Peering Into the Future of Online Video

By Jim Dicso

E-Commerce Times
07/15/11 7:00 AM PT

For large retailers, last year was a year of experimentation with online video. The industry now moves into the future with many valuable lessons learned. There's a new focus on ROI, personalization, optimizing video for the user's specific platform, reaching mobile devices and turning online video ads into an effective tool for brand-lifting.

2010 saw many large retailers experiment with online video.

According to eMarketer, nearly three quarters of all U.S. retailers featured video on their sites in Q4 of 2010, which is up 55 percent from a year earlier.

They created homepage videos, how-to videos and select product videos on their websites and other channels such as YouTube.
Many retailers took a qualitative view of program success, using metrics such as view rates, completion rates, number of videos viewed per visit, stickiness of video viewers, etc.
Some of these retailers also looked at more quantitative measures such as conversion rates and how many videos were indexed in Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).
In 2011, savvy online retailers are taking a more focused approach to measuring the focus of their online video program.

---

 Listen to the podcast (7:23 minutes). 

---

This podcast reviews the state of online video, its multiple benefits and future industry trends including:

• Measuring online video ROI: Online retailers are now able to take a more focused approach to measuring the effectiveness of online video.
• Personalization: Through online video, retailers are working to make the website experience resemble the in-store experience.
• Optimization: New solutions are changing user interfaces to make videos more accessible, working to make videos more exposed to search bots, scaling videos in order to reach long-tail keywords, and automating production in order to have video available as soon as new products are introduced.
• Mobile videos: Video's multi-platform capabilities enable online businesses to reach visitors wherever they are, fueling the importance of video catalogs for consumers who, for example, might use them on handheld devices to aid comparison shopping as they browse in physical stores.
• Online video advertising: Video ads are six times more effective for brand-lifting than other ads, according to a recent case study by Beet.TV.

Jim discusses how the industry is likely to see major shifts from Website text to video, from TV ads to online video ads and from expensive, time-consuming video production to automated, scalable, personalized, effective online videos.