Part of what I do here at Something Digital is what I love most and that’s to be “Strategically Creative.” I know, I’m one of a very lucky few to be able to say I enjoy every part of my job, but this is my favorite part.

After I took my 3 year old to daycare this morning I hopped on the bus and starting reading my morning research articles, as I normally do, and  I found one that was particularly interesting. It was highlighting the use of video in product pages of e-Commerce websites and the author gave some really persuading statistics. If you were ever thinking about adding a product review in a video format, then the evidence is out there to support it. After doing some additional research on the topic from a few other sources, I was convinced. BUT, I wanted to test it. Then I remembered that I had created a blog post just last week with  videos on it which I pulled in from YouTube – I wonder how that was performing.

But before I go into that, here are some nuggets from my online research that I want to share:

• 55% of online retailers used video on product pages in 2009 but this technique increased to 73% of retailers in 2010.
• consumers spend 9% more time viewing the page compared to when no video is present.
• consumers who watch product videos are 85% more likely to buy products compared to those who do not watch.
• online retail shoppers who watch video spend about two minutes more on that site and are 64% more likely to buy compared to others.
• 46% of consumers who shop online regularly prefer shopping on retail sites providing product video compared to 30% of consumers who occasionally shop online.
• Watching a minute of video is the equivalent of reading 1.8 million words

Interesting.

Now here’s where the “Strategically Creative” part of my job comes in. I use research and statistics to determine next steps, whether it’s an ad campaign or something to do with SEO and website design elements. I won’t budge unless the evidence supports it – almost to a fault. (I know my boss doesn’t like it, but it’s one of the reasons he put me in this position) Then comes the creative part of taking that data and addressing it head on in a way that speaks to the audience.

So here’s my research in action.

Last week I had “written” a blog post on the emerging keyword search terms for the week. I say written in quotations because it was more of a video blog post than anything else. I researched the top searched keyword phrases for the week according to Google and found a YouTube news video for the keywords to supplement any writing around the topic. The blog post was, quite simply, these top keywords and the subsequent video – and that was it. (I got some flack for the idea, but I was testing something out).

If all goes well with this post, and according to the research, I should expect to see an increase website views, increase the time on page and increase the inquires to our services.

I arrived at work extremely curious to check out how this video blog post was performing – particularly in relation to other blog posts we’ve done in the past. “Was this a bad idea?” “How did people like it?” “Was this going to be an embarrassment?” “Would this ‘test’ be something that would be beneficial to our clients?”

Immediately I open my Google Analytics and go straight to the content overview section and filter for “blog.” Wow. I was pleasantly surprised. Of all the content we have on our site, this post placed in the top 20 most viewed. Of all the blog posts we ever wrote, it was number 6. And this is in a week’s time – the competing posts in the top 10 were all a month old, or older.

So it was a popular post. Great. Now what?

Well, let’s do a head to head comparison of the metrics – pageviews, time on site, bounce rate and percent exit. Comparing each of the other top 10 blog posts to this new video post, below are the percentage differences for each metric:

As you can see, the results here are, well,  a bit scattered. But there are some interesting nuggets here.

• First is that this post has a high pageview for it’s age, remember that all of the other posts are a month old or older.
• Second is that the time on page for this post (3:13) is longer than every post except for two.
• Third, this post has one of the lowest bounce rates of the competing posts.
• And lastly, this post has the second lowest percentage exit out of all the posts, meaning that roughly 60% of the viewers went on the explore other parts of the website.

I’ve got this giddy grin across my face as I report this to you because I think that this post has been a successful test. But that’s all that it is right now – a test. Sure, we can take the information and make conclusions about what video can do for our clients’ websites, and yes there is other evidence to support it. But I think for this particular test, that may be premature.

“What will the data look like in a month?” “What would happen if I made more posts like it?” “What would happen if the videos were irrelevant to our audience?” “Would people explore more of our website if we use more videos on more pages?”

Well, it looks like we will have some follow up posts on this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and we’ll find out together. If you have any thoughts on the data above, let me know below.