In online video, Advertisers and Marketers look to Click Through Rate and Completion rate when measuring their KPI. Most call it a roaring success if their campaign achieved a large enough view count. But, just because users viewed the video does not mean that they actually engaged with the product/service that was being marketed/advertised via the video. Advisertiser and Marketers may have seized some of the mindshare of these viewers, but they often miss the opportunity to see action from these same viewers. Video is a fantastic medium to motivate consumers, but that motivation has had very little outlet to action in sharing the information with others via social networks today.
Before we talk about how to improve engagement, let’s first focus on the most fundamental issue with video. — The video discovery issue. This fundamental issue for online video is that one frame that is chosen to entice the click cannot tell the story about what is in the video. One image can not represent the entire story, but to to get viewers to click, most publishers 40% of the time resort to click-bait. Click-bait is an image that has little to do with the video, but is visually appealing; the viewers click and find they were misled. The net result of this is that there are fewer clicks on the video as viewers have been fooled before and the few viewers that click end up abandoning the video the second they find out that they have been click baited into the video.
Videogram, an innovative video UX format solves the issue of discovery and engagement by presenting the video in an interactive pictorial summary. With this reverse storyboard presented, the viewer can get the context of the video in one glance. Moreover, what you see is what you get aka no clickbait. The user can also sample the video from any interesting frame/clip. By enabling multiple entry points into the video, the user is able to pick visually whatever entices them in order to understand the context of the video better(snacking on the video).
Once the video is discovered, the Videogram format with it’s unique social interface engages the user for easy and; immersive social sharing. The user is allowed to freeze-frame at any point of the video, comment, and share to social networks. This brings in more engagement from the social graph. What a new viewer sees in their social network is a specific part of the video with an image and contextual comments chosen by a person they trust from their social graph.
In our field trials with 30 major brands, we have seen ClickThrough-Rate (discovery) and engagement time (time spent watching, rewatching, sharing, commenting on the video) increase dramatically.
You don’t have to believe us. You can find out for yourself how Videogram performs against a single frame video embed. Today, we are making A/B testing available via our platform. You can select to show 50% of your site visitors your video in Videogram format and the other 50% in Single Frame video embed and track the metrics in our dashboard. See the embed below to understand how this will work. Click on the refresh button under the embed and it will toggle between Single Frame embed and Videogram. In this example, each refresh is a new user coming to your site. They either see a single frame embed or Videogram embed. You can sign up as publisher at https://www.videogram.com/ and contact us via mail at publisher@videogram.com to enable the A/B test feature.