As a follow up to the webinar Liveclicker presented this past Wednesday called Top 10 Video Commerce Lessons From 2011, I wanted to share an overview of the lessons.

Enjoy!

The data presented was taken from a 1,500 video sample across 25 consumer brand & IR Top 500 retailers among the Liveclicker client base where revenue data was available.  A 7,500 video sample was used for video statistics where revenue was not a factor in the calculations.  The videos were analyzed by source, duration, conversion rate, and share rate.

Top 10 Video Commerce Lessons From 2011

1. Create your own videos. We found 71% of the top converting videos were created by the site where the product was sold.  The lesson: no one can describe your brand or product story better than the merchant or brand selling the product.  When retailers reuse stock content from their vendors, not only does that content fail to differentiate the retailer from competitors, but it also has an impact on conversion rates.

Crutchfield is a good example of a retailer that creates its own videos.  The video below shows a product that is sold in a lot of different places around the web, but Crutchfield was able to differentiate its brand by providing a Crutchfield expert and incorporating interactive shopping elements in the video.

2. Shorter videos sell better. As a general best practice, it is best to keep videos short.  On average, shorter videos from our sample converted higher than longer videos. The highest converting group of videos were less than thirty seconds. Of course, all products are different and some products will warrant longer videos. Still, the trend is clear: keep your videos as short as you can to get the point across and persuade the shopper to buy.

3.  Share and be shared. Although humorous and niche product videos tended to get shared the most, 48% of all shared videos were plain vanilla product videos.  Though product videos might not get shared the most in aggregate, the share intent is likely different for shoppers that share these videos. For example, shoppers could share product videos in order to get feedback from friends to seek advice on whether or not to buy the product.

4. Go mobile. Adobe’s announcement this November that they would no longer support the development of a Flash player in mobile devices following Flash release 11.1 showed that there is now growing standardization and support behind HTML5 video.  With the growing adoption of HMTL5-enabled devices like iPads and smartphones, it is now more important than ever to have mobile video support.  93% of our webinar audience agreed that mobile will play an even more important role in video commerce in 2012.

5. Use video sitemaps. When you submit Google video sitemaps, your videos become indexed by Google which enables your video thumbnails to display in search results for video SEO purposes. To further increase video SEO, Liveclicker provides a video SEO gallery for every client where each video is given its own individual URL along with support for video transcripts, detailed video descriptions, and other SEO-friendly video metadata.

6. Page placement is key. Leverage video content to its fullest potential by giving it optimal page placement on product pages.  The type of page placement used by the retailer Avenue (shown below) has been demonstrated to drive 25-45% of all page visitors to play the video. With video viewers across the Liveclicker client base converting at 20% – 25% more often than non-viewers, every incremental viewer represents a new revenue opportunity.

7. Video email – Look beyond the click. The click-through metric for video in email campaigns has started to become less of a factor for the success of a campaign.  Even if the click-through rate does not take a significant jump versus campaigns without video, there are recent campaigns in the last year touting conversion rates of  21-25% higher.  There were even 2 examples where the average order value was 40% higher for an email with a video compared to one with just an inline static image.

8. Use presentation testing. On average, the play rate increased 22% for those retailers using Liveclicker’s automated video presentation testing.  Video A/B split tests on thumbnails are easy to take advantage of since Liveclicker completely automates the process.

Liveclicker's Thumbnail A/B Split Testing Interface

9. Make videos interactive. Liveclicker clients are capitalizing this growing trend with interactive video support capabilities.  Giving shoppers the ability to buy a product, shop related products, read ratings and reviews, and click on interactive links and hotspots all within the video player itself creates a more interactive shopping experience.  Below is a good example showing how Advance Auto Parts uses Liveclicker’s interactive video player directly in Facebook.

10. Know your numbers. For retailers looking to grow their video programs in 2012, here are some key video metrics to know and track in order to evaluate programs properly:

Retailers and brands that have these metrics are better able to put together a business case for growing the footprint of video throughout the organization.

For a fee ROI analysis of your video program by Liveclicker, you can fill out a form here.