As a thank you to people for taking the time out of their busy conference schedules to meet with us, we will be giving out a FREE iPod Shuffle to the first 30 people we meet with.

To set up a meeting with Liveclicker at the show, please choose an open time slot within our calendar below that works best with your conference schedule. If there is not a time below that works with your schedule, please email sales@liveclicker.com to see if we can accommodate you outside of our conference hours.

6. More brands will attempt to scale video production with technology, leading to an overall deepening focus on product videos

Liveclicker Studio

Scaling video production has remained a constant challenge for companies since the beginning of video commerce. Even those companies who are successfully producing a lot of content struggle with automating the production process.  With the release of new technologies in 2012 like the newly developed Liveclicker Studio, companies will be able to quickly create quality product videos using an automated process.   With a solution like Studio, companies will be able to:

• Shorten the time it takes to shoot simple, scalable product videos
• Reduce required resources needed for each video
• Integrate post-production with pre-built video templates, reducing need for manual editing
• Have a direct connection for batch uploading and encoding to a video platform

7.  One top 100 retailer will launch a longer-format ‘branded content’ series as a way to drive long term loyalty & audience

By developing a longer format ‘branded content’ series, at least one major retailer will embrace video as way to integrate their brand into the lives of customers. A good example of a retail brand creating this type of content already is the clothing company, KarmaLoop.  They offer several different shows ranging from a daily video series called “Daily Loop”, which integrates the shopping experience with coverage of the most current trends and styles, to other longer form content shows like, “A Day in The Life”, which follows a day in the life of a celebrity.

8. The number of Top 500 Retailers with at least 100 online videos will double by the end of the year

At present, 116 of the Top 500 Retailers have at least 100 online videos live on their sites.  33% of the Top 500 Retailers have less than 10 videos.  Those companies are just getting started in video commerce, and have huge potential to grow their video library over the year.  For the past three years, the numbers of retailers producing video has grown; this year will prove no exception.

9. Video QR codes aren’t going anywhere

Liveclicker had several clients run video QR code campaigns in 2011.  Most of them were successful, although many of them were done in an experimental capacity.  Key reasons I expect to see the trend continue:

• Video QR allows merchants to deliver a better quality of service and product information in-store
• Growing smartphone ownership & sophistication among catalog and in-store shoppers will grow the user base
• The ability to measure engagement with print campaigns brings new accountability to these campaigns
• The ability to deliver more compelling brand experiences, any time, any where, has proven to be winning formula for brand marketers

10. 2012 is the year of mobile video commerce (again)

You may recall I predicted this trend last year as well.  Looking back on 2011 today, I see the year now as more about the launching of new content with a big focus on product videos, as opposed to one where the primary focus was on mobile video..  Having said, with the growing support of HTML5 video both on mobile devices and in webmail clients, the increased penetration of smartphones throughout the world, and the growth of tablet shopping, I do believe mobile is again the video commerce trend to watch in 2012.

These are all the predictions I have for this year.  Only time will tell if they come true. You can sign up to view the recording of this webinar and download the slide deck on Liveclicker’s webinars page. Registration is also open for Liveclicker’s  next webinar coming up on February 9th: Retail Video Production A to Z.

1. Videos will get shorter

The current median length of a retail video across the Liveclicker client base as of January 1, 2012, is 1:35, and I predict it will progressively get shorter this year.  Why do you ask?  In the recent video commerce research that Liveclicker conducted in over 7,500 retail videos, conversion rates were higher for shorter videos. Videos under 30 seconds in length constituted the top performing group.

Here is one video that is under 30 seconds that performed especially well:

2. Video SEO moves beyond the video sitemap

Early in 2011 before Google released its new Panda algorithm, the main best practice for video SEO was submitting Google video sitemaps in order to obtain high ranking video thumbnails in universal search results.  Post-Panda, page bounce rate has become increasingly important, which in turn makes things like video player load speed and page speed also important in achieving video SEO success.   Here are some more tips for video SEO post-PANDA:

• Video in context is key -- have a spot for relevant transcription copy and/or related product copy on the video page.
• Consider using a Liveclicker Video SEO Gallery and link to it regularly to from blog posts and other main site pages.  Having an individual page for each video with more context in additional to product pages with video can increase video SEO.
• Measurement and tracking is key to maintaining video SEO.  With Liveclicker’s video analytics and video SEO tracking, companies can measure things like PageRank correlation with traffic, search position of pages with video, and phrases used in search that are driving traffic to your video pages.

3. Interactive video changes from “nice to have” to “must have”

Interactive video has the ability to convert Facebook fans and search engine browsers into site shoppers -- without costly PDP redesigns.   By using simple text link overlays, direct hotspots, and “buy now” buttons in-player, retailers can provide more opportunities for in-player video shopping on Facebook, video SEO galleries, or when when embedded on 3rd party sites like blogs.  Below is an example of Advance Auto Parts using Liveclicker’s interactive Facebook video player.

4. HTML5 video takes center stage

With only 24% of the top 500 retailers supporting HTML5 video on their sites, HTML5 video has plenty of room to grow this year. One of reasons we will likely see more HTML5 support among retailers is the continuous  growth of mobile devices that will only play HTML5 video, like the Apple iPad. Also, Adobe announced last November that it will no longer develop a Flash player to support mobile browsers following the release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and Blackberry Playbook, making HTML5 support even more critical for retailers wanting to reach the growing demographic of mobile shoppers.

5. One more major webmail client will launch support of HTML5 video

Last year, Hotmail released support for HTML5 video. This year, I predict another major client will follow suit.  Gmail presently supports YouTube videos “inside” emails (the video shows up at the bottom of the email).  Because the webmail client’s recent redesign embraces more HTML5 components, I predict sometime this year Gmail will release HTML5 support for video email.  Currently, as seen in the chart below, about 37% of mail clients support HTML5 video in email.  Check out Liveclicker’s Video Email Express to find out to how to quickly and easily create video embedded emails, without causing deliverability problems and saving weeks of creative development time.

These are all of my predictions for today.  Look for another post later this week for the final 5 video commerce predictions for 2012.  Or, visit Liveclicker’s webinars page to watch the recorded presentation and download the slide deck.

San Jose, CA – January 17, 2012

Liveclicker, Inc, the leading provider of video commerce solutions for the web’s top brands, today announced record revenue and client acquisition growth in the fiscal year ended Dec 31, 2011. Revenue run rate more than doubled compared to the year prior for the third consecutive year, and brands including Disney, Saks Fifth Avenue, Spanx, Dollar General, Express, TomTom, Eastern Mountain Sports, and L’Oreal joined the company’s growing client roster.
As in prior years, Liveclicker also retained 100% of its existing enterprise clients in 2011. Kevin McNall, Director of Web Design, Development, and Digital Imaging at Brown Shoe Company, noted that

“since we began using Liveclicker, we have noticed that people who watch our videos are purchasing products two to three times more often than those who don’t watch videos on our site. [Liveclicker] takes our ideas and integrates them into their solution, which is fantastic,” he said.

“The market for video commerce continues to grow quickly as more brands rush to meet burgeoning consumer demand for online video,” said Justin Foster, Liveclicker’s Co-Founder and VP of Market Development.

“Commerce sites that are winning with their video strategies understand the need for a complete solution that addresses the four tenets of a successful video commerce program: produce and scale videos that convert, publish and distribute those videos across the web, deliver interactive video experiences, and prove the results with hard data. Liveclicker addresses all of these needs, making it the ideal solution for video commerce in 2012 and beyond.”

Are you are attending Retail’s Big Show in New York this January? If you are, you should meet up with Liveclicker! We will be hosting quick 15 minute video commerce strategy sessions all throughout the conference to discuss video commerce initiatives and offer free strategy advice for what your program can do to achieve greater results.

As a thank you to people for taking the time out of their busy conference schedules to meet with us, we will be giving out a FREE iPod Shuffle to the first 30 people we meet with.

To set up a meeting with Liveclicker at Retail’s Big Show, please choose an open time slot within our calendar below that works best with your conference schedule. If there is not a time below that works with your schedule, please email sales@liveclicker.com to see if we can accommodate you outside of our conference hours.

With the news that the 2011 holiday shopping season is breaking all types of records, it’s safe to say that retailers are spending more and more time thinking about how their customers’ user experiences can help increase sales. Video, in increasingly robust numbers, is becoming a huge part of that user experience. In fact, Liveclicker’s video analytics reported a 72% increase in plays for customers with us from December 2010 to December 2011!

There is a reason that video page placement was featured as one of the top 10 video commerce lessons in our recent webinar, because if done right, you can expect to drive 25-45% more video plays. In this article, I will share 4 examples of Liveclicker clients using unique product page placement to create a positive user experience with video.

Under Armour

Under Armour completed a full site redesign with a particular emphasis on their product pages. Each page is optimized for the wide screen and presents a clean, simple but visually stimulating look. In this example, there are four (4!) separate video call-outs on the right-hand navigation, with each video providing a different type of content (features, technology, and fit). More content, more plays, more interaction, happier customers.

Onlineshoes.com

Onlineshoes.com, always pushing for the best user experience they can provide for their customers, simplified their approach to a video call-out by placing a  “Play Video” button squarely in the user’s immediate field of vision. While their previous call-out was a bigger, fully embedded player, it was below the fold of the page, allowing the user to see it only after scrolling down. This new approach has paid immediate dividends, showing an increase in both overall plays and attention rates in their video analytics reports.

Crutchfield

Crutchfield went the extra mile late in the year, completely revamping their product pages to give equal weight to product images and video. Similar to Onlineshoes, they provide a large, clear video call-to-action in the user’s line of vision. Once clicked, the transition from image to video is seamless, providing the user with a helpful product demo, aiding them in their choice. This approach combined with a timely release has powered Crutchfield to some impressive plays growth over Q4.

Redcats USA

Redcats and their various brands have taken video to new places altogether, showing their footware “in the round”, but without the need for complicated animation. The end user is immediately presented with a clean and simple product image that can also be rotated all the way around using Liveclicker’s 360 degree player to display the product in the most user friendly way possible. By defaulting to this 360 player, Redcats demonstrates one of the most effective call-outs possible.

These are just a few outstanding examples of the imagination our clients are displaying, and the attention they’re paying to their customers’ experiences online. 2012 is looking more and more like the year video becomes the standard rather than the exception.

San Jose, CA – December 19, 2011

Liveclicker, Inc., the leading provider of video commerce solutions for the web’s top brands, today announced the results of the retail industry’s most comprehensive revenue analysis ever performed on e-commerce videos live during the holiday shopping season. From a sample of 7,500 videos across 25 leading e-commerce sites, Liveclicker learned:

• The average retailer saw the number of year-over-year video views increase by 61% in November 2011.
• As of Cyber Monday 2011, the average e-commerce video generated $2,026 in revenue.
• Each video generated an average of $3.74 per play.
• Sub-30 second videos demonstrated the highest conversion rates, with 4.54% of viewers making a purchase immediately after watching. Following the sub-30 second group, videos between 30 seconds and two minutes in length recorded an average of 3.58% of viewers converting. Videos longer than two minutes achieved an average conversion rate of 2.91%.

“With the world’s most extensive collection of retail video analytics, Liveclicker’s clients are uniquely positioned to drive video commerce success,” said Justin Foster, Liveclicker’s Co-Founder and VP Market Development. “The growth of video viewing during the 2011 shopping season, coupled with more compelling revenue data supporting the business case of video in general, bode well for further adoption in 2012.”

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.

“Liveclicker allows us to provide a unique interactive shopping experience to our customers. We have a collaborative relationship; when we come up with new ideas for our video program, they listen and make changes quickly to accommodate what we need…”

What Scott Loves about Liveclicker:

• Liveclicker is an experienced video partner that understands the quickly evolving video commerce industry, and can help marketers manage all the complexities of an enterprise retail video program.
• Liveclicker uniquely offers the ability to create interactive video shopping widgets.
• Liveclicker takes an active interest in the business of our clients offering a true collaborative partnership.

Thanks for the love Scott!  If you would like to learn more about Liveclicker’s Video Commerce Solutions, request a demo today!

View more client testimonials >>

Interested in Vitamin Shoppe’s mobile video program?  Check out our on-demand webinar: Mobile Video Commerce – Bridging The Gap Between Online and Offline. It features mobile video case studies from both Vitamin Shoppe and Brown Shoe Company.

Outlined below are some main takeaways and predictions from Justin’s interview:

• Lifestyle-oriented videos are a huge opportunity to retailers. Although the main focus of retailers are product videos, several speakers and case studies suggested there is big opportunity to evaluate the use of lifestyle video content  to build loyalty and brand awareness.  This type of content can be a tough sell for retailers who are very conversion and transaction oriented, but Justin predicts we will see at least one major brand implementing this type of content next year.
• Video production scalability will get easier. Justin predicts that there will be huge strides in scalibilty over the next year. Some of the solutions that retailers are using now are not exactly what the industry needs and he believes there is some momentum building to address this issue.
• E-commerce video will continue to grow. The Video Commerce Summit attendance is doubling every year.  Video is clearly a part of consumer expectations now, and you can expect to see even more retailers using video next year.  Video is going to be everywhere.

Need some pumpkin pie to finish off this virtual feast?  Join Justin for Liveclicker’s final best practices webinar of the year: Top 10 Video Commerce Lessons from 2011 on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 10:30 AM.

Happy Thanksgiving!