Internet Retailer is running a story based upon a case study from our video hosting & creation vendor SilverDock.

This result is actually several months old and was included in Marketing "Sherpa's 2008 Wisdom Report":

We tested product videos on our top 10 revenue generating products. After several rounds of iteration improving the load experience, we settled on a 3 level test: no video, autoplay, and click to play.

Both video conditions resulted in conversion gains, but the click to play was dramatically superior. In addition to a 35% increase in conversion for the products with videos, the transaction funnel became much straighter. In other words, users who chose to click to play a video and then added it to cart were much more likely to complete the checkout.

Wedding related shopping is kind of a bellwether for purchasing processes that have to be perfect and are conducted socially. Product videos enhanced the sales of our best product spectacularly, reducing the chance of erroneous add to carts and increasing buyer motivation.

Time to go put some video on your site!

Over at webmetricsguru.com, Marshall quotes the following key video metrics from Dennis @ Visual Revenue:

9 Essential Online Video Metrics

• Online video started
• Online video Pre-roll advertisement started*
• Online video core content started
• Online video Post-roll advertisement started*
  
  
• Online video positive consumption action
• Online video negative consumption action
  
  
• Online video ended
• Online video played, percentage of total
• Online video played, seconds

As another blogger points out, things get really interesting when you start to consider embedded videos.

There is a challenge that neither of these authors mention -- what about user timeline scrubbing? Video complete doesn't mean the same thing if the user fast forwarded through most of it. Logging total time, % viewed, and complete gives you a bit of insight into this. Consider this range of user behavior:

Description	Total Time Played	% viewed	Complete
Full view	12:00	100%	Yes
Fast forward to watch a 2 minute segment	2:18	18%	No
Screencast how-to view with pause, play actions while following instructions	16:00	110%	Yes
Quick Scan, fast foward, watch, etc	5:00	24%	Yes

There are a lot of subtleties here: Do you double credit re-watching to allow > 100% viewed? If so, you confuse the real meaning of %. It's a good justification for logging % in addition to time, as otherwise, you could simply compute % as a normalization of user behavior across different video lengths.

We've created custom logging in the FreeIQ video player, both for the video embedder (who uses Google Analytics) and the management of the FreeIQ site. We simply log complete, but are working on a efficient way to capture some of the sublteties here.

From this logging, we computed an average 25% video completion for our Going Natural 2 series videos -- not bad given that these are greater than 20 minutes in length.