If you’ve been following the buzz in Online Marketing circles these past two weeks you’ll have noticed the big story on everybody’s mind is Google’s gradually increasing reliance and integration of social data into search results. In case you’re wondering what that means in plain English -

Google is now customizing our search results based on data it’s pulling from our personal social circle, and other personal indicators it has about us

Variations in search are nothing but new – we’re probably well aware of the variance in results for queries between google.com and any of Google’s nationally localized sites (i.e. google.co.uk, google.de, etc.), but this new step is something beyond that. Google is now serving each of us with a unique set of results based on what it knows about us PERSONALLY.

A really simple example of how this influences results is below. The screenshot on the left is Google’s search results for my surname, from a browser session where I was signed in. You’ll note my own LinkedIn profile ranks in at #6. On the right hand side I conducted the same search without being signed in. My LinkedIn profile is absent from the results:

Personalized Google search

So What?

Many of the pundits writing about this recent change are taking offence at what they view as a serious offence against their privacy. While I feel it’s not my place to weigh in on the moral aspects of this change, I will say I believe Google doesn’t really have a choice, if it wants to retain it’s position as the leader in RELEVANT search results. There are two main reasons why I think this must be the wave of the future:

#1 – Is that really number 1?

As the web continues to grow exponentially, presenting sites in a simple ranked list format is becoming increasingly irrelevant. It’s a simplistic form of rating that doesn’t really match the complexities of the paradigm.

An easy example is a search for “technology news”. When I ran this search Cnet news came out ranking in at number #1 (from a non-personalized session).

Really?

Is Cnet the “best” site for that query?

Aren’t Techcrunch, engadget, Mashable, CNN’s technology section, etc. etc. etc…. just as deserving?

#2 – Personal IS Relevant

Consider the following situation – Your anniversary is coming up and you’d like to surprise your spouse with a cool date at an Indian restaurant. You have two choices for selecting a restaurant to go to:

• Option #1 – Search your local food directory for a restaurant that might be a good fit
• Option #2 – Ask a foodie friend for a recommendation

Obviously option #2 will yield better fitting results for your date - because your friend knows you. They’ll naturally rule out all the options that you’re less likely to enjoy, leaving you with a selection that matches your choice in decor, budget, location, etc.

This is precisely what Google is tapping into now.

The reality is that the answer to the question “Which is the best Indian restaurant in town“, is entirely subjective, and probably even changes depending on the type of evening you have planned out (going out with a bunch of mates to eat Indian you might choose a different spot than where you’d go for a romantic dinner for two…)

What this means for ecommerce and why product videos matter even more

Online vendors are going to have get used to a web where the old and tried SEO techniques that worked to push them up the SERPs will gradually be replaced (Google’s detractors say “supplanted”).

Increasingly we’ll be all viewing customized and personalized results where for every query the top results will be determined by whatever related content our friends have been sharing, reviewing, commenting and buzzing about. It’s here I believe vendors with video integrated into their sites will truly enjoy an advantage for the simple reason that video content is far more likely to create that type of engagement than boring old text-and-images.

But I’m willing to put this to the test:

For the vast majority of products successful online sales are heavily correlated to the quality of the images and video on the site.

It follows that successful and efficient management of your website’s product images can be a major contributor to your site’s success. As we’ve listed here before, it’s definitely a critical factor in determining the quality of your product videos.

It used to be Image Management was exculsively the realm of photographers and graphic designers, however with more tools being made available for free and online use, this is no longer the case.

Today any ecommerce professional so desiring can efficiently, manage, edit and work collaboratively, with his or her website’s product images, using only free tools, and more specifically Google’s Picasa and Picasa Web Albums service.

The underlying logic for selecting Picasa is this:

It’s Free, excellent, and hooks up to a reliable backup…

Picasa is "built-in backup"

Managing and arranging images

Picasa Web tools is a full featured photo management solution backed by a powerful and FREE software suite, both owned and maintained by Google.

There are a bunch of things you can do with your photos using only Picasa’s web interface:

• Organize and label photos and albums
• Set sharing rules and notifications
• Provide geo-location for images
• Edit images
• Collaborate with others

Picasa is great for product image gallery management

Collaborative work

Picasa’s full integration with all of Google’s other products, and the availability of Commenting for the images on the web, makes collaboration easy and intuitive:

Editing images

There are many types of tasks you might want to accomplish with your images, but it’s safe to bet Resizing and Cropping are going to be at the top of the list…

Resize/crop:

Identifying site image size
Start by identifying what size you need to crop/resize your photos to.

If you’re not sure go to any product page, right-click on the main product image, and save-as. Now check your downloaded image’s properties to identify it’s size. Alternatively if you’re browsing with Chrome you can simply right-click and select Inspect element to reveal the product image size via the Metrics tab:

Identifying image size with Chrome

Entering resize values
When resizing match your site’s smallest value (width or height) to that of the edited image:

Resizing product images with Picasa

Cropping
Set your crop area by dragging or setting constraints for shape and size:

Cropping images with Picnic

Whatever edit’s you make don’t forget to Apply and Save your work before closing down Picnic

Uploading to your site

An important tip to remember for keeping your photos in order, is to associate all the images for a particular product or category in a single folder. This works well when you want to batch download photos for work on your local machine:

The ability to download entire albums at a time is a HUGE time saver

…and just as well when you want  to upload/update the photos on your site (see below).

Naming and locating images 
For extra SEO value it’s well worth your while to give all your product images meaningful names (i.e. avoid file names like prod-123.jpg, instead go for descriptive names like professional-makeup-remover.jpg). Finding image folders to accomplish tasks like this is easy via Picasa’s desktop solution:

Locate your product album by right clicking the album name in your desktop version of Picasa, and selecting Locate on Disk

Tracking product photos is easy

Easy upload
Uploading and updating images to your website’s backend is now simply a matter of following these steps:

1. Access your product’s Image Management console via your shop’s backend (shown here: Magento – details on how to manage Magento product pages can be found here)
2. Browse to find the correct image folder
3. Select the images you want upload
4. Click Open
5. Click Upload and save your changes

Updating product photos is easy when they're kept in order

Cool Bonus!

It also enables you to take advantage of Picasa’s video creator to make videos for your products and upload them to Youtube:

Picasa enables you to make product videos for Youtube pubilcation

More on that here:

Committed to Ecommerce Video

As I’ve mentioned here before, we feel very privileged and thankful for being the market leader of the Online Product Video sector. It’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly. We invest a fair amount of our time and resources in researching the technology side of things, and perhaps even more, the business impact and ROI product videos have for ecommerce vendors.

Helping Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Prosper in 2012

Over the years, and as a result of the massive amounts of data to which we’ve been given access by our clients, we’ve compiled a series of guidelines that have been proven time and again to increase conversions and sales. It’s our great pleasure to start this new year by sharing these guidelines, with the hope they help ecommerce  entrepreneurs everywhere increase their profitability and product video ROI this year.

So without further ado embedded below and available for download here is:

The Treepodia Product Video Best Practice Guide

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyz/3115855390/

Santa's into product videos too...

It’s been nearly half a year since we last featured some Treepodia product video implementations, and that means it’s high time for another (Fourth!)  installation of E-Commerce

“Product Videos on the Wild Wild Web“

Seeing as such a long time has past since the last showcase post I’ve had a lot of installations to choose from. In order to keep things simple and fair I decided that since the holiday season is upon us, I’d simply feature three shops that might just be carrying the gifts you’re seeking for your near and dear ones.

LinenChest.com

Linen Chest - pop up video player integration is great for showing multiple videos on any given URL

Linen Chest was started some 40 years ago by Sylvia Leibner, then a young Quebec mother of 5 boys who was unhappy with the home decoration products available to her and decided to do something about it. Linenchest.com has grown into a company with 20 shops, and over 500 employees. In 1991 founder Mrs. Leibner was honored with a Canadian “Company of the Year Award“.

Integration

Linen Chest has our player set as a launch-able overlay panel allowing them to easily offer more than one video on the page.

SeattleSunglass.com

Treepodia's platform uses existing page content to create video captions

SeattleSunglass.com is the internet presence of brick-and-mortar sunglass shop Seattle Sunglass Co. in the heart of downtown Seattle.

Integration

SeattleSunglass implemented Treepodia product videos as an interchangeable tab that displays either an image or a video for any product, according to browser’s choice

ElectronicExpress.com

When product pages are dry and technical...

Founded in 1983 Electronic Express is a retail chain stocking over two thousand catalog items at their 16 locations near and in Nashville, Tennessee. Electronicexpress.com stands for quality brand electronics at exceptionally low prices, and as such has to constantly think about how to make marketing more cost effective in order to enable greater savings to its customers. As with many similar budget retailers in our client portfolio – automated video was a natural fit…

...Videos are an opportunity to spice-up things up a little!

Thanks for Trusting Us!

I’d like to say THANKS! to all the companies listed above, and to wish them and everyone else that joined us this year:

HAVE A FANTASTIC 2010!

Over the past few months, and with the support of some of our best clients, we’ve been working on a case study that investigates how video is impacting online sales of jewelry items. I hope you find the following information useful and welcome comments and queries…

Mike@treepodia.com : )

Being a market leader is a big responsibility. Simply put – When you’re a leader you have no one to follow. Educating and developing your niche is primarily up to you!

As the market leader of video-for-ecommerce we take our role very seriously. In fact you’ll very rarely see cat jokes on this blog at all! (well there was that one time…)

The fun part is that you have a broader view of your niche than anyone else…

Here at Treepodia we love sharing our unique viewpoint in order to help with the “educating-and-development-responsibility” bit. This here post is one such example…

Ecommerce, Video and Jewelry sales

History

Treepodia has always been lucky enough to have a special relationship with the online-jewelry-sales industry. Very early on in our operations we caught the attention of Mr. Shmuel Gniwisch, CEO of Ice.com – one of the first companies to turn a jewelry store into an online shopping experience (…way back in 1999!!!).

With the support of Mr. Gniwisch, Ice, and it’s credo on such platforms as Internet Retailer, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (…etc.) we were immediately shot into the spotlight for anyone, and everyone, in the online-jewelry-sales business.

It was an amazing opportunity – Jewelry vendors deal in relatively high-ticket items, and anything that makes their products stand out can help them increase sales. Video was the perfect fit…

We became a big hit with online Jewelry vendors everywhere, and companies in this niche still remain some our best clients.

Why this matters?

Our platform enables our customers to:

• Trace a conversion back to a video
• Enable A/B testing for each product to test the impact video is having on its Conversion Rate

Having many clients in the the jewelry industry means we process millions of jewelry-article video views, and can aggregate the above mentioned data for them into unique insights regarding video’s impact:

8% of Jewelry site visitors choose to view videos

As the following chart demonstrates nearly 8% of all the visitors to jewelry websites elect to view a video when included on the page, indicating a good level of adoption and engagement for the technology.

Product videos boost jewlery site conversions by 247%

Videos’ contribution to an increase in conversions is evident across the board for all categories of jewelry items, however to truly perceive just how dramatic this increase is, I’d like to offer this next chart, which demonstrates the relative increase in conversions video enhanced pages had in comparison with their non-video displaying versions:

Note the first column of the table is the baseline “100%” which indicates no change. The chart immediately makes it evident that even the smaller conversion increases represent a near DOUBLING of sales. For bracelets and pendants the situation is even more dramatic with sales increasing by 2.5-3.7 times what they were for the same products without videos.

On average across all items and all vendors the study proves videos boosted conversions by 247%. Adding product videos to jewelry websites has been found to more-than-double sales!

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Raw Data:

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peng-hui/3120170669

With a huge inventory of over 135,000 individual products, ranging from decorative items to clothing to personal care products, greeting cards and more, DollarDays is the leading online wholesaler helping smaller businesses compete against larger chain stores.

By offering a wide range of high-quality bulk products which can be ordered in small quantities (single-case minimum) at competitive prices, DollarDays enables smaller merchants to in turn offer competitive pricing to their customers without the need to invest in excessive inventory.

Marc Joseph and Kevin Ryan - Dollardays.com

The Need – User Experience and Exposure

With a huge offering of a wide range of products DollarDays’ need was two-fold.

1. First, as an evolved online retailer, the company understood the advantage of having videos for popular products. As Marc Joseph, President of DollarDays said, “With so many products to cover, and an ever-expanding product line, an automated solution was clearly the only option in terms of both sheer logistics and cost.”
2. Second, the company needed to make sure its many products were found. As DollarDays has an eclectic product offering, long-tail search terms are particularly effective in terms of video SEO. Therefore, the added value of properly indexing each product video for Google’s search algorithms and the associated video SEO were of particular concern for DollarDays.

The Solution - Treepodia’s Ecommerce Video Platform and Dynamic Video Sitemap

DollarDays originally opted for the Treepodia Enterprise package to create some 5,000 product videos as well as a Dynamic Video Sitemap to ensure these videos were being fully indexed by Google.

Once the success of this endeavor was realized, DollarDays upped their purchase to the Premium package for full coverage of their entire product line.

The Results – 74% Sales Increase

The addition of product videos had a huge and immediate effect, the most dramatic of which was a 74% increase in sales.

In terms of video SEO the positive effects were also quickly felt as all products were fully indexed by Google within a single day.

Most importantly, product specific long-tail search terms such as “bright pencil pouch” were yielding far higher results on Google, in many cases moving to first place.

Marc Joseph*, founder and president of Dollardays.com, is so pleased he gave us a quote for this case study:

“We’ve been incredibly pleased with the results we’ve received from the Treepodia solutions so much so, in fact, that within a month we’d already decided to expand the Treepodia solutions across our entire product offering. Not only was the ROI quick and concrete, but the implementation was surprisingly simple.”

Need to Download?

Download the case study here:
Dollar Days Boosts Video SEO Case Study

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Marc Joseph – Founder and CEO of Dollardays.com

• With more than 30 years in the retail and wholesale industry, Marc Joseph is the founder of DollarDays International. Joseph’s has helped to build some of America’s most known retail stores including Federated Department Stores, Crown Books, and Bills, a chain of variety stores headquartered in Jackson, Miss. He also helped ignite the dollar store trend as the General Merchandise Manager in Everything’s A Dollar stores chain. Joseph also started another innovative chain for EAD, The $5 & $10 Stores, locating the chain’s stores next to Everything’s A Dollar Stores to ensure traffic and offer price-conscious customers additional retail options. Most recently Joseph started a chain of hair salons in Arizona and built it up to 11 stores before selling them to devote full time to DollarDays.
  Mr. Joseph earned his Bachelor of Administration in Marketing with a Finance Minor from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Phoenix with his wife and four children.

Let’s examine that for a moment and understand how that can affect the effectiveness of your product videos and conversions:

Case A – Product Video is presented as an overlay

Product Video - Player launched as an Overlay

Say you had 100 people coming onto your site, of those 100 only about 70 will click on any link on your homepage.

Since I’m in an optimistic mood today let’s say you’re lucky and they clicked on an actual product you’re touting on your homepage – one of your best promoted items.

Now on the product page, they all choose to click to display the video overlay. Drop the 30% and we’re already down to less than half or your original audience – 49 users (100*0.7*0.7).

Since your video is an overlay users are now required to click  once more to return to the page. We’re now at 34 users (100*0.7*0.7*0.7), and we haven’t even clicked the add-to-cart button…

Case B – Product Video is presented on page

Product Video - Player is embedded On-page

We start this scenario with the same 100 people coming to your site. Again we’ll take the optimistic approach that the majority of them chose to view one of your homepage-promoted products, so again reaching the product page we have 70 potential buyers, however now things to look slightly different…

In this scenario the video player is integrated into the actual design of the page, so clicking to play it doesn’t launch a new overlay but simply starts the video player – we don’t need to treat this click as one that costs us users.  Moreover since no overlay was launched, no click is required to return to the product page.

In this scenario we’re still at 70 users AFTER the video was watched – just over double where we were in the example above!

 

Google's Panda update eats spam farms for breakfast!

The web may be only about twenty years old, but as we enter the 2nd decade of the 21st century it’s clearly evident that together with the ascent of mobile technology, it’s the biggest global change engine we’ve experienced in our lifetime, affecting every aspect of our lives.

Google IS the door

The biggest gateway to the web – the entrance point the vast majority of us use to access the Internet, is Google – Its search results to be precise. Therefore when Google’s search result rankings are changed that’s potentially big news. In fact the bigger the change to the rankings – the more likely the change is to be newsworthy.

Earlier this year, late in February to be exact, Google made one of the biggest changes ever to their proprietary site ranking system. It was, and still is big news to the entire web ecosystem – especially to businesses that rely on their websites to generate their income.

What is “Panda” and why does it matter?

This change to Google’s algorithms was given the internal name “Panda“, after Google engineer Navneet Panda, who’s work on machine learning is a major component. Outside Google circles it’s also widely referred to as the “Farmer” update, because originally it was aimed at helping Goolge reduce the search visibility of so called “content farms” (low quality article sites that specialize in dominating long-tail key phrases).

The big change Google Panda introduces into search rankings, is a deference to actual human preferences insofar as websites are concerned. For the first time ever Google’s ranking system isn’t based solely on on-page factors and inbound links, but also on data that relates to how people actually perceive the ranked pages.

How did Google do it?

Without getting overly technical, and based on an interview that Google staffers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts gave to Wired Magazine, the process Google used to achieve this started out with presenting a select panel of raters with a bunch of websites, and then interviewing them about the sites using questions such as: “Would you buy on this website? “ and “Would you trust the medical information on this website?”. Eventually the reviewed sites were divided into two groups – those raters wanted to see more of, and all the rest…

Many Search Engine Optimization Professionals suspect this initial data was cross referenced with the aggregated user and usage data Google collects via the Chrome browser, user’s site blocking in search results, Google +1 buttons,  Google Analytics (…etc.) in order to improve the search giant’s understanding of how and why people were preferring the selected sites. The insights gained from these experiments were then scaled up using the machine learning processes developed by Mr Panda, and the new data regarding each site was then used to influence Google’s entire ranking.

What Panda has effectively done is enable Google to refer to a “Human Like-ability Factor” in their search rankings – Sites people are likely to enjoy get better ranked than others 

How does all this relate to Video?

Video’s popularity with all of us is no secret, and it now seems the Panda update might be taking this into account in its rankings, as was recently reported by Frank Watson over at Search Engine Watch.

Based on an analysis of Searchmetrics ranking losers and winners Frank stipulates that many of the winning sites are Video rich:

9 in 10 of the top winners from the new rankings are Video intensive

Hindsight is always 20/20, and the results do seem to speak for themselves, but it’s still interesting to ponder how Google is using the data it has to re-assess search rankings, and why video seems to feature so heavily in sites that are seeing better rankings:

1. Visit depth and length – If Google is using data it has on visit depth and length to your site to evaluate your rankings it’s easy to understand how video would have a positive influence – Your visitors are prone to spend a longer time on each page and visit more pages if they know they can expect to see videos there .
2. Video requires a bigger effort = less likely to be spammy - Another reason Google would give a preference to video is simply because of the extra effort involved in adding it into your pages and curating it. Having video on your pages pretty much earmarks you as being less likely to be a low-end quality spam website.

Pandas, Videos, Sales and You

As interesting as trying to reverse engineer the reasons for Google’s obvious new-found love for videos is, it’s pretty safe to assume that, as with all other things relating to their rankings are concerned, they will continue to maintain their well known policy of releasing precious little beyond their regular “Build a good website and everything will be OK”  type statements.

Be that as it may videos do seem to be the darling of the day for SEO, and having them on your site clearly makes more of a difference now than it ever did before.

As an ecommerce operator that presents a new set of challenges – With video creation being normally time and budget consuming, how can you quickly provide your site with video content in order to ensure you end up on the right side of the Panda update?

Enter Treepodia Product Videos

Treepodia’s automated product video generation platform instantly adds a short video clip to each product page on your site, regardless of how many products you’re offering, and guarantees your site will capitalize on Google’s Panda update’s preference for video intensive sites.

Check out the following implementations to see what it looks like on a working ecommerce website (look for the “play video” buttons):

• Jewelry - http://www.idonowidont.com/loosediamonds/heart-brilliant-diamond
• Sunglasses - http://www.seattlesunglass.com/oakley-livestrongstraightjacket-700285127927.html
• Bathroom fixtures - http://www.splashdirect.com/Baths/Bath-Range/Free-Standing-Baths/sc1638/p3402.aspx
• Women’s fashion - http://www.nectar.com/collect/fashion/results.points#item=197759032
• Education - http://www.careerschooladvisor.com/video-library/

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/3581217785

We're all getting lazier - Product videos are great usability...

As a technology fan and a lover of all-things-web I find the growing body of research regarding  the impact the web is having on our intelligence absolutely riveting.

What impact is the web having on our intelligence?

There’s no clear answer to the question. Some pundits claim it’s making us dumber, while others claim it’s making us smarter. There are valid arguments for both claims, but whichever side you happen to take there’s little doubt the Internet and our experiences on the web are changing they way we think, process information and behave.

…And it’s probably making us lazier

Personally I’m unsure which side I’m on insofar as the debate regarding the web’s impact on our intelligence, but I’m definitely sure the web is making us lazier, and I’m not the only one that thinks so.

…And less attentive

Another interesting behavioral trend worth noting is the evident overall decrease in people’s attention spans, as evinced by broadcasters and advertisers alike. As we’re increasingly barraged by ever growing volumes of information and options of content to choose from, we’re clearly becoming less and less patient and satisfied with whatever it is we happen to be viewing/reading/browsing RIGHT NOW.

How does this relate to ecommerce and product videos?

Seeing as this is a video and ecommerce related blog some of you might be wondering how all this relates to our regular content. I promise you all will be revealed in a moment, but first please take a second to answer the following question:

Unless this post happens to be read by a statistically anomalous group of  detail obsessed individuals, I’m pretty sure most of you like myself chose option B, and that’s just the thing – seeing as how we’re all getting slightly lazier and less prone to attend to detail, we’d much prefer ecommerce sites present us the information we need to make a buying choice in the format and medium that makes it EASIEST for us to absorb. It’s good usability on their part, which is increasingly something we EXPECT.

Conclusion

The best marketing efforts don’t satisfy themselves merely with presenting customers with excellent information regarding their offers, they go the extra mile to ensure the information is presented in the way most likely to make the best impression with their audience. In the case of online shopping that means including VIDEOS for their product offerings.

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorbasa/2476381678/in/photostream

Automatically generated videos are essentially reliant on two major factors:

1. The Video Template
2. The Product Data Feed

Both factors can be tweaked and adjusted, and every adjustment will have some degree of impact on the video’s conversion rate

Tweaking The Video Template

A customized video template is “the skin” given to the information contained in the website’s feed. Creating the right video template by ensuring the look & feel of the videos match the client’s overall site style (as well as the general industry), is a critical factor in terms of success.

Product video templates should match the brand

Ideally a video template should match the brand’s guidelines and values as closely as possible, and integrate seamlessly with the website’s design. From a visual perspective all the following should be taken into consideration when creating the video template:

• Company logo
• Tagline
• Atmosphere images
• Existing video assets

Providing good design assets is all it takes to get your video template to match your brand

Well branded video templates increase buyer confidence and encourage more sales.

A video template can be tweaked and made to match the brand values not only visually, but also from the auditory aspect as well. Video templates can be customized as follows:

• What music will your soundtrack have?
• What sex is your narrator?
• What language and accent will you use?

Note that although normally the initial choices regarding video templates are made based on a vendors gut feeling of what will work for his audience, but truly leveraging a website’s video template for maximum conversions requires accurate A/B testing of different template variations.

Optimizing Your Product Video’s Data Feed

Automated product videos are generated from your website’s product catalog data feed, hence the quality of the generated videos, and the positive impact they have on customer engagement and conversion, depends heavily on the feed’s quality. A good data feed will include as many of the following as possible:

• Several different high resolution images of the product
• Descriptive statements including product specifications and classifications
• Catch phrases and marketing statements about the company
• Special offers
• Price
• Customer ratings and reviews
• Existing video footage

A few small tweaks to your website’s feed, based on the aforementioned recommendations, can quickly improve the performance and conversion rates for your automated videos.