Lauren Freedman of the e-tailing group debuted results from a survey into how over 1,000 consumers use video during the shopping process. Judging by the questions attendees asked, interest was high and so was the level of sophistication of the attendees.

We couldn’t get to all the questions during the session, so I’m answering a few more here.

Q: Is buying video production services ROI-positive for an etailer?

A: Yes.

(pause)

OK, sounds like you want more detail. Our clients consistently report realizing ROI based on the business goals they set.

ROI is based on deciding which needle you want to move and why, and on how much you spend to move that needle. For Bizchair.com, increasing sales with video was a key goal. They found that the 13% of their site visitors who viewed video accounted for 33% of their sales. Stacks and Stacks reported increased sales with video as well. Living Direct had increased engagement as a key goal, and realized that with a 9% increase in time on page. And, as we learned in the webinar, consumers consistently say that quality matters. That’s why our clients choose to invest in well-produced, but cost-effective,video production.

Q: What has been the reaction from online retailers to the idea of category videos versus product-specific videos?

A: There’s certainly value in both. It’s certainly attractive to leverage your video investment across a category at times. That said, I think the place to start is with your business goals. Analyze your site traffic and customer base, then do the math to determine where you can have the most impact. Product-specific videos are attractive in that they should pay off in clearly incremental sales, based on conversion tracking and A/B testing. That makes the business case easy to build. However, if you’re converting well on the product page but not doing as well in moving consumers down the funnel, you might want to start at the category level.

And – final note – a video gallery can be a great way to leverage your investment in product-specific videos. One video, two use cases, two locations. And if you do it right, you can index for category-level search terms in the gallery while indexing for product-specific search terms on the product page. That brings the right searchers to the right pages, making the most of your video SEO.

Q: Do you have data showing consumer preference between third party production versus company generated video content?

A: Yes. Stacks and Stacks found that Invodo-produced, retailer-branded video content drove higher conversion than manufacturer-supplied content. We also see that in data from Video Ratings and Comments, where consumers rate Invodo-produced, company-branded video as more helpful than video produced by other sources. And, as we discussed on the Webinar, companies that have traditionally used highly informal videos are recognizing the benefits of emphasizing good quality sound and lighting.

Q: What do you think about YouTube as a search engine as opposed to just a video hosting platform?

A: YouTube’s the second largest search engine – bigger than Yahoo! or Bing. It’s a great place to be found. Your video strategy should include leveraging your video assets across channels, including YouTube. I recommend using socially optimized edits for YouTube and Facebook. Reason: on a product page, your goal is to drive conversion – to get the consumer to click the “add to cart” button. But in social distribution, your goal is to bring that consumer to your site. That may require a shorter edit and an explicit call to action, such as “learn more at www.invodo.com.“

Q: What’s a good source of video statistics and information?

A: As Lauren said on the Webinar, she searched quite a bit and didn’t find anything close to a definitive resource. We publish a lot of information here on the Invodo blog and in our newsletter (kindly subscribe, if you haven’t, and thank you!). I frequently see journalists and bloggers linking to our video statistics page. We keep it updated with both Invodo and third-party information.

Did I miss a question? If so, email me at russ@invodo.com and I’ll be happy to respond.

OVPs (Online Video Platforms, the technology-only side of the business) are fond of publishing viewing time metrics showing how long viewers watch before clicking away. They then characterize that as insight into consumer behavior and urge retailers and brands to create shorter videos – regardless of the message to be conveyed or the quality of the content.

The problem, of course, is that their approach assumes that all content quality is the same, all product categories have the same level of complexity to communicate, and all audiences are equally engaged. Pretty big assumptions. That’s why we commissioned the research as a consumer-facing study. Rather than guessing about consumers based on clicks, we thought we’d directly engage them to find out what makes video content valuable to them. By combining that research with data mined from our network of close to 100 major brand and retail sites, and tempering that with insight from researcher Lauren Freedman, we hope to form a more complete picture.

Here’s the cool thing: we haven’t even formally released the study, and it’s already generated quite a bit of industry dialog. The findings on video length are only a small part of what we learned. We’ll have a better industry discussion when we can put that data in context. We’ll do that, with Lauren Freedman’s help, on Wednesday, February 8th during a Webinar, “Captivating Consumers through Cross-Channel Video.” We hope you can join us!

When I started at Invodo about 1 year ago, the primary hosting for applications was on physical servers in a datacenter here in Austin, TX. There were plans to move to an infrastructure that allowed better failover and geographic diversity, but work had not begun for the actual transition. All components required to provide service to end-users had been pushed out to the content delivery network, so the risk of the application infrastructure impacting clients and end users was very low. That made the relative urgency of accomplishing the move lower than other improvements to our technology at first, but beginning in 2011 we had a strategic goal of improving our system uptime/availability to 99.999% before the holiday season. After I joined, priorities aligned and we decided the time was right for the transition. Two of us then set out to make the move happen.

Reasons Behind The Move

While end-user service is all pushed to the content delivery network, several components of our infrastructure are necessary for managing that service and providing the full service offering to our customers. What this means is that a complete failure of our infrastructure should have no impact on end users, but could be seen as a degradation in service for our customers. Things like data analytics for the period of the outage and access to the tools we provide (such as to push new content or retrieve reports) would be unavailable to our customers.

One thing I have learned over the years is that no system is perfect. Any system that is supposedly incapable of failure will have a problem at some point and, since it is impervious to failure, it will take a significant amount of time to recover the system. Instead of trying to build the perfect system, we planned for failure. The primary goals of the new architecture were:

1. Focus on mean time to recovery (MTTR) for all systems so any outage is reduced to the minimum time possible.

2. Customers should not be impacted in any way unless it is a catastrophic failure of multiple systems, and even then, it should be the minimum impact possible.

3. Any given system can fail at any given time. Any individual server or system going down should be expected and ANY recovery necessary should be quick and straightforward, independent of what caused it to fail.

4. The architecture should easily survive the next 5 years, meaning how and when systems were to scale with increased usage had to be decided out of the gate.

There’s more than one provider of cloud-based hosting, each with their own focus and strengths. After reviewing providers in the context of our goals, we found that Amazon Web Services was the clear choice for how we wanted to accomplish them.

First Few Days On Amazon Web Services

Our first few days on Amazon Web Services were exceedingly scary. We had tested all of the components, we had verified our monitoring systems, but there were still lots of unknowns. Would the new infrastructure perform the same was as the previous one? Was our security model sufficient to provide access to all services? Were there any components that needed to communicate that we overlooked? The end result was a very smooth transition, even done in a way so that our customers wouldn’t notice a change. Before we were fully transitioned, Amazon Web Services had a major outage in one of the components. Numerous large scale companies ended up having issues because of the outage. However, thanks to our new infrastructure design, there was no noticeable impact for our customers. This helped provide validation that we were going in the appropriate direction for our architecture.

Extended Period on Amazon Web Services

We have now been on Amazon Web Services for quite a while. There have been a few more outages of one type or another on Amazon’s infrastructure and we have had multiple components fail and need to be recovered, all without noticeable customer impact. That is all great for normal operations, but what about the peak retail usage that starts just prior to Thanksgiving and ends just after the new year? In one day, we tripled the capacity of each individual server and doubled the number of servers that would be involved in handling the additional load. And the entire holiday season was reasonably uneventful (from a technical perspective). Looking back, had we been on our previous infrastructure, it might have required a lot more work to keep up with demand. We did not have the ability to rapidly scale up our infrastructure, we did not have the same detailed monitoring on our infrastructure and our ability to recover from faults in the infrastructure were significantly lower than they are now. In the final analysis, the uptime goal of 99.999% of critical services during the holiday season was achieved, in large part do to the migration to AWS.

Our previous infrastructure was not poorly designed. In fact, it was the previous design that allowed the move that we did in the period of time we did it. Everything about the move did not go according to plan, but through hard work and ingenuity we managed the transition without negative customer impact. Looking back, the take away is that what worked for you yesterday will not work for you tomorrow and that planning needs to happen today.

Matt Brace, Invodo Lead Envisioneer

Luckily for you, Internet Retailer has a stellar agenda laid out for the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference in Orlando, FL, February 13-15^th.

Since this event is clearly something you want and NEED to go to, allocating your time is going to be a challenge!  In an effort to help, I’m sharing my Top 5 Must Do’s for IRWD 2012.

1. Get Twisted with Cirque du Soleil!
Orlando is synonymous with Walt Disney World but did you know that Downtown Disney, which is outside the park, has a ton of fun offerings as well?  For example there is the Cirque du Soleil- La Nouba show.  La Nouba is a show that can only be seen in Downtown Disney; the show’s title translates to “to party, to live it up.” La Nouba is a visceral show receiving 5-star audience reviews.

“[When an 11-year old boy ‘s father asked him how he liked the show the boy responded with] “My throat hurts.” “Why?” asked the father, [to which his son responded] “I think, I forgot to breathe.”” — The Orlando Sentinel

2. Stop by Booth #211!
Why?  Because we want to meet you! Soon we will be releasing an e-tailing group research report that shows consumers shop with video in a different way than you probably think they do.  Come get the inside scoop on some surprising new research.  Say the secret password, “video strategy,” and we will give you a sneak peek at this invaluable report.  We will also hook you up with our secret weapon to boost your energy and help you power through the conference!

3. Attend the Session: “Design 101: 10 Best Practices to Pick From the Pack”
A key component to any modern website design is delivering a site that can operate on any platform effectively.  Mike Sidders, VP of E-Commerce at ShopKo Stores Operating Co., and Todd Luckey, Senior User Experience Specialist at Usability Sciences, will host this session on Tuesday, February 14^th from 11:15a- 11:45a and share their best practices for modern retail web design. You won’t want to skip this one!

4. Swim with the dolphins at Discovery Cove!
Need I say more?!?  If you’re like me, you love animals and have always wanted the opportunity to swim with a dolphin!  If not, you can always just chill out in the lazy river or take a snorkeling adventure!

5. Attend the Session: “Revving up Your Retail Website with Online Video”
On Wednesday, February 15^th from 12:00p- 12:30p, Invodo’s own Craig Wax is partnering up with Office Depot’s Director of E-Commerce Searchandising, Shannon Wu-Lebron, to discuss how to deploy and merchandise video in a way that improves the user experience and drives conversion, SEO, and more.  Don’t miss out!

If you have any questions or would just like to get some more ideas on things to do at IRWD don’t be shy and give us a shout!  You can also schedule a specific time to discuss video at IRWD right here!

MediaPost featured Invodo in a recent article about how video viewership is positively impacting purchasing behavior in online retail. The article cited a 9x increase in 2011 retail video views at the start of the holiday season as well as a Forrester report showing improved SEO due to video. Daisy Whitney goes on to discuss what we’ve known all along—video sells. Check out the full article here.



Last week Internet Retailer published an article entitled Retailers need to prepare for the online video wave. Internet Retailer recognizes that video is going to be a hot topic at their upcoming Web Design & Usability Conference in Orlando, FL and took this opportunity to point curious minds towards our session. On February 15th Invodo CEO Craig Wax will be discussing how video can be used most effectively while also providing good and not so good examples of what retailers are doing with video today. Read all the details here.

Tena Crock, Online Marketing Director for The Step2 Company, recently answered a few questions about what Step2 is doing with video. Her answers make it clear that Step2 is doing some great work across video, social, and cross-channel mobile campaigns in major retail stores.

Q: Tell me about Step2’s target customer. What do they care about when they shop? Can video help them choose the right product for their children?

A: Step2’s target customer can easily be described in one word, Mom.  She is all about convenience, finding quality products for the right price, and having the peace of mind in knowing that she is making a purchase that will last for years to come and will be enjoyable for her children.  The quality of our products, we feel, is what sets us apart.  The videos do a nice job of showing our products in use and highlighting the features that we know Moms care about.  How do we know they care about them?  We ask.  We have a group of MomShare panelists that we survey and ask questions to on a pretty frequent basis.  From that, we know what is important to them.  That is specifically why we feature children playing with our products in the video.  Moms want to see other kids having fun with our toys so they know that their children will have fun too.

Q: Step2 does a great job connecting with customers via Facebook. How do social and video marketing work together?

A: Moms are a savvy bunch.  They enjoying connecting to others and to companies via Facebook, so they make the connection factor easy on us.  Moms are looking for authenticity in any sort of marketing that we do.  Video gives us the opportunity to talk to Moms from other Moms in “Mom Speak”.  Of course our videos are scripted, but they are written and revised by Moms for Moms.  We know that in order to keep that connection with our target consumer, we need to meet her where she is able to engage with the Step2 brand, and right now, that is predominantly in the online space.  We also recognize that she doesn’t have a lot of time, so we like to keep our video content short, sweet, and to the point.

Q: After getting video on your site, what’s the next step? How will you use video to connect with shoppers who may be on retailer’s sites, on social networks, or even on mobile devices in store aisles?

A: We have already started a poster program with Toys R’ Us for 2012.  Since our products are often big and bulky, in store retailers often don’t have the space on their shelves to feature our products.  Our solution to that was to create a large poster that features Step2 items with a QR code that links the customer to the product video.  This allows them to see the product in action and have all of the details to make an informed decision about their purchase while in store.  We know that it is imperative to have our videos featured on every retailer’s website that carries our products.  We hope to have all of our videos pushed out to our online retailer sites in the upcoming months.  Additionally, we intend on using videos to announce an email promotion or to introduce a new item to market on Facebook.  Linking the potential purchaser to a video showing the product in use is a lot more powerful than a static photo.

Over 1,000 shoppers were surveyed to find out how they use video in shopping and what elements matter to them. We invite you to join the e-tailing group President, Lauren Freedman, and Invodo Director of Marketing, Russ Somers, who will share these research insights and the implications for online and multichannel merchants. Register today>>

Learn:
- Where, why, and how consumers watch video
- Where video performs best
- What consumers will watch – and what they won’t
- How consumers use video to make purchase decisions

Consumers expect video to be a part of their shopping experience. But how do you know what type of video will engage and convert them? Find out why video quality matters, what today’s consumer will watch, how to extend your video investment across channels to leverage the power of social networks and mobile devices, and more.

Leave with insight into consumer behavior and best practices to engage and inspire your shoppers.

This was a record-setting season for online retail. Cyber Monday was the busiest ever, at $1.25 billion according to Comscore.

To dive a little deeper into the record-setting activity that occurred in eCommerce video, we dived into data from across the Invodo client base. That’s the largest network of video-enabled retailers in one place. Tens of thousands of videos across about 100 retailers and major brands gives us a good read on how shoppers used video during 2011 and during the holiday season. Key learnings:

Today’s shopper relies on video more than ever – and more experienced shoppers lead the trend. As previously reported, Cyber Monday video views increased by 897% and Black Friday video views increased by 337% over 2010. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Looking at all of Q4 2011, video views increased by more than 3x. Why was Cyber Monday even bigger? Good question. My take – Cyber Monday shoppers are the most sophisticated and dedicated online shoppers. They know how to take full advantage of the tools available to them, from reviews and free shipping to video and 3D interactive experiences.

Shoppers prefer Facebook and email for sharing. 46% of Q4 video shares were on Facebook. Email was nearly as popular, accounting for 40% of shares, and Twitter was used 14% of the time. If you don’t have sharing enabled for your videos, you’re missing out on an easy opportunity to get additional views and sales.

Today’s holiday shopper is wired, multichannel, and multiplatform. Mobile browsers accounted for 12% of holiday season video views on Invodo client sites. Over half of that – 6.3% – was iPad, and Android was 3.5%. I saw plenty of people using their phones in store aisles to check prices and availability as well as to get product information without waiting for a store associate.

That’s a lot bigger than any discussion about HTML5 versus Flash. The same shopper may research on a laptop, stop into a store to kick the tires, view a product video on their phone while in the aisle, and ultimately purchase on their iPad. Are you leveraging your videos and other content smoothly across these touchpoints?

A final point: if this season was groundbreaking in terms of tablet usage, I can’t wait to see what happens in 2012. Reason: the Kindle Fire’s adoption rate has overtaken the iPad’s. Amazon has planted an Amazon-connected storefront in the hands of millions of consumers. Am I the only one who sees eCommerce implications there? How will that affect Apple’s iPad strategy?

Shoppers are vocal about which videos help them shop – and which do not. Shoppers using Invodo’s Ratings and Comments feature rated videos an average of 4.19 out of 5 stars. Apparel, do-it-yourself and toys received the highest marks, but multichannel retailers scored well across all product categories.

In a subset analyzed for content, videos that included a demonstration of product features receives almost a full star more than videos that did not. User comments on videos without clear product demonstrations included responses such as “I expected to see the product in use.” This is a “video coming of age” phenomenon. Consumers expect video, like any other site content, to provide value above and beyond simply creating motion to catch the eye.

Video drives conversion across product categories, but does so differently depending on type of product and type of shopper. Given the size of the Invodo client base and the depth of our analytics, there’s some surprising and useful data there. Stay tuned – that’s coming in a second post as soon as I have an hour to crunch the data and an afternoon to put it in context. If you’re not subscribed to the blog, this might be a good time to sign up.

Online shopping lacks the physical experience that accompanies browsing and purchasing in a brick-and-mortar store. As a result, ecommerce retailers must constantly be on the lookout for new methods to showcase their products in effective and compelling ways.

One popular way that online retail brands set themselves apart from the competition and engage consumers more effectively during the shopping process is through the use of videos that tell a visual story about how products can be used.

Online merchants can incorporate video into their visitors’ ecommerce experiences in a number of different ways. Let’s examine six considerations for testing the effectiveness of how video performs on websites:

1. Video vs. No Video. Perhaps the simplest way for you to test the performance of video on your website is by segmenting traffic so a percentage of site visitors receives a video demonstrating the product on the product page while the rest receive the same page without the video. In a test like this, one version of the page would contain only a product photo accompanied by its description, while another version would contain a video of the product accompanying the details.

A major retailer that Monetate works with recently learned that seeing was believing with product videos. While management initially thought that the play button would obscure the product and confuse visitors, this assumption did not bear out when tested. In fact, the video version of the product page was more successful, and lifted the conversion rate by 1.26% while generating a significant projected annual revenue impact.

2. Video A vs. Video B. Another way to test the impact of video on your website is by delivering two different product videos to different groups of website traffic. A test of this nature is important when you have a number of merchandising videos to choose from (perhaps showcasing different product attributes or styles) and are interested in identifying which video is more likely to resonate with consumers, and ultimately influence sales.

3. Which Play Button Is the Best? You have countless options for enticing consumers to play a product video, but how can you be sure which one will have the biggest impact on whether the consumer decides to actually click ‘Play’? In order to make an educated decision, marketers should test different options of what the play command looks like and optimize all website videos towards the version that is shown to generate the most clicks, boost the add-to-cart rate, increase conversion, etc.

A few options for the play button include a semi-transparent overlay on top of the video itself that’s intended to make it stand out on the page, a play arrow that points to the right, or a version of the word play that appears somewhere on the image thumbnail, as shown in the example to the right from Altrec.com.

4. Auto-Play vs. Click-to-Play. You will want to decide whether to serve consumers video that plays on its own as soon as a page loads or video that has to be triggered by a user action before it plays. This can be tested by segmenting different groups of traffic to receive auto-play and click-to-play video options, and then determining what is more efficient for the particular goal you are trying to accomplish with each video.

5. Thumbnails, Titles and Descriptions. The video thumbnail is the first thing a consumer sees when visiting a page with a video. This important first impression can make or break a video’s success. Working under the assumption that more compelling thumbnails will drive more views, you should not neglect this essential aspect of merchandising the video on your website. Constantly test new thumbnail options to ensure you’re displaying the most successful image at all times.

While video titles and descriptions can seem like an afterthought compared to the production of the video, they are essential to the video’s ultimate performance—titles, descriptions and thumbnails are the foremost attributes that consumers use to determine whether they watch videos online.

6. Video Badging. Product badging, a simple way to do smart merchandising, is the modern version of what shopkeepers have been doing in-person with customers for decades: calling attention to product features and benefits to get shoppers to interact with the merchandise.

Badging represents a powerful psychological tool that taps into consumers’ inherent need to be directed toward particular products, and the same rule applies with video. Just like badging a product thumbnail with messages like “staff pick” or “free shipping,” you should consider implementing the same method with videos, as shown in the example below from FreePeople. The most important thing to remember when badging videos, of course, is to test different variations and iterations to identify the ones that perform best.

Lastly, and most importantly, the guiding principle behind testing whether video will make an impact on your business is to have a clear vision of your goals before you test video content. You have to understand what you want to achieve from video—whether it is driving traffic, increasing conversion rates, boosting the average order value, or something else—before integrating it into visitors’ website experience.

When testing to get the most out of your video efforts, ask yourself the following baseline questions:

• Who is the test for?
• What does the test show?
• When will the test run?
• Why are we running the test in the first place?

The answers will help establish clear goals for your video campaigns and serve as a guide when you work towards meeting or exceeding them.

Adam Figueira is Product Marketing Manager at Monetate, the leading provider of website A/B and multivariate testing, targeting & personalization.

Babies “R” Us was noted as having an exceptional online store that helps shoppers find exactly what they are looking for. Babies “R” Us employs video to showcase products as well as to offer service support. In the example below, a virtual advisor explains the perks of the Rewards “R” Us program.

Office Depot made the list for their multi-channel approach that enables customers to shop and buy anywhere. Their scan-and-go mobile app makes ordering office supplies easy, with only a few swipes of a screen. As you can see below in the videos, Office Depot pros give detailed information along with demonstrations to equip shoppers to make the best purchase decisions.