The Great Video Background Throwdown

So today we’re talking all about video backgrounds – what are they, how you make them and whether or not they really work.

Because right now video’s quite a big thing.  Video backgrounds are definitely very much in vogue.  And there’s no denying they’ve got a lot of wow factor when you first hit the page – but does that translate into conversions?

A lot of people assume it does.

It’s well known that video’s more engaging than static images and a lot of people, particularly the ever-growing age-range people insist on calling ‘millenial’ prefer their content in video form.

YouTube is now seeing 400 hours of content uploaded every minute, comScore say that 64% of people are more likely to buy something after seeing a video about it, and the one that really got us interested:

Unbounce say using video on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%.

Now this sounds fantastic, but a bit of digging shows that while Unbounce did say that, the original number actually comes from Eyeview Digital, who provide Outcome Based Video Marketing.

Hm.

Of course that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate, but when you’re getting stats on how effective video is from research done by a video marketing firm it’s worth being a little bit cautious.

And also notice they say it ‘could’ increase your conversions.  Scarlett Johansson ‘could’ be about to ask me on a date, but I’d be dumb to base my social life around that possibility.

So we decided to try it out for ourselves.  Test a video background squeeze page against one with a static image and see which one did best.

So we tested this in the Vegan niche.  We set up two pages, one with a background video starring some delicious tomatoes and one with a background image, made from a still of the first frame of the video.  We did this to keep the test as fair as possible, so when people first load the page the first thing they see is exactly the same.

And as a side note – if any stock footage creators are watching this, the world desperately needs more vegetable-based video.  Seriously, we had no idea how much you guys relied on chickens and sizzling eggs.  When you’re targeting vegans, that’s not a good look.

Anyhow, everything else on both pages was identical:  the copy, the offer, the traffic.

And talking of traffic, we drove people to this page using Facebook Ads – a very simple ad using the same background image and copy that was straight to the point.

So we ran this ad for 5 days – and here’s the results.

The background image got 242 hits and collected 26 e-mails, that’s a conversion rate of 10.74%.

The page with the background video got 356 hits and generated 49 conversions.  That’s a conversion rate of 13.76%.

So in this case, video outpulled the static image by about 28%.

We could have done with a bit more traffic to draw any really firm conclusions, but this data’s still significant at the 85% level…

Which means there’s about 5 chances in 6 that video really does convert better, and 1 chance in 6 that these results were just dumb luck.

So it’s not certain, but I’d definitely be happy to take those odds.

If you want to try this out for yourself, you can make video backgrounds in Convertri pretty easily.  We’ve got a special element for it, all you need to do is go into the video menu, select video and drag the element on.

Resize it to be as big as you want.

And then take the URL of your video and put it in the box here.  We suggest hosting your video on Amazon S3, the bandwidth is ridiculously cheap and it’s a very solid platform.

Now if we hit publish you can see how it looks.

There we are, video background squeeze page.

And because these are so simple to make I do suggest you try it out for yourself.  Let us know how it works in your niche.

I’d be pretty pleased with a 28% boost in leads, though I think you’d have to be pretty lucky to get the 80% that EyeView Digital talk about.

That said, I’m still hopeful about Scarlett Johansson.