimum: Click through rates, conversion rates. Do you drive people back to the website? If you’ve got video content that doesn’t have a call to action, that doesn’t have a direct click in it–you’re really going to struggle to know how important and how useful that video is for your site and for your brand. So try to have some kind of call to action, a custom landing page if you can’t get a click into it. The other thing to look at it, if you have the capability, is to measure video as a component of the engagement that a visitor has with you on an overall basis. Do people who watch video have a higher level of engagement? Are they more likely to come back to the website? Or more likely to come back with a greater recency–a greater frequency to the website? How does that video interaction change the relationship you have? Should deepen it. Should deepen it, right? But, we saw a presentation today that said that the use of video at the Google website optimizer site actually decreased the likelihood of conversion. So you have to get in and you have to measure that, does video drive conversion? Does video drive engagement? I think those are the two critical measures.
XC: And in your experience as a web analyst and all the consulting work you’ve done for some of the top firms in the US, can you point us to some examples of people that have successfully measured video, and–or tools that do a particularly good job at doing that?
EP: Yeah. Do you mind if I use a European example?
XC: Sure
EP: Is that okay? I ask that, because actually, I did a white paper earlier this year with a company called Nedstat, out of the Netherlands and across Europe. Nedstat has actually, surprisingly good video measurement capabilities with their java script integration. They have both the ability to measure the video on your site, but also distribute the video through YouTube and other formats and other technologies. They’ve got a client, Fabchannel. Fabchannel is bringing concert video and music videos to the masses. Fabchannel was able to use Nedstat’s technology to actually get a revenue sharing deal with Universal, and were really very successful with this because of their ability to measure online video. So, if you have a Nedstat, or perhaps if you have a Liveclicker, some type of technology that lets you understand what’s being watched and where is it being watched? What are those actions that people are taking after they watch that video? That’s really what you need to have.
XC: So actually brings up an interesting point here which is, the video content doesn’t necessarily reside on the original website. Often times, that content is going to be served on a blog or on youtube or somewhere else. How do you go about measuring video outside of your site and creating a wholistic view of the effectiveness of your computer program?
EP: There are a lot of different strategies. I think the reason that we’re seeing companies like Liveclicker emerge, Visible Measures, and other technologies out there means that it’s a problem that has yet to be solved. If you’ve got a flashbased video player device, you obviously have the opportunity to use action script and imbed the action script that says, “I am here, and I am playing, and I’m going to report that back to you.” But It really depends on the medium that people are playing in. If somebody downloads a video to an Iphone, you simply might not know, right? So there’s going to be instances where you can know directly because it’s on your own site. You can know indirectly, because it’s in a measurable situation some place else. Then, there are going to be those gaps of your experience.
XC: Thank you very much for your time, Eric. I appreciate it.
EP: Absolutely. It’s good to talk to you again.
ShopNBC’s Video Commerce Endeavor Is Inspiring
When Justin Foster from the Video Commerce Consortium talked about ShopNBC’s video commerce experiments at Streaming Media West last fall, many of us were impressed by the vision and commitment from a company that’s been competing for years against the Home Shopping Network and QVC, but somewhat trailing behind. True, HSN and QVC still retain the lead in terms for marketshare and brand awareness, but ShopNBC.tv has taken a clear lead in the nascent video commerce space with a site that’s designed as an entirely new channel.
It’s not hard to find ShopNBC.tv. Personally, I’m seeing the ads popping all over the place on the internet, like this prominent and wide banner on WebWorkerDaily, one of my favorite blogs.
The site itself has been carefully built as a new destination site, using Flash as the presentation layer. After landing on it, you are immediately taken into the video experience, since it’s streaming the TV content live, without needing to install or activate anything. Yes my friends, the homepage is boldly featuring live video content, which is sort of a powerful statement: this is video, this is ShopNBC.tv.
The navigation on the site is innovative too. Unlike many ecommerce destinations nowadays, which feature countless links to site sections, departments, brands, etc, ShopNBC.tv is betting on a simplified shopping experience with simple yet intuitive rollover menus that allow you to shop by category, brand or host. The search is also elegantly designed and consistent with other elements on this page. Also impressive the fact that the video never stops playing, all navigational content is overlayed right on the page without any interruption.
Interesting also what happens when the user is ready to buy a product - as the click button is redirecting the user to the ultra-elaborate ShopNBC.com, and the most seamless fashion.
On the critical side, the biggest concern would be the extensive use of Flash, which limits SEO visibility and linking (everything happens under the same URL). Another limitation, which I am sure will be overcome soon, is the lack of social media features which would enable sharing across blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.Nevertheless, what an amazing shopping experience. ShopNBC.tv will no doubt be the benchmark for many video retailers moving forward:
1. ShopNBC.tv was designed as a new destination site, with its own identity and user experience.
2. ShopNBC.tv is a true video shopping site. Video is the center of the shopping experience, and ShopNBC.tv doesn’t make any excuses about it.
3. ShopNBC.tv is the innovator to follow. We are not aware of any similar project in the industry that marries video and commerce so well.
How is Amazon Selling you the Kindle? (Hint: starts with a “V”)
Like Apple, Amazon is aggressively spreading video across its product pages to pump up conversions and educate its users for its top selling product: the Kindle. eRetailers take note.
Even in this economy, the Kindle is going to be the hot Christmas gift for many Americans this year. It’s been predicted that Amazon will sell over a million Kindles before 2009, making this new toy one of the most successful new electronics product launches since the iPod. A billion dollar opportunity, according to some.
Make no mistake about it - the Kindle is a big opportunity for Amazon.com and naturally, the web experience team must have invested countless dollars on the product page to make sure it converts. And — oh what a surprise — a video of the Kindle is taking a prominent location on the product detail page.
This is a major shift from traditional product detail pages, where traditionally, the left side of the product page is occupied by static images, and sometimes a 3D view of the product. Confident that the video is more persuasive, Amazon chose to replace the classic images and feature the video instead, a bold move I’m sure has been validated with rigorous A/B testing.
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There is a lot more - I was particularly impressed with these features which I think are terribly missing from many video retailers that I come across: - The ability to share the video - The subtle use of music in the video - The clever use of captioning to stress key selling points - A clear call the action at the end, with an HTTP link - User review scores and other important link right underneath the video in support of the purchasing decisionI get a sense that this type of product presentation will be copied over and over again in the next few years. After all, Amazon.com has pioneered important eCommerce innovations in the past and seems to always be one step ahead of the competition.This is exciting, to say the least. |
Full video: Video Commerce - Selling online with Video at Streaming Media West
StreamingMedia.com just published the entire Streaming Media West 2008 conference content, including the session on Video Commerce, with participants from the Video Commerce Consortium, drugstore.com and eBags.com.
After the conference I also conducted a number of interviews that will be available on VideoRetailer.org shortly.
YouTube entering the Video Commerce era
YouTube has unveiled some ambitious plans to further monetize their massive user base by contextually inserting commerce links on their video pages. Amazon and Apple are early partners, with more to follow on the gaming, music and movie distribution verticals. What does this mean for the nascent video commerce space?
1. YouTube is serious about video commerce. Reading off the original blog post “I clicked to buy and I liked it”
Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.
This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.
We can read “this is the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube”. This shows that YouTube is committed to this project and hopes to create a new business line that will nicely complement their current ad revenue streams.
2. YouTube is starting with digital products. What next? Partnering with Amazon and Apple makes a ton of sense because these types of products are most directly related to the masses of content you see on YouTube. Think songs, movies, games, software products, and other soft products that are just the perfect fit right now. However, with so many hard products currently been marketed on YouTube (anything from shoes, to musical instruments, to electric cables, to cars, etc), I am convinced YouTube is also thinking longer term about how they can get a piece of the e-commerce action and deliver the equivalent of the eBay stores to their users. In other words, I predict that within the next 3 years YouTube will provide merchant tools for small and medium sized businesses to sell their products online using video.
3. Another big jab at eBay. Google has been slowly gaining on eBay and it’s not a coincidence to see Amazon as one early partner in this initiative. It is all too clear that YouTube and Google are trying to lure merchants from eBay and deliver a compelling package that includes video, and I’m sure a payment system (Google checkout) down the road.
4. A fantastic boost for video commerce. By entering the space so early and with so much commitment, YouTube and Google are validating the video commerce space in a big way. Expect video adoption to accelerate in the retail space and benefit from this new momentum.
Video “mandatory going forward” says Alison Jeske from drugstore.com
Alison van Diggelen from Womens’ Radio did an interesting interview of Alison Jeske, Director of product management at drugstore.com about e-commerce and video, amongst other things. The full podcast, which is part of a the “Fresh Dialogues” series is about 6min 30secs, here are some excerpts:
From Fresh Dialogues by Alison van Diggelen -
Alison van Diggelen: What is it about online video that’s making it so attractive these days? […] Can you expand a little bit on that and the kind of feedback you are getting from your customers?
Alison Jeske from drugstore.com: Definitely when people see products in action they get very excited about it. In the prestige beauty world we get to see exciting new designers like Vena Cava showcased in fashion week, we get to see Oscar Blandi doing “How can I get that second day hair look”, we have Tina Turnbow (our fabulous make-up artist that we work with) showing people how to take a day look to a night look. Those things on the prestige beauty site get our customers really excited. On the drugstore.com side, it’s very new for us. We have just been introducing some funnier videos showcasing toys and games for the holiday, so we’re definitely getting some wordings and interesting feedback from our customers on the drugstore.com side.
AVD: So you’re getting a lot of feedback from your customers?
AJ: It’s early launch, early indications are real positive but on the drugstore.com we’ve had videos for about 2 weeks now, and it’s still real early. We’re measuring impressions we’re getting from the customers and definitely some of the feedback. It’s early to tell on order impact and conversion but it looks promising.
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AVD:That’s very exciting. Can you give an idea for how long these video clips are? Are we talking like 30 seconds, or longer than that? AJ: Typically longer than that. We try to keep our clips to around 1 to 2 minutes but some of the ones we have from Fashion Week on our Beauty.com site can go between 3 and 4 minutes. You want it to be interesting enough to tell someone a story but not too long to where we lose people. So we try to balance that and that’s something we’re testing. |
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AVD: Do you feel you’re really on the cutting-edge of this, taking videos to the market?
AJ: I think we’re definitely in the early adopters – I think there is a lot of people doing it really well out there – eBags is a great example, REI is doing video. The real mavericks in this that have doing it for quite a while are QVC and the Home Shopping Network , they really kind of started translating their TV shows into the different medium. We’re excited to see where this can take us.
AVD: What are your expectations for this? Do you see being your main focus getting video streaming online?
AJ: We see this as mandatory going forward. Customers are demanding it, and we want to offer all the different ways to help a customer make a choice about a product that they want. We see this as a requirement to stay in the game.
AVD: What key message are you bringing today to the Video Commerce panel (you have a panel of four talking about the big picture)?
AJ: I think some of the key messages are that we still need to measure success. We’re excited about this opportunity but we still have to measure, and we’re still near the early stages. The other thing about video is that it’s that next evolution of going from product reviews where customers can describe right how they feel about a certain product and why they like it. Video brings reviews up to another level where we’re getting to the next evolution in the product partisan life-cycle.
Read more and listen to the podcast…
Video Commerce presentation at Streaming Media West
These are the slides that can be download from the Streaming Media West panel, “Video Commerce: Selling Online with Video”. The panel took place September 24th 2008. Thanks to Dan Rayburn for organizing this great event.
Here is the transcript -Slide 1: Justin Foster, Founder, Video Commerce Consortium Alison Jeske, Director Product Management, drugstore.com Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, Ebags.com Xavier Casanova, Founder & CEO, Liveclicker
Slide 2: Video Commerce ShopNBC.tv launches Social Marketing Friendster founded Search Engine Marketing - CPC Overture first $100M revenue Email Marketing - CPM Digital Impact first email Affiliate marketing - CPA Commission Junction formed Banner advertising - CPM DoubleClick - first banner open to all first visitor bankrupt first profit founded $1M web sales Will It Blend video IPO viewed 100M times eCom sales 1% eCom sales 4.2% of total retail of retail 1994 1996 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
Slide 3: “Will It Blend” over ~100MM views and counting
Slide 4: Self-Produced Videos: build credibility, add value, humanize the experience
Slide 5: Acquire content from customers Build a trust relationship
Slide 6: Q: What is preventing Don’t know where to start you from starting out Lack of knowledge with video commerce Unproven ROI Lack of resources or expanding your Lack of industry case studies current video No executive buy-in commerce initiatives? None of the above Lack of interest Poor ROI High production costs Goes against the culture or brand 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% Source: Video Commerce Consortium Survey. July 7, 2008
Slide 8: Alison Jeske drugstore.com, inc. With a decade of experience in (NASDAQ:DSCM) is a eCommerce, Alison Jeske has leading online retailer of health, worked in customer acquisition, beauty, vision and pharmacy retention and customer service products. Our portfolio of brands aspects for online retailers. include: drugstore.com™, Alison is currently Director of Beauty.com™ and Product Management for VisionDirect.com™. All are drugstore.com, inc., where she accessible from is responsible for defining site http://www.drugstore.com and strategy, and implementing new provide a convenient, private, site features to deliver an and informative shopping exceptional personalized experience while offering a wide shopping experience. assortment of more than 30,000 Prior to joining drugstore.com products at competitive prices. Jeske was a senior member of the eCommerce team at Cingular and AT&T Wireless.
Slide 9: Past : Launch of new Beauty.com site in November 2007 – included video ▪ Video library (self-produced and vendor videos) ▪ Brand boutique videos (e.g. Jonathan) ▪ Objectives: - Increase basket size - Increase time on site - Provide enhanced shopping experience for prestige beauty customers ▪ What did we achieve? Basket size and time on site difficult to directly correlate to video viewing (new features also launched w/ new site) Positive feedback from customers 9
Slide 10: Pop up window displays video
Slide 11: Present: New tools and expansion of video into drugstore.com ▪ Partnered with Liveclicker to provide rich tools for driving that intersection of video and commerce ▪ Launched Beauty.com w/ Liveclicker in July ▪ Launched drugstore.com in September ▪ Monitoring SEO benefits ▪ Building out a video library ▪ Securing content from vendors ▪ Adding video into our product setup procedures ▪ Measure, measure, measure – analyze!
Slide 12: Liveclicker tool provides many features: - ’Buy’ just one click away - Product links in video - Sharing - Rating of videos - Comments - Access to related videos/whole library - SEO benefits - Push to YouTube, Twitter, Google Video
Slide 13: Over 30 videos on Beauty.com Still early to determine the basket (order value) impacts
Slide 14: Other exciting metrics – newest video with a 94% continue to watch past 10 sec mark; 42.5% watch whole video
Slide 16: Future: - Broaden access to video throughout the site (product details pages; tutorials on new site features) - Develop in-house videos (videos for our “brand”) - Facility for customers to upload video - Continue to monitor and analyze results (orders!)
Slide 18: Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO Ebags.com >$100MM 2007 revenues Growing 25%+ annually Launched video in early 2008 - Initial pilot on video site - Later rollout to brand and product pages on Ebags.com
Slide 19: Put existing assets to use The most engaging medium for selling Provide a richer customer experience Drive new traffic through video SEO
Slide 20: Leverage supplier content Access professional quality assets; low cost
Slide 21: Group A – No Video Group B – With Video # Product pages 25,000 25,000 served Conversion rate 6.63% 10.00% (clicked play button) Conversion rate 6.63% 15.84%(watched entire video) Conversion rate 50.1% increase N/A (clicked play button) Conversion rate N/A 138.9% increase (watched entire video)
Slide 22: Launched in 2008 “ Conversion rates increased. Prominent SEO placement Plus, we quickly validated the SEO pilot.” - Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, eBags.com
Slide 23: Future: - Continue producing video assets - More experimentation testing “demonstration” vs. “promotional” - Lean on suppliers and customers for new video content
Slide 25: Largest and fastest-growing consortium of interactive marketers seeking to learn about and advance the use of video in e-commerce www.video-commerce.org
Slide 26: Justin Foster, Founder, Video Commerce Consortium Alison Jeske, Director Product Marketing, drugstore.com Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, Ebags.com Xavier Casanova, Founder & CEO, Liveclicker