The best web platforms don't just exhibit technical excellence: They allow organizations to optimize on their own to smash through their KPIs. In this guest blog, our friends at Lemonlight explain how using video on your website can help you achieve and surpass your performance goals on your digital marketing platform.

For years now, the benefits of video on websites have been touted far and wide. Video is being made and being watched at rates faster than ever before and video marketing specifically is transforming the way brands communicate with their audiences online.

It’s no wonder: Video is more engaging, more captivating, and more personal than anything you can write. Including video on your website can boost all your website performance goals and help you attract more new users, engage them into considering a purchase, and convince those already considering your company to take the plunge.

Thinking about investing more resources into video marketing? See how video can boost your ROI and your website metrics.

How Video Helps Improve Your KPIs

Visits

Does video help increase your overall website visits? Absolutely. This is due mainly to video’s positive effects on SEO. Video positively impacts nearly every other site metric as well, so search engines tend to prioritize web pages that include multimedia like video, driving more organic traffic directly from search. SEO giant Moz also found that including video on a page can help increase the number of linkbacks that page gets by almost three times, driving high-intent, relevant traffic directly to your site.

Although website visits alone aren’t the best metric to use to measure your site’s performance, it can be a good barometer of overall awareness, reach, and brand growth, especially when used hand in hand with other data.

Return Visits

Return visits as a data metric can mean a lot more than visits alone. Return visits imply someone enjoyed your site enough to come back and can be a signal of customer loyalty. According to Contently, marketers who leverage their returning customers to drive acquisition efforts can see an ROI of up to 15x, a huge moneymaker compared to new customer acquisition.

And video happens to be one of the best ways to keep users coming back. Video series in particular help brands grow their return visit percentage, like Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series, or Hubspot’s Academy training videos. These videos provide not only knowledge, but fresh, entertaining, and regularly updated knowledge in a form that’s engaging and which keeps users coming back for more.

Time on Page

It makes sense that adding video to your web page would increase its time spent on page - the moment someone hits that play button, their attention is captivated. And if you embed your video directly on your page, the video’s full watch time counts as time spent on page. Without video, it’s more likely that same user lands on your page, skims your written content, and quickly hits the back button.

Wistia ran a test and found that the average time spent on pages without video averaged two minutes and 48 seconds. The average time spent on pages with video? Seven minutes and 21 seconds! That’s an increase of 2.6x the time spent on pages just by adding video.

Bounce Rate

A bounce happens when someone lands on one of your website’s pages, and navigates away from your site without looking at any other pages. It generally signals lack of interest in further exploring your site or content, and therefore, your product or service offerings. Video once again comes to the rescue here, engaging users more than other types of content.

Bounce rate for landing pages with video is 34 percent lower on average than the rest of the site. In one example, adding an explainer video to a homepage lowered bounce rate from 62 percent to 35 percent. That means video is helping engage users while piquing their interest, encouraging them to click around in order to learn more.

Lead Generation

Pages with video have been shown to drive greater lead generation than pages without.

One website A/B test showed a 492 percent increase in conversion rate - from 0.47 percent on a page without video, to 2.79 percent on the same page with a video.

Besides conversions, lead generation should be your number one goal. It’s how you as a company can get your foot in the door and establish that direct line of communication. Since videos are already so much more engaging than other types of content, adding an email capture or gating your video content can lead to a huge increase in leads, helping you grow your brand consideration and reach.  

Video: It's a great idea

You don’t have to add a video to every single page on your website in order to boost each individual page’s ROI. Adding even just one video, maybe to your homepage or your How It Works page, can do the trick, with performance improvements trickling down to everyone one of your pages. But the most important thing is to develop your video marketing strategy from the start, and ensure that your platform partner (like FFW) has set up your site so that you can easily add video to any page you want.

Know what your goals are and how video can help you reach them. Then, you can craft the exact video that’ll help you get there. Whether you create your video in-house, or hire a video agency like Lemonlight, having video at the ready can boost your marketing efforts and help you make significant gains where it matters most