Website with Videos Sell and Engage your Audience

What is one of the best ways to engage visitors on the web these days? If you answered “with videos,” not only did you read the headline to the article, but you are also 100% correct!

Video is one of the best ways to not only engage people but it can easily enhance your content and generate more ad revenue. Does that sound too good to be true? It’s not. In fact, when it gets down to it, the concept behind why video is so successful is a simple numbers game.

Cost per Mille

The idea of Cost per Mille, or CPM as it is known in the ad industry, has been around for years. Basically it is the “cost per thousand advertising impressions”. So you determine CPM by dividing a cost by the number of impressions in the thousands that it generates.

Now online the concept is skewed a bit because we also get into eCPM or “effective cost per mille”. This is an important factor Google uses to rank site-targeted CPM ads.

Generally speaking, online advertising is calculated using the CPM model with the idea being the longer a person spends on a page; the more ad revenue will be generated. So what is one of the easiest ways to keep someone on a webpage? Aside from targeting male viewers and using pictures of scantily clad women, videos are one of the easiest ways to stretch the clock to the two-minute mark and beyond.

Benefits of Video

• Most engaging format – Recent studies have shown that video is the most engaging form of content. The average time a viewer spends reading something they are interested in is approximately 50 seconds while the average watching time is 2 minutes and 50 seconds.
• Higher rankings – Because of view times and shares, it has been shown by research companies that video content makes it 50 percent more likely to obtain first page search results from Google.
• Positive Feedback – Multiple studies have shown that brand awareness, brand favorability, and purchase intent all increase over 200% through the use of video.

When you think about video and how you watch it yourself as a consumer, it makes sense. Think about what you do when you watch a video. If it is a two to three minute video you resign yourself to spending that time on the page. Unlike with text, where everyone automatically skims and tries to digest it as quickly as possible, video is a format that demands we slow down. But at the same time you get a little bored and your eyes roam around while you listen.

Content is Still King

Of course the old adage “content is king” has not changed, but the medium has. You cannot simply put up a bunch of badly done videos and expect results. Your videos still need to be relevant, interesting, engaging, and produced with a level of quality that you want associated with your brand. Otherwise people will watch a few and determine not to waste time with them again.

Luckily there are a few great services out there to help. First we have VideoElephant which is basically the iStockphoto option for videos which can really provide a lot of basic options for people looking to transform their site via video. There are also great free video editors like YouTube and WeVideo. Plus there are plenty of videos that teach you how to make good videos.

If you are doing videos yourself make sure to invest in good equipment which includes audio. Then it is a matter of creating a plan, writing a script, and running takes until you get it. Of course, just like anything else, practice makes perfect and it usually takes a few tries before you strike gold. But when you do strike, then you get to look forward to improving time on site and engagement metrics along with boosting ad revenue.