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