Transcription of Video
So last week we had a client come to us wanting to produce a video. The main purpose of the video was for brand awareness and to actually drive traffic back to their website. So a lot of the normal rules of SEO video don’t really apply for this. So what we did was we actually used YouTube Display Advertising and used the click to call to action in the lower third overlay. There were pretty interesting results. We got a very high click through and lows costs for the client. So we’d just like to run through how we did it, step-by-step. So it’s probably best if we head back over to the computer and we’ll show you how we did it.

Okay. There are a couple of things you need to do to start off. What you need to do is actually set up an account with AdWords. I’m not going to show you that because it’s a fairly easy and straightforward process. You just enter in your payment details and all, and give them some money, and away you go.

So once all that’s set up, what you have to do is to decide which video that you actually want to promote. So once you go into the actual video, once you’re logged in, along here you just hit “Promote”. Now this will start up the actual promotion process. So it automatically selects the video that you’re on. Then go in here and hit “‘Next, I agree.”

So now we need to actually create an ad. Now you might be thinking, “I don’t want to pay for anything.” But what you do is you put a very, very low cost per click, like 1p or $0.01. Then bid for a very, very high keywords, but I’ll show you all this anyway.

So obviously, you put something a bit better for that. Select the thumbnail that you want, enter in the keywords. Now, because we only want this to show up on our own video, so we don’t actually have to pay that much for it, either put in like a stupidly highly searched keyword like Lady GaGa or football or baseball or something like that, or put something that’s highly viewed that you can control. So for this I’m actually going to put our company name. So add this to the list so it goes up to there. Then we hit, “Next”. Now set your cost per view. So we want that very low, so 1p. If you’re in the States it’ll be for this. You match your maximum daily budget at 6 pounds. It needs to be up over 5 pounds for it to actually kick in, so just hit it for 6. Okay, “Rrun the promotion”. There that’s all done.

What we now need to do is actually create the overlay. So we go back into the settings for the actual video that we’re running the promotion on. Then now you’ll see we’ve got this call-to-action overlay. Now, I’ve already created this just for speed. So we’ve got the headline. We’ve got description line one and description line two. Now image URL, this is really important. It really pulls out the ad and makes it very highly clickable, and it’s 56×56 pixels. It needs to be on the Web somewhere so you can run it off your own website or put it on whatever photo sharing site you use, the display URL and the destination URL. All pretty straightforward, very similar to AdWords. Hit “Save Changes”.

Then it’s pretty much instant, so if we go and view this page, there we go. There’s the actual video, linking off, got our logo, all looking lovely. It’s super easy to promote your own brand or push out links to other websites.

Now with this, it comes on automatically. It runs for 15 seconds, and then will fade away. We’re still able to view it, but we are right down at the bottom here. Obviously, if people want to get rid of it, they can just close that. So it’s not overly offensive. It’s quite subtle, but it looks really, really nice, especially with the image there as well.

So I hope that helps. If you’ve got any questions, put them in the comments below. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Direct Marketing News recently wrote about Paintball-online.com highlighting its video description of the products and analyzing how it improved the conversion rates.

When the company started thinking out of the box, it came up with the idea to use videos to deliver their pitch and description of the product. The marketing director claims that visitors are more comfortable with 30 second video than reading five long paragraphs about the products. He believes this has brought a small revolution within the company.

Treepodia and Paintball-online.com have joined hands to bring these videos to the visitors. Treepodia has a unique way of producing videos where they use pre-created templates to add new product descriptions hence saving time and money.

Another interesting thing about this new way of introducing products to customers is the time that customers are spending on the website. A report suggested that average time on the website with video descriptions is 2 minutes whereas for text descriptions it goes down to 35 seconds. Grabbing this much attention simply means more conversions and more sales.

If you have an ecommerce website and you are looking for new ways to grab some serious attention from your potential customers, you may have to take the route that paintball-online.com has gone. With videos describing your products, you are definitely going to attract lot more attention.

At the end of 2010 the Interactive Advertising Bureau  (IAB) conducted a survey titled “An Inside Look at Demand Side Perceptions of Digital Video Advertising” (extremely catchy title) the report, which followed the survey been released and makes very interesting reading. Below are some of the standout results in our opinion.

Growth in Spending for Video Ads

One of the major findings in the report shows that there is a 22% growth in spend on video advertising online. It should be no great surprise that the main reason for this is greater reach, tractability, return on investment and the engagement of consumers.

Video Ad Budgets

The average percentage of video in total ad budgets has come out that 17% which doesn’t seem great amount when you’re talking about £1 million budget, £170,000 produces lots of video advertising and the costs are still low in comparison.

Decision Criteria

Another interesting result which came from the survey is the decision criteria for video advertising, it will be no great shock to find out that the two main decision criteria are the superb targeting and the results that video offers.

This report is a must for any online marketer or publisher you can download via the following link.

On many occasions the YouTube player will simply not do. You may want your video player to match your branding or match your website design or you just don’t like the chrome player that YouTube offers by default. You may think that you are stuck with YouTube’s player if you distribute your videos through YouTube, but with a few simple hacks you are able to use a fully customised JavaScript or Flash player on your website.

JW player by Long tail video offers a fully customise the ball video player which uses the power of both Flash and HTML 5 to deliver fantastic quality and also easily allows you to use you chew at your distribution network.

Step one
Download the JW player from Longtail Video

Step 2

Add the following to in between your <head> </head>tags

</pre>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jwplayer/jwplayer.js"></script>
<pre>

Step 3

Upload the jwplayer.js and player.swf to a folder off the root of your webs server
for example

http://youdomain.com/jwplayer

Step 4

Visit the Setup Wizard at http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player-setup-wizard add all the relevant details.

Step 5
Embed the code into your page

</pre>
<script type='text/javascript' src='jwplayer.js'></script>

<div id='mediaspace'>This text will be replaced</div>

<script type='text/javascript'>
jwplayer('mediaspace').setup({
'flashplayer': 'player.swf',
'file': ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgEPdQwQBIw’,
'backcolor': 'CCCCCC',
'frontcolor': '000000',
'lightcolor': 'CCCCCC',
'screencolor': 'CCCCCC',
'controlbar': 'bottom',
'width': '470',
'height': '320'
});
</script>
<pre>

WordPress Users

You have two options you could use the Object code and embed into the post or download the JinX- the Javascript includer  plugin (better option) and add the Script into the post.

The Results

I have left the YouTube logo in the video but if you would like to remove this please see my How to remove the YouTube Logo post

If I had something for every time I hear one of these comments I’d be better off than I am now.
What people don’t understand is that there is a series of URL parameter hacks, which can solve almost any problem you have with the YouTube Player .

Remove YouTube Logo Watermark

Currently there are two versions of the YouTube logo watermark in distribution
On one the logo is a watermark on the video, the other has the logo displayed in the toolbar.

So to remove either of them you need to use modestbranding

modestbranding=1  turns the logo off
modestbranding=0 turns the logo on

The Iframe embed code is very easy, all you have to do is add modestbranding=1 at the end of the URL, See below

Iframe

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxx?modestbranding=1"
frameborder="0" width="560" height="349"></iframe>

Using the Object code

The object code requires two more steps

The Parameter is the same but you need to add “&” to the beginning &modestbranding=1

You will need to add this to both URL’s

<object width="560" height="349" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/egAX8JID8s8?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0&modestbranding=1" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed width="560" height="349"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/egAX8JID8s8?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0&modestbranding=1"
allowFullScreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" /></object>

The Results

If you are only using the URL to embed your videos then all you have to use is the following.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxx?modestbranding=1

But nothing happens!

So what’s the problem?

Is your video clickable?

Which would you click?

Your thumbnail may be letting you down. Now I can hear you all saying “I can’t choose the thumbnail in YouTube” and you are right but we have an idea of the timings of thumbnails. YouTube will pick an rnadom image from around the following places on the video.

25% – 50% 75%

People like to click faces! Curiosity is human nature so use this to your advantage. Think about early Facebook, Hot or Not and now the new author images in google SRPS. People love faces and respond to them. We have seen a 17% increase in click throughs by changing our thumbnails to a face.

So during the editing stage it a good idea to think about your timings. Have a full face, well framed shot at approx the 20% to 30% stage or 70% to 80% you only need to have one per video to make sure you have it covered.

I was shocked when I read the recent TechCrunch article YouTube Counts Video Ads as Regular Views. Once my shock wore off (about 3 seconds) my hat started to turn a little grey and I started to think about the ways I could use this to my advantage.

to sum up YouTubes position techCrunch got an explanation from a spokesperson.

“When it comes to paid advertising, view count of a video increases only when it’s clear that a viewer has made a choice to watch a video. For example, a viewer might make that intention known by clicking to watch a Promoted Video, opting-in to watch a TrueView in-stream ad, or playing a YouTube video embedded in a homepage ad.
To be clear, with standard in-stream ads where a viewer has no choice in its selection, we do not increase the videos view count.”
Warning this is for deep pockets only

So this is how you do it

• Buy Placement ads on YouTube
• Put a big budget behind it
• Watch the views roll in

You can see how these two films relied heavily on paid views

Rise of the Planet of the Apes 7 million views – 5.8 million were paid views
Conan the Barbarian  5.5 million views 4.98 million of them were paid views

Both of these films where so awful, it’s no great surprise that they needed to pay for 80% of their views.

I’ve been working in internet marketing  for about 6 years now so I have a reasonable sized list. This list of people trust me enough that I am able to ask them to go and view some of my videos. There are different ways you can ask people to get to a video to view it though. A view is not just a view

This is quite difficult to prove but trust me it works.

• A view from a google search result is worth more than a view from an email link
• An embedded view is worth more than a twitter refer
• anything is worth more than a  http no referrer

So if you are going to email your list send a link to the Google SERP’s page, ask them to search for “add keyword here” and go to page X to view it

Youtube is busy there is a huge amount of videos uploaded everyday, if fact there is 35 hours of content uploaded everyday.
So we need to have realistic expectations With any videos which are uploaded

• 70% of all videos uploaded get under 20 views
• fewer than 20% of get more than 500 views
• less than 10% receive over 1500 views
• 3% of videos get more than 25,000 views
• only 1% of videos get over half a million views

This little tactic is so simple it’s easy to overlook. I never take tips at 100% face value so have put these to the test. The results have been fantastic.

If like me in the past you uploaded content to YouTube without much consideration of the times and days of the week you push the submit button, then this is for you.

If your Target audience is over 23 then follow these guidelines.

Days

Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday

Time of the Day

Between 11am – 2pm in the country of your main target audience

If your Target Audience is under 23 then we’ve found that different times work better

Days

Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday

Time of the Day

Between 4pm – 7pm in the country of your main target audience