Prezzybox launched our Vidibox Video Content Units last year. For those of you who’ve not seen them, the Vidiboxes are basically banners with product videos embedded into them and look a little bit like this - below.

I’m convinced that the Vidiboxes work better than traditional banners for affiliates, so I’ve been meaning to do some analysis for some time now with regards to the success rate (and particularly the conversion rate) of products that have and don’t have demonstration videos, and thus confirm the validity of the Vidiboxes as affiliate content.

For the purposes of this research I’ve looking at 2 products - the original yellow Sun Jar, which has a product video (and a Vidibox) and the Sun Jar - Blue, which doesn’t and looking at how well each one converts.

The results are really interesting. I’ve compared visitors and sales over the last 3 (and a half) months and here’s my findings:

The main point that stands out here is the difference in conversion rate - with the original Sun Jar having an average conversion rate of 3.02% compared to the conversion rate of the blue Sun Jar of 1.27%. To me this is really interesting. The product imagery, product copy and retail price are identical in every way with the two products, apart from one product being blue and the other being yellow. The only differentiating factor is that the yellow Sun Jar has a product video and the blue one doesn’t. It appears at  first glance therefore, that the yellow Sun Jar has a conversion rate of 1.75% greater than the blue one because it has a product video. This fact is backed up by point number 2…

…The second interesting point to note is the product videos appearance on Youtube. You can see that by clicking here. In 9 months we’ve received 15,855 viewings of this product video, that’s an average of 1761 viewings per month. Now, even if only 10% of those viewing the video on Youtube (could be more, could be less - we’ve not tracked the clickthroughs) click through to Prezzybox and then buy the Sun Jar, then at the conversion rate of 3% we will have achieved an extra 48 sales and generate extra revenue to the tune of approximately £950 for literally shooting a product video and putting it on Youtube, all of which is free of charge. Now, obviously this isn’t going to make us our millions but if we repeat the exercise with every product that warrants a product video, the ROI will soon start to add up.

So - although I don’t have any specific figures as to our video content units increasing conversion, it would appear when analysing the actual product page, that conversion is significantly increased. I can only assume therefore that using a Vidibox will increase the CTR from affiliates to merchants and thus increase commission.

I really do advise affiliates to use video content. In the words of Peter Kay, “it’s the future”.

But how should you use the Vidiboxes? Well, that’s entirely up to you. Jason at Loquax, has been really ingenious with them, displaying them all for people to scroll through. You can see Jason’s handy work here or alternatively you can use them in place of traditional banners or content units.

So, in short, I’m really glad that we took the time and effort to produce our Vidibox content units. I’ll be pushing our creative team to do a whole stack more and also be pushing affiliates to use them more frequently.

Till next time. Toodle pip.

TBW