The home page video was an introduction to products offered throughout the site, while the product page video was focused on that particular product. Each visitor to the site was either shown the original page, or the page with the video, and Google Analytics was used to track and analyze the results.

The #1 result I was interested in was the “value per visitor” (total sales divided by the number of unique visitors to the page). I was also interested in the time each visitor spent on the page, and the “bounce rate” (the percentage of people that left the site after viewing that page).

Results

In both experiments, the “video” versions of the page clearly out-performed the original version. No other changes were made to the experiment pages other than the inclusion of a video at the top of the content area.

Home Page Results

Video on the home page had the following results (green = improvement):

Time on page: +36%

Bounce rate: -36%

Visitor value: +111%

Product Page Results:

Video on the product page had the following results (green = improvement, red = no improvement):

Time on page: statistical tie

Bounce rate: +14%

Visitor value: +243%

Video on the product page had a slightly higher bounce rate, but the increase in revenue (2.5 times higher!) per visitor makes the trade-off well worth it.

The above tests ran for 45 days. Based on these results, I am going to be rolling out video to additional product pages, and will continue to track improvements / declines verses the original pages. In the case of the two pages already tested, I feel confident in declaring the video versions to be “winners” and ending the split-tests.

I’ll report further experiment results here. So far, the improvement is dramatic – I highly recommend testing video on your site if you aren’t already!