Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

A/B testing - Which option is better?

In my last post I talked about A/B testing ecommerce video performance, and why we’ve opted to automate this process for clients using our platform. The truth is that the only way anyone can truly expect to improve their site’s performance is via a meticulously implemented optimization program, based on consistent execution of A/B testing, for all the variables one can tweak on one’s site.

A/B testing is extra work

The problem with A/B testing is that it requires you to make an extra effort – you need to have two versions (at least) for the site element (text, design, image, button,video, etc.) you want to optimize, and you need to have an effective framework for planning, implementing, and analyzing your test results.

Sadly this additional effort is enough to make the majority of ecommerce site operators decide to give up on the entire exercise.

Is it worth it? You tell us!

Since site owners & designers tend to be protective of their current efforts, and are often less than receptive to the idea they might be able to improve on them, we decided to setup an experiment to enable people to test their intuitions and compare them against verifiable data.
If your up for the challenge take a look at the following nearly identical Biotone body crème videos and try to estimate what effect, if at all, the voice-over had on their sales conversion rates:

So are you ready to make a guess?

If you guessed the voice-over increased conversion rates by 50% (from 3% to 4.5%) you’re spot on.

The problem is that when we conducted a survey, to see whether people’s intuitions were able to predict this result, we discovered the vast majority of those surveyed came nowhere close to guessing the right answer. This isn’t really very surprising, considering that answering the question with any type of credence would require one to be an ecommerce expert with a fair deal of experience in video marketing and the effects of voice overs on conversion rates – not exactly common experience…

Lets Try Again Shall We?

The following two videos are both for the same vendor – an online retailer that specializes in providing golfing goods online. The first video is a production grade video ordered from a professional studio. The second video was created automatically via Treepodia’s automated video solution. All you have to do is guess which video provided a higher conversion rate:

Ready to make your guess?

If you guessed the automated video out-preformed the man-made one by nearly 300% you’re correct. You’re also unique. Not one of our survey respondents guessed the answer to this question correctly. This is precisely what makes A/B testing such a powerful tool:

A/B Testing Provides Answers You Can’t Get Any Other Way

Without A/B testing it’s simply impossible to isolate which elements of a page provide better performance and by how much. Occasionally the results of this type of testing will prove insights that are the exact opposite of what your own gut instinct tells you, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the result you got is based on cold hard data, and is PRECISE & ACTIONABLE.

Are You Doing the Best You Can?

If you’re not implementing A/B testing on your site now you’ll never figure out what exact elements of your site are providing you with the highest value in terms of CVR. You may be doing well for yourself but you have no idea what you might be missing.

We’re Doing the Best We Can For You

In order to guarantee that your Treepodia Smart Video platform is giving you the best bang for your buck we’ve integrated and automated A/B testing platform directly into your system. So, although you might not be aware of it, you can rest assured that your Treepodia Product Videos are constantly being tested for performance with top performers replacing less optimal videos constantly. This is one of the reasons our clients consistently report CVR increases of +35% and above since implementing our system on their ecommerce sites.

Most Etailers Have Poor Decision Making Processes

It never ceases to amaze me how despite the extensive online availability of massively powerful tools for improving conversions and sales, the vast majority of marketers & e-tailers still rely, almost exclusively, on “gut-instinct” (their own, or that of others) as the only system for making the decisions that manage their business. In my humble opinion this may well be the main cause such a vast percentage of online businesses fail, despite the relatively low overhead cost that going online offers when compared to a brick-and-mortar business.

Great Technology is Friendly - it works without forcing YOU to understand it

From my experiences only few online retailers bother to study the statistics of their website traffic closely, and even fewer do so effectively – i.e. know what indicators are the most important for their business and how their day-to-day operations influence them.

This is a particularly sad state of affairs because the ineptitude can’t be traced back to a root cause that makes sense, for example a desire to avoid expenditure on software or resources. Some of the most powerful tools available for gathering statistics and acting on them effectively are available online for FREE.

Are You Optimizing Yet?

One example of an extremely powerful tool, that far too few people are using, is Google’s “Website Optimizer” service, which allows etailers to test how various combinations of changes to their website content will affect conversions, in order to choose the most effective one. Website Optimizer lets etailers choose what parts of a page they’d like to test – headlines, images, design styles, etc., and then runs an online experiment directing a portion of the site’s traffic to each variation in order to determine which content users respond to best.

Why Not?

Over the years I’ve studied this failing rather extensively as it represents what to me is a very intriguing paradox:
On the one hand the very fact a person succeeds at opening a business would seem to indicate a certain level of competence and diligence, however on the other hand that very same person is often unwilling or unable to carry that effort through by providing it with all the opportunities it requires for success. This despite the fact that this person often acknowledges freely their awareness that their ineffectiveness means they’re “Leaving money on the table” and losing their business as a result. The most obvious question to ask would be WHY???

Why Not Indeed…

After spending a fair deal of time pondering this I’ve come to the conclusion that the fault is NOT exclusively that of the entrepreneurs, a degree of blame must be laid at the feet of the developers and engineers that provide these incredible marketing tools.

Most Powerful Online Marketing Tools Are Too Complicated To Use

A well known paradigm of technology development is that all too often engineers develop products without consulting enough, or even at all, with their target audience. At the end of the process they end up with a product that is intuitive and easy enough for THEM to use, but NOT so for anybody else…

I think this may well be the case with many of the marketing tools available online today. Although they’re powerful and effective, and at times even free, they’re engineer-friendly design makes them simply unusable by the vast majority of the population. The fact someone is a great marketer, a driven sales person, and an industrious entrepreneur, is no guarantee that one has the skill sets required to operate a bit of software designed with an engineering audience in mind. Some might say that the exact opposite might be true (think why so few engineers become effective business owners…).

What could be done otherwise

One of the reasons so many people love Apple’s products, despite their technological limitations, poorer features and complete reliance on Apple’s closed marketplace, is because these products don’t require you to learn how to make them work. They simply work for you.

Apple’s products are designed around the core understanding that:

People don’t care about technology. They care about what technology can DO FOR THEM.

Why We’ve Opted For Automation

This truth can be extended just as easily to the world of ecommerce – At the end of the day when presented with the question:

“Do YOU want to increase your revenues by becoming an expert at operating our software, or do you want US to increase your revenues for you?”

9 business owners out of 10 will prefer to simply have their revenues increased (& the 10th is likely to be a “Power User” type with a strong affinity for technology…). This is precisely why we at Treepodia opted to automate as much of our service as possible, and are constantly pursuing new methods for increasing this automation.

We believe wholeheartedly that we serve you better by not burdening you with technobabble you don’t really care about ,and focusing you on what you do care about instead:

Your business results and bottom line revenue.

Now you tell me:
Assuming we GUARANTEE your ROI,
don’t you actually prefer it that way?…

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/firepile/438134633

French Shopping (Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shibuya246)

Although France may have been trounced in the world cup not all the news coming from the land of baguettes and liberty is bad. It turns out that in terms of e-commerce revenues Q1 2010 wasn’t only great for our clients, as we discussed in our last post, it was excellent for online retailers in general, and nowhere more so than in France.

As a recent article in eMarketer quotes, according to FEVAD (Fédération du E-commerce et de la Vente à Distance), Q1 2010 saw a 30% increase in ecommerce sales over Q1 2009, valued at €7.2 billion (or $10 billion).

B2C E-commerce sales growth in France

What is powering this growth?

Much of this overall increase is attributed to the addition of some 16,000 online retail sites. But the growth is more than a matter of more stores, it also applies to overall basket value which was up to a healthy to €93 (or $129).

In addition, another factor is the fact that buying online is becoming more common in France. While the average consumer made 11 online purchases in 2009, already in Q1 2010 the average consumer has made four purchases online (at that rate online purchases would average 16 per year throughout 2010, representing an almost 50% increase over the previous year).

In other words, the French market is experiencing a positive overall trend with the combined factors of more online stores, more purchases made online at a higher value.

French growth set to exceed FEVAD expectations

While growth in the French market was anticipated this year (FEVAD predicted in the 24% range), if the current trend continues the numbers could far surpass what was expected.

While the largest online retailers (eBay, PriceMinister and Le Redoute) still garner the lion’s share of the pie, the overall growth trend is positive news for French online retailers across the board.

This positive trend also means there’s lots of room for ecommerce sites to expand and resume investing in the future of their businesses by updating and modernizing their sites to meet the developing demands of consumers.

Although I’ve often written here about how great our smart Video platform is, how it improves the user experience, increases conversion rates, and generally makes life better for everyone – Every marketing professional knows that in sales, words are only as valuable as the numbers behind them, or in other words:

“The bottom line is only as good as the bottom line”

After you’re done feasting your eyes on the bombshell below you might want to scroll down and check a few figures on how Video is impacting conversion rates for Online Fashion Retailers…

Oh the joys of writing about the Fashion Industry... : ) Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehearttruth/2173468676

Fasion Industry Retailer’s Video Conversion Figures – Q1 2010

As the table and graphs below show, my assertions about the value of video for retailers are well backed by hard data:

Fasion Industry Retailer's Video Conversion Figures - Q1 2010

• “No Video CVR%”
  % of Unique Visitors to view a product page who could watch a video, but DIDN’T, yet still added the product to their cart.
• “Video CVR %”
  % of Unique Visitors to view a product page who DID watch video and added the product to their cart.

Video's Impact on Conversion Rates

CVR Improvement Due to Video

The most obvious fact one learns from the data is this:

Visitors who watch product pages videos convert more than twice as often then those who don’t.

This data is in line with similar case studies we’ve published in the past showing that presenting video as an option for shoppers improves CVR even when the customers don’t watch them!

Conclusion – Online Retailers Ignoring Video are leaving Money on the Table

Online retailers seeking to increase sales would do well to investigate adding video to their site today.

Some of the key points to think about are:

What’s the most cost effective method of adding video to the site?

What products and offerings should receive video treatment first?

How will the the video be integrated into the site’s existing pages?

It’s important to remember that, although a few production videos might be great for retailers that only deal in a a very limited number of products, any online retailer that moves tens or hundreds of products will be poorly served with this type of solution. Furthermore production videos have no dynamic aspect – once created they’re impossible to change or edit so if your porduct details change they basically become useless.

If you’re an online retailer with a large inventory interested in covering your entire inventory with dynamic self updating videos quickly and cost efficiently contact us today : )

Captico

The Challenges

Let’s be honest. As an ecommerce retailer you really want one thing: People to buy your stuff. It doesn’t matter if you sell a product, a service, or tea-cup pigs, all of your other goals and needs fit under the giant umbrella of getting people to buy your stuff. In an effort to achieve this goal, clients always tell me the same things:

- “I want more traffic to my website.”

- “I want to be listed first on search engine results.”

- “I want people to come back to my site again and again.”

- “I want people to interact with each other on my website.”

The Solutions

It sounds simple, but the truth really is this: If you want repeat visitors and business to your site, make it a place people WANT to come back to! Give them a reason to come, a reason to stay, and great content that is easy to share with their friends! But I won’t leave you with such vague advice. Lets look at practical solutions for getting your site in front of people.

• Search engine optimization (SEO) is a phrase often bandied about by internet marketers, social media experts, and service providers. Basically it is a term used to encompass a variety of techniques used to increase a website’s ranking in search engine results. Using specific keywords in your page titles, urls, content, links, and even in your photos and videos makes your site more visible to the bots that crawl through the web looking for and categorizing content. Building useful information into your site, like how-to guides or tutorials, provides material that ranks well on search engines as people are more inclined to share it with their friends or colleagues – resulting in more links, more traffic, better search engine result listings, and more sales!

• Encouraging your visitors and users to actively engage with your site and each other through product reviews, discussion forums, or even something as simple as enabling comments on your articles or blogs will help with your SEO as well as increase repeat traffic.
• Once you have people active on your site, make it easy for them to share your content with others – use bookmark and link tools to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or Digg. These sites are free to set up accounts on and can be used to drive traffic to your site. (Check out these guides for help on Setting up Your Twitter Account and Setting up your Facebook Page) This kind of off-site linking also helps with your SEO campaign.

• Showcase your products or services in an easy to understand and transparent way! Data continues to show that consumers research items online before they buy. “If we look at the success story of any unique product or service that was launched and required a change in consumer behavior, the ones that were successful were those which were able to win customer’s trust and offer a clear value proposition to the customer.” (http://www.technetto.com/blog/e-commerce-in-india/) Video is an excellent way to detail and highlight the features and functionality of your offerings. It is the closest thing to physically picking up and turning over a product like a shopper would do in the store and you can address common questions or misconceptions in your branded environment! Plus video SEO is HUGE, not only encouraging viewers to share with their friends, but also increasing your search engine ranking as video is 50x more likely to show up than text in google search results!

These practical tips will go a long way in increasing your market share. If you feel overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to ask for help! You may have friends or colleagues experienced in social media or who know enough basic SEO to get you started, and there are also great companies out there who can ramp up your business. So pick a task and get out there and sell your stuff!

Guest blogger: Corrie Davidson is the New Media Coordinator at Captico, LLC, a technology strategy firm focused on website development, online marketing solutions, and mobile applications.

MAD Productions

Beyond expanding our own offering, we’re always on the look out for good strategic relationships, and partnering with M.A.D. Productions is exactly that.

Proud to have M.A.D. as our U.K ecommerce partner

M.A.D., for those of you unfamiliar with the company, is one of the top UK based e-commerce companies, particularly in the realm of SEO. Much like us at Treepodia, they service online retail sites of different sizes across multiple verticals. And much like us, they’re extremely focused on, and successful at generating ROI. So much so that they are responsible for producing over £125 million in online sales for their clients – that’s a lot of returns!

“We met through a mutual friend…”

The relationship between Treepodia and M.A.D. came about as many successful relationships do, through a mutual friend, or in this case a mutual client, Onlinegolf.com.

Onlinegolf is one of our oldest clients having been with us from the full production video stage back in 2008. In 2009 they moved to the automated videos of the smart video platform to more (cost) effectively showcase their entire product line, and ultimately increase conversion rates.

The positive effects were felt immediately (and continue to this day), with an 85% increase in conversion rate for people viewing video.

“Mutual Benefit kept us together…”

Based on these results and the recommendation of the client, both Treepodia and M.A.D. recognized the mutual benefits of their services – to help online retailers increase sales. With that, the partnership was formed.

In the words of Simon Peirson, our UK Director:

“As both Treepodia and M.A.D. are strong forces in the world of e-commerce, providing different services with a similar end-goal (i.e. bringing more business to our clients), this is an obvious strategic partnership that benefits all parties involved.”

Most of all it will benefit each company’s clients who will continue to see ROI based results and an increase in their online store’s profitability.

For more information about the Treepodia smart video platform, or to propose a strategic partnership, feel free to contact us now..

Being a control freak - it's not necessarily a bad thing...

I’m not entirely sure why the words “Control” and “Freak” are so often put together – as if there’s something bad or unnatural about wanting to control things. Being in control of your actions always seems to me to be a positive trait. Isn’t it?

Knowing your past actions’ impact is the key for assessing your future plans

If we consider that being aware of the impact of one’s past actions is crucial to predicting what impact one’s future actions will have, it becomes quite obvious why there’s great value in having the ability to gauge this impact as accurately as possible. This simple truism is in many respects the foundation for the entire industry of web based analytics driven marketing, and the logic driving its growth. Companies are founded, funded and flourishing based on their ability to provide accurate, actionable data which retailers can use and manipulate in order to improve their sales and bolster their bottom line. Here at Treepodia we’ve always viewed providing accurate and actionable metrics as one of the most important guidelines for the development of our applications and that’s why it gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of the newest member of our metrics driven video based marketing tools.

Control Group Measurement for Video

The latest enhancement to the Treepodia smart video platform, is our Control Group Measurement Tool.

This new tool accurately measures the impact of product videos on sales and conversions by comparing the behavior of site visitors who have been exposed to video to the behavior of site visitors who have not been exposed to video.

Get a precise picture of the impact your product videos have on your sales

In other words, by using a control group of those who do not have the option to see video, the Control Group Measurement Tool is able to accurately assess the precise impact of the presence of video on your shoppers. Essentially, what this does is give you (online retailers) an accurate view of how site visitors are responding to the presence of product videos on your site, and we’ve already established the fact that the more data you have at your disposal regarding your past actions, the better equipped you to make informed decisions regarding your future…

Conversions for video-enabled product page are consistently higher

So far, the findings have been astounding, with the conversion rate for those presented with video always coming out substantially higher than among visitors who were not presented with the option to watch video. And, what’s even more interesting is the fact that conversion rates are higher when the option to watch videos is presented to site visitors whether or not the video is watched. In other words, the mere option to watch product videos already increases conversion rates – further proof that product videos work wonders for your online business.

As our own VP of Marketing Melody King said:

“This speaks loudly to the value product videos bring to an online business in demonstrating credibility and trustworthiness.”

For more information on the Control Group Measurement Tool or the smart video platform, contact us now.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ach-squared/3325230784

Everybody knows video is on the rise - but how much?...

A recent study published by Tubemogul, a video distribution and analytics startup, in partnership with Brightcove, a video platform, provides some interesting insights and statistics regarding the ways and places we’re all finding, viewing and sharing video content.

Before diving into some of the cool numbers shared in the study It’s important to note that the study is based on numbers garnered from both companies’ data, which means that it only represents a certain segment of video consumption. This isn’t to say that the data isn’t valid – only that it’s partial and should be viewed as such. For example, data regarding Youtube, which alone accounts for ~40% of the market, is not covered by the study.

Video Engagement Statistics

• Broadcast networks take the lead in terms of viewing time per stream
  Online video content from broadcast networks is watched on average 2:53 minutes per stream. The networks are followed by music labels (1:50 min.) and newspaper publishers (1:41 min.)

• Newspapers and magazines lead in terms of video viewing completion rates
  Interestingly viewers are most likely to watch an entire video when they are consuming it on a newspaper’s site. Newspapers and magazine publishers video viewing completion rates are about 40% each closely followed by broadcasters (38%) with music labels bringing up the rear with 29%.

• Twitter leads in terms of referral engagement
  Twitter referrals generate the highest level of engagement, when compared to other referral sources, for broadcast networks, music labels and magazine publishers. Interestingly newspaper publishers enjoy their highest engagement rates with viewers referred from Yahoo.

Facebook’s shameful share

Another interesting statistic published in the study is Facebook’s share in driving online traffic. Although Facebook’s community has increased by 2% in April alone, and despite the fact that over 34% of the entire adult demographic in the US is already using Facebook, accounts for only 0.40% of video traffic.

I think that if nothing else this number, if correct, speaks volumes for the relatively poor experiences Facebook delivers in terms of video viewing and upload. Considering how popular video is, and considering Facebook’s incredible adoption levels, Zuckerberg’s social behemoth – a leader in almost every other online field, should account for more than %0.40 without even trying!

I’m pretty certain that when Facebook chooses to address it’s video usability issues its market share will improve dramatically almost immediately.

Join the video bandwagon with Treepodia Video Distributor

All these numbers are good and well but how does this reflect on your business and your day to day marketing efforts? Well, although I’m hardly what you’d call objective, I believe the joint Brightcove Tubemogul study provides further validation for our Video Distributor product, which syndicates etailers’ product videos to video sharing sites (Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, etc.). Since we released Video Distributor in February we’ve consistently seen consumers searching for, and learning about our clients’ products on the video sites, and then coming in to make their purchases on our clients’ sites. This trend was confirmed by all the pilot partners who helped us test Video Distirbutor before we made it publicly available.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndevil/3491395689

Online retail is back on the rise!

According to a recent eMarketer article, the prediction is that this year (2010) ecommerce “will climb to more than $152 billion, up 12.7% year over year”. In addition, according to the US Census Bureau online sales grew by 14.6% in Q4 2009 (over the previous year’s sales), which means a positive trend is finally under way.

These gains, of course are reflective of the overall state of the economy, which is starting to pick up, as well as peoples’ desire to start purchasing again.

Online product research gaining in popularity as well

The number of people doing their product research online, of course is even greater. In fact, in the US, a whopping 162 million people are expected to do their pre-purchase research online this year, with over 82% of them ultimately making an online purchase.

That means, that in order to maximize your sales, you need to be everywhere they’re searching – and we can help with that.

Besides creating, hosting, and streaming product videos, Treepodia also has a service that uploads your videos to any and all of the major video portals (think YouTube, Google Videos, etc.).

Bottom-line

increasing your visibility online will ultimately increase your sales. This type of coverage will help not only in terms of SEO, but also in terms of reaching your clients wherever they are going to do their research, leading them back to your store to complete their purchase.

Contact us now for further details.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobilestreetlife/4278659537

Dr. Melody King - Our VP for Sales & Marketing

On March 5th, our very own VP of Sales and Marketing, Dr. Melody King was interviewed on Webside Chats.

Webside Chats, in case you aren’t familiar with the site, is produced by Jack Humphrey: “who’s sole purpose is to track down the leading experts in internet marketing, blogging, SEO, and branding and pump them for insider information for the benefit of new to advanced marketers”.

Although of course we have a particularly soft spot for video, we appreciate all mediums for communicating our message, and it was an honor to be hosted in this audio format.

Automated Video is always impressive

In case you didn’t catch the Treepodia interview just yet, to summarize, Jack and Melody discussed the growing importance of video online in general, and on retail sites in particular.

Melody went on to describe the Treepodia platform and how it uses retailer’s existing marketing materials to automatically generate product videos in a time-effective and cost-effective manner, thereby removing all barriers to adding video to any retailer’s site.

Throughout the conversation, Jack was particularly impressed by this automated process, and the ease of installation (adding just a couple of lines to code, once, to the retailer’s site). But the thing he seemed most enthusiastic about was the type of relationship Treepodia builds with its retailers in offering long-term service with continual video version A/B testing.

85% Increases to Conversion Rates…

Other things that were discussed include the details behind how we do automated voice-overs, some stats on conversion rates (starting at an 85% increase), and practical examples of the difference different video versions can make to your bottom-line.

We recommend that you listen to the interview in its entirety for a great summary of all that the Treepodia smart video platform can do for your online store. If you have any questions or comments, you are always free to contact us.