I was listening to an interesting talk about video and podcast optimisation yesterday at the search engine strategies conference in London.
The talk had included useful, practical tips on producing and optimising video and podcast content which I’m looking forward to suggesting to clients.
The problem was that although I personally wanted to delve into the world of podcasts / videos etc, I know that I need to base any recommendation on sound business principles and so I asked a question at the end of the session asking the speakers if they could tell me about the business benefits of using and optimising this format.
Amanda could only point me to the case study that she’d used previously in her presentation and said that she had been using that example for over a year now and couldn’t find any other examples of these formats positively affecting business.
This seemed extraordinary to me that the whole video / podcast industry doesn’t have any solid examples of how it’s affected hard business metrics on websites as it seems to me to be obvious that they would in certain cases.
We’re launching an e-commerce site soon that may have videos incorporated into some of their technical products at a later date and so I plan to use this site as a guinea pig to test the effectiveness of video demonstrations on conversions by exposing 50% of users to the video and 50% to the same page without the video and then measuring basket size, conversion rate, visitor value etc after around 1,000 visitors.
I believe there are also ‘soft’ benefits to having videos /podcasts on your website that may not show in any obvious way such as:
- Greater trust from the visitor
- Brand awareness and perception
- ‘viral’ forwarding of videos to friends
- More websites wanting to link to the video
Posted on February 19, 2009
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