Using Video to Drive Traffic and Conversions: a Merchant Interview

The following post comes out of an email interview I did with Lars Hundley, owner of cleanairgardening.com and several other successful Yahoo! stores. I met Lars at the Internet Retailer conference and he showed me how he has incorporated video into his sites and we talked about how it has helped.

Lars demonstrates the Big Round Compost bin. Highlights: 0:02–The Clean Air Gardening jingle, 0:12–Lars demonstrates how much the bin can hold, 2:08–Video cross-sell merchandising–very smart.

Tell me a bit about your store(s) and how long you have been with Yahoo!?

We’ve been with Yahoo! since 1999. I started out in 1998 by building the web site myself with an HTML editor. But I wasn’t a programmer, so I couldn’t figure out how to get a secure shopping cart to work. I could only take orders over the phone. I switched to Yahoo! and my sales have grown either exponentially or by double digits every year since.

We were one of the early online stores to sell manual reel mowers and compost bins online, and we couldn’t have done it without an easy to use platform like Yahoo! We’re coming up on our 10th year in business, and our 9th year with Yahoo! That’s a pretty long time in Internet years, isn’t it?

At the show we discussed using video on your site. How did you go about producing the videos and incorporating them into your site?

I started out by simply shooting them with my little $200 Canon digital camera that also had a video feature. I would just have someone push the button and hold the camera while I demonstrated a product, and then we would upload the video file to the “Files” part of the store, so that people could click on a link and download the video to watch it.

But then I realized that I could upload them to Yahoo! Video for free and embed the video right on the product page, so that people could click on the video and play it while they were still on the site.

Since then, I have gotten slightly more advanced with my setup, although it’s still pretty straightforward. I bought a real video camera for around $300, and I shoot with that now instead of the digital camera. Then I import the video into my Mac and edit it after I shoot. I add an introduction title screen with our company name on it, using Apple iMovie. Then I take the finished video and upload it to Yahoo! Video. (You can see my Yahoo! Studio space here: http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?sid=86695)

Are there specific products you think are demonstrated better with video?

Yes and no. In an ideal world, I’d love to shoot a video for every single product that we sell! I think it’s helpful to customers to see almost any product in action, or watch a real live person tell them about the product.

But in the real world, it takes time to shoot the video and edit it and upload it. So I concentrate on products that are more expensive, and products that are complicated or uncommon and that might otherwise result in someone calling on the phone to ask a lot of questions. By creating an informative video, I can answer all of those questions upfront, which saves time for us, and for people who want to learn about the product and get a better idea of how it works.

I’m sure most other Yahoo! merchants out there have some kind of a product that ends up being a constant source of email and phone questions. That’s the kind of product that is perfect for shooting a video, because customers obviously want to know more about it.

What has been the impact in terms of traffic? Did you post the videos to other sites as well or just on your own site?

It’s hard to measure exactly how much new site traffic we’re getting directly as a result of the videos, but traffic is up in general by 35 percent compared to last year.

And yes, we also uploaded our product videos to YouTube and Google Video, and people are watching them there too, even when we don’t embed them on our site. They are actually finding them directly on those sites and watching them on their own. Who would have thought?

We’ve gotten tens of thousands of video views if you add them all up at all the places we have them uploaded, so people are obviously interested watching them. And I see comments all the time with the incoming orders where customers mention that they bought from us because of the informative product videos. So it has definitely paid off with better conversion rates and happier, better informed customers.

By the way, one quick tip to other Yahoo! merchants who want to do this. I always mention our company name in the videos, and I start out with an introduction screen that says Clean Air Gardening. That way I don’t have to worry about competitors embedding my videos on their sites. I’m thrilled if people start embedding it other places.

Are you reaching a whole new audience, more deeply engaging with your current audience, or both?

I’d say that we are primarily engaging our current site visitors better. We’re getting better informed customers too, which has resulted in lower returns. We do get a decent number of people who watch the videos on the other video sites without visiting our site first, but that isn’t a major part of our overall video views.

After seeing the success we’ve had with simple product videos, we plan to make more strictly educational videos so that we can bring in a wider audience of people interested in environmentally friendly lawn and garden issues. I think that these educational videos will certainly bring in a new audience of people who are just looking for good information. Hopefully, some of those viewers will buy something, but even if they don’t, we’re getting our name out there for free, and using our expertise to teach others.

Have you seen any impact on conversion or are you just driving more traffic to your site which converts at the same rate?

We have been working on a lot of things to increase our conversion rates in the past year in addition to adding video, so it’s hard to know exactly what is responsible for the increase. But in general, our conversion rate is up 12 ½ percent over last year’s conversion rate. Judging by the number of people who email about our videos or mention them during checkout, I would say that the videos have played a substantial role in that increase.

It has helped show our customers that we aren’t just another faceless web site selling the same stuff as every other site.

We’re real people who actually care about and understand the products that we sell, and the videos help demonstrate that.

What was the biggest obstacle to using video on your site?

The biggest obstacle is simply taking the time to make and upload the videos! Even though I know first hand how valuable they are, I still have a list of 50 more products right now that I still need to shoot. Just like other Yahoo! Store owners, I get caught up in running orders and answering emails, and then another day has gone by with no new videos. Everything else is pretty easy, but you still have to take the time to do it.

Thanks Lars for sharing your experiences with video. No doubt other merchants may be inspired to tackle video on their sites after reading this post.

One final thought: Ideas such as this, and video is certainly not the only one, will help your site stand out from and gain an advantage on your competition. Certainly you have to get the basics down before tackling a project like this, but the most successful merchants I have spoken with have one trait in common: they are creative risk-takers. They are willing to try new ideas such as this and while many “viral marketing” ideas will not yield big results, it only takes one that does to push your business to the next level. Try to carve out some time each week to step back from the basic operations of your business and answer the question “what if we did…”

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Notice of Order URL Redirect—No Action Required

As part of our continuing efforts to ensure the highest availability of checkout and redundant servers, you may soon notice the URL changes when entering checkout for stores using Checkout Manager. This change does not affect stores still using Order Forms (older checkout).

Current URL:

• order.store.yahoo.net/…

Revised URL:

• us-dc1-order.store.yahoo.net… or
• us-dc2-order.store.yahoo.net…

No Action Required
No action is required on your part as a result of this change. If you are hard-coding URLs to checkout, you should continue to use the same URL as you currently do.

Note: Do not change any URLs to point to one of the new URLs or else your checkout could be impacted if there is maintenance ongoing on one set of order servers.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Karl Ribas Recaps SMX–Search Marketing Expo

The following post comes from search engine marketing consultant Karl Ribas of All Web Promotion. At the same time that the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions team was busy at Internet Retailer 2007, the elite of the search marketing world gathered at the first Search Marketing Expo conference. Karl provides an excellent recap of his experience in this full-length post. –Paul

As some of you may or may not know, last week in Seattle was the very first ever Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference… a conference for the experienced and more advanced search engine marketer. Unlike other search marketing conferences that you may be familiar with, SMX is all about providing an atmosphere where sessions, exhibits, and after-conference networking events start and remain at an advanced level. In other words… the basics of SEO and PPC are thrown right out the window.

I was fortunate enough to have attended this conference, and so as a Yahoo! Store developer, I was asked to step in and share some of the sights and sounds of my experience. With this post, I am hoping to provide readers with a quick run-down of the conference itself, as well as some of the many tips and strategies (those that will be most beneficial in your marketing and development efforts) that were shared.

SMX Advanced kicked off strong on Monday morning with a Q&A session with the ever-so-popular Google engineer Matt Cutts. Members of the audience were able to pose search related questions directly at Matt, and he of course would attempt to answer them. I was actually impressed by this session. Going in, I thought Matt would be pleading the 5th on almost half of everything that was asked, but he didn’t. He did a tremendous job of addressing near every question.

The conference proceeded on with a 2-track schedule where attendees could choose to follow a track focused on organic SEO, or one on paid search advertising (Pay Per Click). Personally speaking, I was quite happy with only having two tracks to decide between. I’ve been to a couple of conferences in the past where the schedule had as many as four or more tracks going at one time… which makes it very difficult for attendees with interest in multiple areas to be able to catch all that they’d like to.

SMX Advanced ended on Tuesday late-afternoon with the “Give It Up” session that featured an all-star panel of search marketing professionals. During this session, speakers (including Matt Cutts) provided the audience with some of their better industry tips and tricks. Unfortunately, due to an embargo that was formed just before the session got underway (it was the only way the panel would share their goods) we, the members of the audience, are not able to share with you any of the details presented during that session. Sorry guys.

However, as I mentioned above, I do have a few other take-a-ways that should prove to be useful in your marketing efforts:

Duplicate Content Issues (SEO)

Duplicate content was a pretty big concern at SMX, as having non-unique content on your website is quickly becoming a bigger and bigger problem for online merchants. Website’s with duplicate or similar sets of content are often at times filtered out (ex: Google’s supplemental results) or, in some cases, may even be banned entirely from the search engines. And rightfully so.

From a search engine’s point-of-view, their one and only goal is to serve a variety of quality results per query, not multiple versions of the same content blasted across different websites. With that said, my suggestions for merchants (as backed from conversations at SMX), is to either write or hire a copywriter to write brand new, keyword-focused copy for each of your pages and products.

One of the bigger problems I see when optimizing a Yahoo! Store is that merchants will “borrow” product descriptions and such from the manufacturer’s website. This is among the worse things you can do for two reasons. One, the manufacturer is the originator of that content and Google, Yahoo!, and other engines are most likely going to rank them over you. Second, every other merchant that resells that product is no doubt “borrowing” the same product descriptions as you are… which in the end provides you with even less of chance to rank high in the search engines. The easiest way to overcome this is to just write your own product descriptions.

Quality Linking (SEO)

Linking is a big part of the search engine optimization process, as I assume most of you understand quite well. Search engines use links to help them understand what a website, more specifically each page within that site, is really about. Therefore it is in your best interest to encourage others to link to you.

However, what most people fail to realize is that it’s not the sheer number of backlinks pointing to your website that merits a boost is search engine rankings, rather it is the number of quality backlinks involved. A website with 1 or 2 quality backlinks can, and most likely will, out-rank a website with 1 or 2 hundred backlinks.

So now the question becomes “what constitutes a quality backlink”? Well, aside from being a relevant source, one thing that was mentioned at SMX was that the page linking to you should have several sources linking to it. This makes perfect sense, right? The stronger the page is that links to your page, the stronger that page will make your page. So the next time you go out and exchange links with a website, request a link on a popular page, such as an article or resource of some kind, rather than a website’s link page… which most likely has no links pointing to it.

Using Day Parting (PPC)

Day parting was also a pretty big topic of discussion at SMX Advanced. Day-Parting, for those of you who don’t know, is a Pay Per Click term which means limiting your PPC campaigns to only a few hours per day. For instance, depending on the target-audience that you’re trying to reach, you may find it worthwhile to have your PPC advertisements run only during morning hours, as opposed to the entire day. And vise versa for other markets and audiences.

The ultimate goal with day-parting is to decrease the amount of wasteful spending (times when clicks lead to little or no conversions) and re-focus that budget on times that are most valuable to you. The common suggestion at SMX was to review over your website’s stats (number of visitors, conversion data, etc.), and find out which hours of the day (or even days of the week) your visitors seem to click and convert most. Now knowing this data, you can test those measures and limit your ad campaigns to only those time periods.

On an extra note: most PPC platforms offer some type of Day Parting program which makes it easier for you to set and monitor.

Using the Keyword Insertion Tool (PPC)

The keyword insertion tool is a small little tool that resides within every major PPC platform (Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter), and its sole function is to automatically implement your individual keywords into your ad copy. For instance, let’s say that you have an ad group with 100 or so keywords in it (quite common really), and let’s also say that you only have one ad running in that same group. Well instead of running just a general ad, the keyword insertion tool will automatically implement your keywords (when searched) into the ad’s title and description.

At SMX, there were quite a few discussions on whether or not using the tool might actually increase one’s quality score. I will say that it probably doesn’t influence your quality score directly; however, because of the nature of the tool, I’m thinking that it creates a much better ad, which in return boosts your quality score.

Elements of Quality Score

Quality score, which is the engine’s secret sauce for ranking a PPC advertisement, was probably the most talked about topic on the paid search track. It seemed like with every session, someone new was sharing their thoughts on what elements they believe make up the quality score algorithm… and you know, some of the theories were way far-out, while others could very well be dead-on. That’s the beauty of this whole thing… there’s no, nor will there be, validation from the engines.

However, some of the more common elements which are believed to affect your quality score are as follows:

1. Click-Through Rate: The number of times your ad was clicked on vs. the number of times it was displayed. Tip: Create compelling ads that attract people’s attention… to the point where it is being clicked on regularly.
2. Keyword Relevance: How well the keywords you’re bidding on reflect the products or services you’re selling. Tip: Use a combination of broad and specific terms that describe your products and services for each adgroup.
3. Landing Page Relevance: How well the page that you’ve specified (via the destination URL) reflects the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding on. Tip: Send traffic to the appropriate category pages and not just the home page. (Ex: the term “Nike hats” would do better if it sent search users to the “hats” page of your Nike store, rather than the home page).
4. Ad-Text Relevance: How well your ad copy relates to the keywords (products and services) that you’re bidding Tip: Include keywords in your ad’s titles and descriptions.

And that’s that. Overall, I’m going to say that the conference was very successful. SMX provided an atmosphere where veteran search marketers could learn, share ideas, and even interact with others as proficient in the industry as they are. I was very pleased with how the conference was scheduled (location, time of year, times of sessions and breaks, etc.), and I very much enjoyed the smaller, close-knit atmosphere that was emitted.

Karl Ribas
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Due Maternity Connects with Customers and Drives Traffic with Yahoo! Widgets

The following post is an interview with Albert DiPadova of Due Maternity. Albert alerted us to his use of Yahoo! Widgets as another tool to help build community, engage with new and returning visitors, and drive traffic through providing valuable content to customers.–Paul

Tell me a bit about Due Maternity? How long have you been in business and what is your market?

Due Maternity has grown into a collection of five retail boutiques in Atlanta, Austin, Santa Barbara and San Francisco. We launched its online ecommerce website in the summer of 2003. Now in our fourth year we are currently ranked no.1 on most all maternity industry key word terms like “Maternity Clothes” and all things related.

This was due to our partnership with Yahoo! where we have been able to enjoy the traffic and marketing opportunities available to merchants.

Here’s our latest press release about it: www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=250643

Due Maternity Widget brings visitors from the desktop to the website

Tell me about the Widget you built. What are the features and how does this tie into your store?

Due Maternity chose Yahoo! Widgets because they run on Macs and Windows and they are very easy to download and install. We authored the Widget on the Macintosh using a text editor and Photoshop, and deployed the Widget through the Yahoo! Gallery and our own marketing efforts.

How did you get the idea for a Yahoo! Widget?

We were looking for a way to reach out to our customer in a meaningful way. Widgets are one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to keep your brand top of mind and provide our customers a useful and fun way to reconnect with our site.

Our Widget tells you how many months, weeks, and days left before your bundle of joy arrives, and you get to customize it with your baby’s name and choice of pink, green or blue face.

The most important thing our Widget does is alert our customers on the first day of each trimester with a link to our site that has important information about your baby’s development.

How long did it take to build roughly and what level of knowledge was required?

The Widget required about a day’s worth of effort from a good graphic designer and programmer who was familiar with JavaScript and Yahoo! Widgets. Because Yahoo! Widgets are built using XML, JavaScript and graphics files, they present a really accessible way for web developers to provide desktop functionality.

What are the hopes for this in terms of driving awareness or traffic? If you are seeing results, are they better than expected or not quite to expectation?

We’ve seen more than 3000 downloads the first week and it is quickly become one of our leading sources of new customers. This is truly amazing response. I was a little worried that newly expecting moms might be a bit intimidated by downloading a program, then downloading our Widget, but I was dead wrong. Or maybe there are another 3000 that couldn’t figure it out but I hear in the next release there will be a single download and install button for all Widgets…. Either way, it’s more traffic than we ever expected!

How much traffic are you getting from this?

Five days into it we’ve seen 5000 clicks and $1500 in sales. Not a tidal wave but it’s still growing.

Are you doing other viral tactics and if so what?

We are producing some really fun media that will be the first of its kind in the Maternity industry, but I can’t tell you what it is until next month.

In terms of ways to promote your store, what else do you do (SEO, PPC, social networking, etc.)?

We’re doing everything right now, National Print to Paid Search but I think the real break through is in unorthodox media projects that not only advertise your company but also really give the customer something useful and entertaining to play with.

If you could offer new merchants one tip for building traffic to their store, what would it be?

Create a community with relevant content, build your customer base using all the free new media out there: YouTube, Del.ic.ious, Vertical Response, MarketWire, MySpace, Facebook, iMovie, PodCasts, Slide, Blogs and of course Yahoo! WIDGETS!

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business