The truth about videos on your website
Videos are perceived to be high impact, as they can add dramatic footage, combined with a clever production trickery to enhance visitor’s experience. Videos can create both visual and audio stimulus, in the hope of creating desire for the product or service promoted by the website.
If a picture paints a thousand words, then a video should write a book!
Indeed a well-produced video can do wonders for promotion of hotels, restaurants, holidays, activities, training, and many other products, but how effective are they on a website?.
Over the last few years there has been a big push by media companies to persuade website owners to deploy videos. The actual impact of videos is still a hotly debated subject, and there is little or no independent studies to prove or disprove the hypothesis of higher engagement that video supporters claim.
Here we try to set out a case with data from the websites we manage, so our findings are data driven rather than dogma driven, and we let you decide if videos are for you.
What is Engagement?
Web designers and SEO practitioners talk about engagement, but let’s see what that actually means. There are a number of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that define, measure, and highlight engagement. These include:
Bounce Rate
This is very important as it can directly impact your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) position. Bounce rate is when a visitor lands on your first page directly from a search engine (not necessarily your homepage), but leaves without navigating to any other page (hence the bounce). A high % of bounce rate sets the alarm bells ringing at Google, which could result in your website being pushed down the SERP as it is perceived to be of “low in relevance”.
Exit Rate
Not to be confused with Bounce Rate, Exit Rate is the % of visitors that exit your website after visiting a specific page but excluding any Bounce Rate exits. The concept being the Average Exit rate sets the benchmark for your website, and you should then pay attention to pages that fall outside of your Average.
Time-on-Site
This is the total time a visitor spends on your website. There is really no benchmark that you should aim for, except that there are trends within each sector or industry. So you need to compare your website’s Time-on-Site, with others in your sector, as comparing it to unrelated industry is like comparing apples and pears. However, the length of Time-on-Site is not necessarily good or bad, as it depends on how well thought-out your website is, and how quickly visitors can navigate to the information they are looking for.
Number of Pages
The average number of pages visited is another factor, with the theory being the more pages people visit the more “Engaged” they are with your website. However, there is a flaw in this assumption, just as your Time-on-Site stats! If your website is well planned, then the logic says visitors should find information they need quickly with minimum number of clicks. In this context, number of clicks is usually the same as number of pages, which means concept of Good Design determines Visitors should get to the information they need with the least number of clicks (or number of pages).
You can see the difficulty of measuring engagement when you only use this data in isolation without context. If visitors are going to lots of pages, then may be you are not presenting your information clearly.
However, going back to sectors, let us suppose you are an Estate Agent (Real Estate for our US readers). One can rightly assume you want the visitors to see as many properties as possible before contacting you. This means high number of pages is a good thing. On the other hand, high number of pages for a firm of Lawyers is not a good thing, as visitors should know exactly the service they require from a lawyer, without having to go through page after page after page.
Conventional wisdom determines that these 4 KPIs define your website engagement. However, be careful as Engagement does not mean Conversion! You can have a highly engaged visitors who do not buy anything (ouch)!
Impact of Videos on engagement
To make some sense of the impact of videos, we turned to the data from websites that we monitor. We found some very interesting results.
Firstly, the average length of video on these websites were around 4 minutes, which is about as long as you would want any promotional video to last.
Secondly, the impact on KPIs were not what we were expecting from all the hype:
Bounce Rate
No significant change recorded (we consider any change significant if it exceeds 10% up or down). In fact we have managed to reduce the bounce rates more successfully by reviewing the navigation keys, content order, etc. Inserting videos appear to have no, or little impact on this aspect.
Exit Rate
No significant change here in majority of sites. Whilst video extended the “Time-on-Page” (not to be confused by Time-on-Site), it did not significantly change the exit rate. This means introducing video to a page engaged the visitors for longer, but did not make them take “Action” or view more pages.
Time-on-Site
In majority of cases (over 90% of sites), the average time-on-site was less than the average video length. This was irrespective of the website sector, and surprisingly no signifcant change was detected in the Hospitality and Real Estate. Hospitality and Real Estate sectors are the biggest fans of Videos! If the average Time-on-Site is less than the average video length, we must conclude that most visitors do not watch the video, or at least do not watch the video in full.
Number of Pages
In 85% of cases, there was no significant change in the number of pages visited. In fact the changes were mostly downwards, meaning visitors visited less number of pages. We could argue that introduction of a video gave visitors enough information, which meant they did not need to visit more pages, but that does not really do much for the “Engagement” or “Conversion”.
Who really watches videos?
Notwithstanding speciality websites such as YouTube, Netflix, etc. which are for streaming and video services, majority of commercial videos are produced for 3 main sectors
- Hospitality
- Real Estate
- Education/Training
Interestingly, anecdotal evidence from customers indicates that most videos in both Hospitality and Real Estate are watched “Post Purchase”. The reasons vary from “Showing friends where they were going on holiday” to “Sharing information about their purchase” (Real Estate). It appears video helps “Affirmation” post-purchase rather than determine or encourage action.
Conclusion
We did say we leave it to you to decide. The data is self-explanatory but like all statistics you can take away what you wish from it. Anecdotally, the benefit of videos appears to be the best cure for “Post-Purchase Syndrome” and great for affirmation, but the jury is still out on this one (at least in our office!).
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