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

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 Hello good people of blogsville. Hope you are well.

I just wanted to write a short post to see how prepared affiliates are for Mothers Day. On the whole I’m reckoning not very!

This isn’t me having a dig, moreover, I think a lot of merchants and affiliates have been caught out by the close proximity of Mothers Day to that commercial bastian of an event which is Valentines Day. Really however this is no excuse, as Mothers Day is one of the big retail occassions of the year and if marketed correctly will, in my opinion,  only be eclipsed by Christmas and Valentines Day in terms of sales.

Is this the fault of the Affiliate? Or should we, as Affiliate Managers, be doing more to help get our affiliates promotions and time table organised? I reckon it’s a combination of the both, but I certainly think there’s more Merchants can do to encourage their affiliates to launch promotions in plenty of time.

So this then leads to the next question - when should merchants launch their promotions?

Well, in my role as an affiliate manager, I try and pre-determine what I would be doing were I an affiliate. Using Christmas as an  example, if I were an affiliate I’d want to start my Christmas promotion in October at the latest, so this would give me time to optimise my pages, promote the years hot selling products, update creative etc.

Then I work backwards. If the affiliates need the creative/promotion in October and it’s going to take us a month to put together the creative/competition prizes/product sales reports etc, then we need to start the work at the beginning of September to make sure the affiliate gets their sales tools in time.

I then give myself and our designers and techies a couple of ‘extra’ weeks grace just in case something happens which delays you a wee while.

…now, I know this isn’t rocket science but it amazes me to see how many merchants and agencies actually launch their promotion a matter of days before the actual event. One of our competitors (via an agency) launched their Fathers Day promotion last year on the Friday before Fathers Day. Now, even if some affiliates had bothered to promote the merchant at the 11th hour, any customer who purchased products wouldn’t have got them prior to fathers day because the postal service/couriers don’t collect and deliver on a Saturday. In short therefore a complete waste of time, effort and dosh.

So, to conclude this, now not so short post, I think we, as merchants need to be doing more to drive promotions forward with our affiliates. Lets provide them with tools, nice and early and work with them to promote the best products for the specific occasion.

(blatant sales pitch…) and if you still havn’t put together a Mothers Day promotion then you need to be quick. Mothers Day is on the 2nd March (less than 2 weeks) and you can find details of our creative by clicking here.

Ten ten. Over and out.

 Zak.

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