April 01, 2008 | Tuesday
Video is changing the Internet - now in paid search
By Matt Brocklehurst, Head of Marketing in Display |Marketing |News |Online Sales |PPC |Search Engines |SEO |Social Media |Web Development
Everywhere I turn recently the talk seems to be of video on the internet - including in paid search - and the power on returns it can/will have.
Guy Phillipson from the IAB spoke at a recent IDM evening event. Amidst slide after slide of stats painting a very rosy picture for digital marketing, even in our credit crunched times, one that really caught my eye was the returns that video ads are providing. Online video massively outperforms standard online ads in terms of awareness (+18.1 compared to a +8.2 when visitors exposed to ads are compared to a control who haven’t) and purchase intent (+3.2 compared to +1.8). In other words someone who has seen a video ad compared to a standard ad is almost twice as likely to buy and more then twice as likely to remember it. Some of this is down to the relative newness of the medium, yes, but still food for thought.
Guy again returns to the theme of video in a recent Marketing Masterclass he provided for Marketing magazine (and which Latitude sponsored) when discussing Universal/Blended Search.
Universal search with videos, images, maps etc appearing in the results is already having an impact. In a recent search piece I did for Marketing I point out that the famous heatmap ,that shows where eyes focus on a screen, has changed. No longer are the top three results in a search page going to necessarily get all the eyeballs. A relevant video or image in number four spot, for example, can get a big share of the attention. Further still, video results are now appearing in the paid search sections as highlighted by a recent blog from Andy Beal:
“Video ads are appearing on select queries as plus box results accompanying a regular text ad. The plus box text has read “Watch commercial,” “Watch demonstration” and “Watch testimonial.”...Advertisers may have a hard time competing with these video ads—but only if users notice the plus boxes. Of course, it’s entirely possible that as users get more and more used to seeing the plus boxes, Google might begin including video players in sponsored results without plus boxes.”
Check out some screen grabs from SE Roundtable showing how this is working for Blackberry.
Video is also appearing more and more on web pages and for good reason. Last week I attended the Travolution Question Time, think the BBC programme but focused on the travel industry and replace David Dimbleby with Kevin May, Travolution editor, and you’re there. One of the most interesting nuggets that emerged was from Ed Kamm, COO of lastminute.com who reported far higher conversion rates on site when visitors looked at videos. Look at the article in today’s NMA on the BBC site redisign and again we see the importance of video:
“It (BBC site) will also include more promotion of the video services around breaking news and live events, as the BBC looks to put video and audio at the heart of story pages with viewers now able to watch video on page rather than in a separate window.”
So it seems that video is working well in ads. Videos are appearing in search results natural and paid. And video is transforming web experiences. Video is changing the internet and I haven’t even mentioned YouTube, Blinkx or Joost.
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