You’ve probably visited some sites recently that featured a video clip explaining why the company’s product or service is perfect for you. While some sites let you start the video at your convenience, others launch the video when the page is loaded, forcing you to either:

a. Stop reading anything else on the page and watch the video

b. Stop reading anything else on the page, find the stop button and stop the video

c. Do your best to read the contents of the page, while trying to ignore a talking head

To determine what impact automatically starting the video has on conversion, we performed an A/B test of the exact same page for a B2C lead generation site – the control was the video automatically starting at page load; the test page required the visitor to start the video.

Here are the resulting conversion rates:

Video starting automatically            9.9%

Video not-starting automatically   11.9%

The results don’t surprise me, except i would have expected an even greater difference in conversion rate between the two pages.

Stay tuned as we plan to replicate this test on a B2B lead generation site as well as an eCommerce site.

Landing Page Optimization, landing page testing, online video

At the recent PubCon conference in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to have lunch with Matt Cutts of Google and ask him a few questions regarding SEO. Instead of the usual questions he gets about link weight, though, I wanted to get his thoughts from Google’s perspective on what search marketers should be doing during these rough economic times.

Watch the interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD7a9NdDm98

Google, SEO

Ask a lot of SEO agencies and they’ll tell you that SEO is far more cost effective than PPC in getting qualified customers to your site. Why pay for clicks when you can get that traffic for “free”?

Ask a lot of PPC agencies and they’ll tell you that PPC is far more cost effective than SEO in getting customers to your site. Why spend your limited marketing budget chasing elusive search engine algorithms when you can much better control your visibility and ad creative?

Unfortunately, what both arguments ignore is the important revenue side of the debate – which visitors are likely to convert at a higher rate and spend more when they reach your site – visitors that clicked on an organic listing or a paid listing?

We just completed a 2 year study looking at the value per visitor based on traffic source: (more…)

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