Comments on: Improving View Through Rate for Product Video: 4 Hypotheses Tested

By: Artem

Artem — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:28:42 +0000

Hello,
Thank you for the article, very interesing, especial in case of percents cos our results is same.
In 2007 we invented new model of advertising and in particular VTR.
You can find our math model there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-through_rate.

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:55:57 +0000

We saw a negative correlation between View-Through-Rate and Conversion Rate. I think we need to remember that for commerce sites VTR is not an end to itself.

By: Roy Spencer White

Roy Spencer White — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:31:31 +0000

Hello Linda,

An outstanding post, including comments, I have just started creating my first video for one of my websites and from my basic research; videos that get the most play are the ones that can deliver their message/call to action in less than 1.5 minutes. As I said this is my first production and I’ve decided to go with a part 1 and part 2 format of about 1.5 minutes each.

Again thanks for posting this information…

Best,
Roy

Remember: Failure is success, if you learn from it.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:31:15 +0000

@Jonathan, yes, you can absolutely segment that with your video analytics (provided you have video analytics). This would give you additional insights, and it’s interesting to correlate completed videos with purchases.

Because the thumbnail image certainly has an impact on the attractiveness of the call-to-action – a good element to test. I haven’t seen any hard, fast best practices for thumbnail images, if you come across any research, please share.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:43:08 +0000

Thanks Russ. Definitely a fertile area for interesting studies!

From the comment about video length, I was thinking it would be interesting to see the difference between one long video that addresses several aspects of the product, say 2-4 minutes, versus 6-8 small videos, each focused on a specific aspect of the product/target.

By: Russ Somers

Russ Somers — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:45:47 +0000

Jonathan,

I couldn’t agree more that quantifying time watched is key. If we break viewers into buckets based on how long they watch, and we track conversion among those groups, we can test different lengths of video and understand the optimal length to drive conversion. There’s information out there now on viewing times, but it’s not ecommerce-specific and not tied to conversion. That’s a direction for some further research we hope to deliver in Q2/Q3.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 04 May 2010 06:01:35 +0000

You mentioned that VTR is the number of videos watched, and then the anomaly of more elements on the page having a higher VTR. I wonder how much time a person has to spend on a video to qualify it as being “watched”.

It would be interesting to break down the VTR into groupings based on length of time spent on the video — perhaps as a percentage of the video length.

Another thought was in the case of static thumbnails, I wonder whether there are some good guidelines on what types of images/frames might impact VTR, or anything about the frame text title that had an effect on the VTR.

Nice post, Linda!