Video Players and E-commerce Insights

More and more people are watching video online rather than reading text. Video brings your story and your product to life. Video converts better because there is no other medium that can convey emotion and information so well about your company, your products and your services. This makes video a very interesting medium for e-commerce websites. But how do you come up with a smart video strategy?

Did you know that your branding and reach on video platforms and social platforms also help your competitors?

It is obvious that you want to achieve more brand awareness with video. Then it makes sense to post your videos on platforms such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. There is potential reach there. However, one does end up in an ocean of videos where your competitors are also preying on the same consumer. It is in the interest of these platforms to show visitors as many videos as possible, not yours specifically. Because that way they can show more ads. That’s their revenue model. Thus, your competitors’ videos are placed below, next to or after yours. Competitors can additionally advertise on your reach. So on the one hand, these platforms can help generate brand awareness and reach, but they can also take away reach from your videos against your interest, and let your competitors profit from your videos and reach. That’s not in your best interest.

Do video and social platforms really drive traffic to your site?

The promise of videos on video platforms and social platforms is that they generate leads to your site. However, these platforms have been shown to generate relatively low referrals to e-commerce websites. A solid video and social strategy are necessary here. Start by measuring how much traffic this approach actually generates. An implementation that is becoming more popular is to only post teaser videos on these platforms and actively entice visitors on these platforms to go to your site for more, longer, higher quality and better videos, explicitly hosting the videos on your own site without using these platforms. A hybrid strategy with teasers on video and social platforms, and using a specialist like Jet-Stream to host videos on your own site is recommended.

Did you know that video and social platforms draw visitors away from your site?

It seems attractive to post your videos on video platforms and social platforms on your site as well. After all, the service is free. However, danger lurks here. The service will do everything in its power to entice the visitor that you have struggled to get to your site to move on to their platform. They do this by, for example, recommending videos that are not yours. In this way, advertisers and videos from competitors may appear on your site, which is obviously completely undesirable. Some platforms allow you to disable some of these features, but generic buttons like “watch this video on YouTube” remain. Analyse what risks lie within them, and measure lost traffic. By hosting videos with a specialist who keeps videos on your site, you prevent visitors from leaving. Specialists like Jet-Stream can make sure visitors stay on your site longer, and watch more of your videos on your site.

Did you know that you are directing Google search traffic to YouTube, rather than to your site?

If you post videos on YouTube, Google will index them. If someone searches on your metadata, Google will direct the visitor to YouTube instead of your website, even though you post the same video on your website. That is not in your best interest. So you will have to weigh the interests of public branding against your SEO interests and then make choices about which videos to place where. Consider hosting videos with a specialist with a player that keeps traffic on your site. JetStream’s video player keeps viewers on your site, and will only recommend your videos.

SEO optimisation of videos with metadata.

Search engines cannot (yet) index what happens in a video. For that reason, both YouTube and professional video services allow you to add metadata, such as title, description, and keywords. With Jet-Stream, you can easily add this metadata to your videos, and place these videos on your site so that search engines will index them and you will be better found based on your data. We additionally recommend placing transcripts next to your videos for indexing. Jet-Stream works with partners that use AIs to automatically index videos and can generate transcripts and subtitles.

Did you know that users drop out when loading times are too long?

Loading speed is important, both for the user and for SEO. Some video players are bulky, and take a long time to load. This is undesirable for SEO as well as for the user. Sometimes the choice is made to load an image, and only when the user clicks, the video player is loaded. This can be done with YouTube as well as with the Jet-Stream Player. This is better for SEO, but from the user’s perspective, it requires 2 clicks and takes longer for the player to load. Jet-Stream’s player is ultra-light code, hosted by global CDNs. The player is modular and loads only the minimum code needed. SEO does not monitor how fast the video loads, but from the user’s perspective, this is essential. If a user has to wait a second for a video to play, the user is already gone. JetStream’s cloud and CDNs, and pre-buffering in the player, ensure instant play, without any lag, and without intermediate buffering. If you put a YouTube and a Jet-Stream video on the same page, you’ll notice the big difference in speed. It’s the difference between not watching and watching, not converting or converting.

Did you know that users are less likely to click on YouTube and social videos on your site, compared to your own branded player?

Companies invest heavily in the look and feel of their brand and their website. The more uniform the entire look, the more professional the impression on the visitor, and the more inclined the visitor is to make a purchase. The standard players of video and social platforms detract from this. Their use is perceived as not professional, making people more reserved to go deeper into the funnel. Jet-Stream’s video player can easily be designed entirely to your own brand: colours, poster images, and play button, they are all customisable to your brand. Even a completely custom button bar is possible. By fully integrating the player visually with your website, your branding comes into its own, and users will be more inclined to play the video, and proceed to call to action. Keeping users on your site longer with videos, and encouraging them to view more videos on your site is good for your SEO.

Did you know you can add call-to-actions to professional video players?

Jet-Stream’s video player offers the ability to dynamically place web objects over your videos. These can be simple graphics like ‘20% off now’, or a clickable banner ‘add to cart’, ‘only 10 left in stock, buy now’, all the way up to a full mini-shop iframe placed at the bottom of the screen, or on the side over the video. This makes impulsive purchases much more appealing and allows you to drive urgency. Experiment with call-to-actions and measure how much more conversion you generate.

Tip: add user-friendly elements

Visitors appreciate it when you subtitle videos in multiple languages or offer videos in multiple languages. Jet-Stream offers extensive support for multilingualism, both in writing and audio. Create attractive poster images, and use the built-in recommendation engine to show more (your own!) videos at the end of the video. Also popular is linking content to moments in the video: a range of products are shown in the video, and these can be displayed in real-time in the site next to, below or overlay on the video, with a buy button, this drives sales.

How do you avoid being competed with your own data?

If the service is free, you are the product. In the case of video and social platforms, they are all about your (search) data. The more traffic they can redirect to their own platform instead of your site, the more ads they can sell. The more videos you submit to them and place on your site, the more they learn from your visitors’ search and buying behaviour, and the better they can sell this data and their services to your competitors, even sell a competitive product. By hosting videos on their platforms, and placing those videos on your site, they are tracking your visitors, and you are being competed against yourself with your own data. This is highly undesirable. Jet-Stream puts data protection first. Your data belongs to you, and no one else. We actively protect them. Our players don’t have trackers, we don’t share data, we don’t sell it, and we don’t claim ownership of it either. Speaking of ownership, many video and social platforms also claim the right of commercial reuse of your videos. Say what?

Got good insights?

Jet-Stream logs every viewer in its secure cloud. We report viewing data in real-time. We track which videos are being watched, for how long, where people are coming from and what devices they use to watch your videos. So you have all your core video metrics at a glance. In addition, we also offer a deeper analytics tool that allows you to see trends and see usage sessions across multiple videos. Logs are also available so you can link them with external analytics tools. Of course, everything is done within the AVG / GDPR legislation.

Have you thought about live video yet?

Nothing comes closer to a real shopping experience than live video. It’s exciting, it feels exclusive, and it converts tremendously. We would love to talk about the possibilities, such as our 4K studio in your browser, which allows you to stream live, in 4K quality, at the touch of a button.

About Jet-Stream

Jet-Stream invented video streaming in 1994, by turning Netscape Navigator into the world’s first HTML player. The company built its first CDN in 1997, after overloading the internet in 1996. Sorry again 😉 Jet-Stream runs its own streaming cloud which is built for extreme streaming quality, performance, uptime and scale. Our team of streaming experts is at your disposal, we help with strategy, knowledge, business cases, use cases and streaming workflows.

If you’re interested in learning more about what we have to offer, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a consultation.