On one of my sites I decided to add some inline video (hosted via YouTube) to demonstrate some important aspects of the product. I made four videos in about 20 minutes and was all set. These are not professionally done at all — simple screencasts of me working through the software and talking.
At any rate, I placed the four videos in their relevant sections of the sales copy and began a splittest:
Original: The user would click on a link, which would open a new browser window and launch a screencast I had made using Camtasia. There was no audio, just popup bubbles explaining things.
New: The user sees the embedded videos right there inline. The videos are about the same content-wise, but have audio of me explaining things as I go — no popup bubbles requiring reading.
The results have been phenomenal:
As you can see it’s holding very strong (98 conversions are enough for a statistically significant result…standing on its own) at 3.34% conversion. Granted, Google’s Website Optimizer says it doesn’t have enough data to declare a high-confidence winner yet, but 97.4% was high enough to merit writing this post.
So what are some key takeaways from this?
- It’s fairly obvious that visitors (at least in my niche) respond well to video.
- 20 minutes of work can boost sales 33%.
