VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Why I don’t buy into the YouTube cannibalization theory for product videos

Many retailers hope to significantly boost their product page PageRank by adding video to it - betting on the fact that Google favors pages with video embedded in their search algorithm. I have seen anecdotal evidence that it is indeed true - although no one has published a repeatable formula yet, SEO after all is more art than science.

Another common practice for retailers and manufacturers is to publish their videos to YouTube. If you ask around what is driving these marketers to share on YouTube, you’ll likely hear that a) YouTube is the second most popular search engine, b) It’s potentially a lot of traffic, and c) it doesn’t cost anything (free advertising).

On the flip side I have been hearing more and more recently about “product page SEO concerns” - when a video is published to both the product page, and to YouTube. The argument usually goes like this - “I’ve read somewhere that Google favors video by inflating PageRank, resulting in up to a 50x boost in search engine visibility” (whatever that means). “So if I put my video on YouTube, the risk of the YouTube outranking my own product page is high - bumping my position on the SERP down. That’s why we stopped pushing videos to YouTube”.

The cannibalization story is certainly believable and the explanation makes sense if indeed Google has some bias to artificially inflate the PageRank of pages with video. At the same time, I have observed that the most successful retailers with video usually have a very
aggressive YouTube strategy, where every piece of content is pushed to YouTube, without evidence of SEO cannibalization. In fact, the perception among these successful retailers is that YouTube provided an extra SEO boost - and here is why.

1) YouTube is a massive backlink magnet, because so many sites, blogs, articles point it. Its PageRank is high - but more important, since YouTube appends any outbound link with rel=”nofollow”, the PageRank credit of a YouTube page is only spread across other YouTube pages. It’s like an echo chamber.

2) If a YouTube page is linked from a site with a high PageRank, it’ll benefit not only that page, but any related videos that are linked from it. In other words, the related videos on YouTube get a “free PageRank credit”.

3) As a retailer, if your videos appear as related to popular videos, they might start showing high on a SERP because their PageRank is high.

4) High PageRank means more visibility on Google, which may result in third part sites finding and linking to the retail site, sometimes directly to the product page.

With this hypothesis there isn’t a cannibalization risk, because when the retailer pushes a product video to YouTube it is not at the expense of the product page, rather, it earns free credit from YouTube. Perhaps a more appropriate term to understand what is really happening would be “incremental free SEO” from YouTube.

In essence publishing e-commerce videos to YouTube in addition to the adequate product page is something I would consider a must. Important also would be to properly tag the video in YouTube and append a good description, since the key to success is to appear as often as possible as a related video in YouTube.

Refreshing key factors of video SEO strategy

I have just disconnected from my first live webinar on video SEO strategy, organized by ReelSEO, Truveo and Ooyala. The experience itself was good, I connected through a site called Go2Webinar to follow the presentation; I started Skype, dialed a number and entered my personal code. Image was ok, sound was fine. So that’s for the webinar experience.

The content itself was a bit commercial (especially the Ooyala part) but nevertheless there were interesting points worth sharing with you:

1. Video search engines and general search engines work differently.

2. 85% of all video search traffic goes through YouTube. So if you like it or not, think if you can affort not to be there. If you compete there, consider that YouTube values the following ranking factors:

• Views, ratings, shares, comments, suscribers, embeds and inbound links. The community factor counts, so make sure you also suscribe to other relevant users.
• Consider manual upload (vs. API upload) because it allows you to take full advantage of the text fields.

3. Create optimized video landing pages: Make sure every video has its own page and above all its own URL.

4. Avoid Javascript, it won’t get indexed.

5. Minimal page load times are super important for the user experience.

6. Spend time to optimize meta data, that’s the text that describes the content of your video: title, general description, tags, brand name, close captures or even an entire transcription of the video content.

7. Try to get videos into search engines, don’t wait for them to crawl for your content. Reel SEO recommends MRSS feeds and XML sitemaps.

8. Choose eye-catching and relevant thumbnails: the right thumbnail is important; make sure you include a relevant and appropriate representation of your video content. They are key to trigger the “click-to-play”.

Most watched at YouTube in 2009: Evian Roller Babies in the top 5 list!

Only 10 more days to go and 2009 will be history: high time for reviews and previews. Let’s start these last 2 weeks of the year with an interesting review. The YouTube Blog has published this year’s Most Watched and Most Seached For worldwide, and here are the results:

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle - Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

All top 5 ranking videos are clearly entertainment content, that’s what people come to watch for at YouTube, they look for short, fun to watch clips that have natural viral potential. Which leads us to the second thing people love to do with these videos: they love to share the stuff they like.

And here is the interesting news: Even if pure e-commerce contents, company videos or product demos do not show up in the best of 2009 ranking, YouTube is still the best media platform to do online video marketing… if you only know how to do it.

There are 2 clips with a commercial character and a clear online strategy that made it into the 2009 top 5 list: The New Moon movie trailer and the crazy dancing babies of Evian, part of the Evian online campaign “Live Young” . The French mineral water brand’s YouTube channel has some 14,000 subscribers, their international version of the “Rapper’s Delight” video counts some 6,800 comments and almost 20,000 users have ranked the clip. Those numbers are not too bad in terms of user engagement for a low involvement product like bottled water. And if we take the FMCG sector, Roller Babies is this year’s best global online branding campaign on YouTube and I think other FMCG brands can draw the following lessons:

1. If YouTube is your single most important distributing platform, content has to be highly entertaining. That’s what people look for.

2. The YouTube interface is highly customizable - take advantage of it and make your branded content recognizable so it stands out form the rest.

3. If you are able to produce a good viral (some say that starts at 150,000 views), make sure all the rest of your content is integrated naturally into the YouTube environment; see for example, the series of interviews with Paul Smith, the design guru who conceived the limited edition bottle for Evian.

For the future of video marketing and video-based e-commerce it would be interesting and useful if YouTube also openly published metrics on the traffic generated from YouTube to Evian’s other sites. It would provide all online marketers with a great tool to start investing more into video branding and communication. Let’s see what 2010 holds…

When will YouTube be a transactional video shopping site?

This week, eMarketer cites a study by InternetRetailer which reveales that already 41.4% of all Top 500 online retailers are present on YouTube. That’s the second most used social site after Facebook where more than 57% of retailers are trying to do business.

So far social networking sites have been seen by many retailers as part of a multiple-points-of-entry strategy to the e-commerce site. That’s where we wanted to attract the traffic to because that’s where the user is less distracted by other offers. At least, that used to be the common belief. But the article points out an interesting fact that will make us rethink this “single- point-of transaction” strategy” again, especially for those retailers using video for selling.

Shopping is (and always was) a social act, so it’s common sense to let people shop among their friends at their favourite social networking sites.  That’s why forward-thinking retailers want to bring their Web stores to the environments where their customers like to spend time. As a result, almost three-quarters of the merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on at least one of the major social networks or social shopping sites.

I think in the future we will have to think much harder about how to integrate the transaction into the video content or player in order to reduce clicks and make online shopping an even better user experience - even if that means that customers don’t drop by our shopping site. Let’s see how long it takes YouTube and other social network and video sharing sites to become transactional.

Video finally integrates with AdWords and YouTube becomes e-commerce enabled.

Last week, Google announced the international (Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands) roll-out of the integration of YouTube Promoted Videos with Google’s AdWords platform. Any AdWords advertiser who has video content can now start promoting videos directly from the AdWords UI, creating a “One-stop-shop” for marketers, as Google says in its blog.

This is good news for small and medium sized businesses with video content to promote their services, especially if they have been using AdWords sucessfully to drive traffic to their site already.   It will also help to make content stand out in a place that many e-marketers still call “too crowded”.  It’s no no wonder, - 20 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute!

For all the YouTube skeptics, let’s not forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine with 107 Million unique visitors and an average of 65 views per visitor each month. If you have product videos you may very well want to consider how to leverage your content by using all e-commerce tools YouTube now offers.

When does branded web.tv make strategic sense?

Video has become part of corporate Internet content strategies and online marketers who don’t pay attention to that, are wholeheartedly ignoring YouTube as the second most important search engine behind Google. “To YouTube” is “to Google” and for brands there is no way to get around that. Having said that, there are many different strategies and ways to use video; a YouTube channel to communicate with your clients is just one of many formulas.

One option - and without any doubt the most challenging in terms of strategy, implementation and maintenance - is to set up a branded web tv. In the last 12 months we have seen how difficult it can be to keep a branded web tv alive. Bud.tv (Budweiser Beer) closed. “Jen and Barb mom life” , originally sponsored by Kraft Food, had to downsize its activities drastically and instead of talking about food and health they now talk about connected living as Kraft Food dropped out and Verizon Wireless came in as a new sponsor.

But let’s look at some branded web TV success stories: take Mercedes Benz TV, a Web TV platform of the German carmaker with films and stories about cars, motorsport, lifestyle and music. The idea is simple: using entertaining contents to present the innovative drive of the brand.

Or enter at Vacacions Canada TV, a great example of how to sell online while entertaining the audience / users. The site is based on video content and they way it’s done seems so natural. All that Canada has to offer as a vacation destination is intelligently packed into short episodes which relate to holiday offers that can be booked online through the site. All video content can be e-mailed, shared, embedded and downloaded.

On the other hand there are example of brands like Nestlé Spain that have launched their idea of web.tv. But unfortunately there is nothing “webby” about the site’s value proposition. But let’s be fair: At least, Nestlé Spain at least calls the thing by its real name: “Nestlé online television”. Take a quick look and you will see what I mean. This is TV content (including Nestlé’s outdated TV spots) made available online without any obvious relation to strategic marketing objectives.

So, when does branded web tv = entertainment that helps to persue a specific online marketing strategy, make sense in the first place? In my opinion, branded web tv can be a powerful marketing tool…

1. … if you are able to produce and offer useful and unique contents that are not available elsewhere. Sometimes it feels that brands think of web tv as a channel to recycle their tv spots.

2. … if the site is part of a bigger online strategy and related to branding, converting and ultimately selling you product or service.

3. … if you can create community around the contents and target it to o users / customers with specific needs and/or interests.

4. … if you provide an interface / player that allows the user to truely interact with the content.

5. … if you are aware of the resources necessary to maintain the site alive and know how to distribute the content on the web. Those are costly projects which need to produce ROI at some stage, through cross-selling with other site of the brand or affiliated sites.

Video Commerce Chronicles #2: YouTube’s Click-To-Buy Updates

Discussing the latest Click-To-Buy announcement from YouTube, and covering three points:

1. More validation for video commerce
2. Link overlays are the future
3. More interesting, how is YouTube going to avoid upsetting retailers that are already uploading product videos but may see their competitors’ ad overlays in YouTube?

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.

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 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