Posts Tagged ‘calls to action’

Tracking Video Calls to Action

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

You already know that calls to action are a great way to keep your users from falling deep into an existential void after they watch your video. We’re huge fans of tracking everything here at Wistia, and calls to action are no exception. How can you keep an eye on whether viewers of your video are following your calls to action? Here are a couple of ways that you can take your calls to action to the next level.

URL shortening services like bit.ly are more than just a method for making messy-looking links more pretty. You can also see how many clicks a link is getting from a particular location, and you can compare the number of people finishing the video (from Wistia’s analytics) to the number that are clicking your post-roll links. Services like bit.ly are a really easy way to track which paths people are taking to a particular page.

Another thing that you can try is using UTM codes (a.k.a. Urchen Tracking Module codes), which can be tracked easily in Google Analytics (and you can even combine their power with bit.ly tracking by putting UTM code URLs into bit.ly!). You can use Google’s URL Builder tool to filter analytics by UTM categories like source, medium, and content. For example, if you have a video in a few different places, you can give each post-roll URL a different “source” code. Multiple versions of the same video could be differentiated by different “content” codes.

Another added benefit of using UTM codes with Google Analytics is that you can track beyond just the initial call-to-action click and keep track of whether people are actually converting — signing up for trials, filling out contact forms, etc.

Regardless of what tools you use to track your users, it’s hard to argue against connecting the dots of how video-watching is helping you to create prospects and increase conversions.

Smooth Playback: Calls to Action

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Smooth Playback is a webcomic about web video.

We’ve all been there: you play a video that really grasps at the core of your soul, but nothing is infinite so, eventually, it ends. You’re faced with a blank screen or something equally unreassuring and your soul is propelled into an existential void, never to return to reality. Well, we have good news for you: it doesn’t have to end this way.

When designing a webpage or an email blast we’ve all been coached by the marketing gurus to include a call to action to help guide the behavior of our audience. How come we don’t do the same thing with video?

For the most part, people don’t add CTAs to video because it used to be technically difficult to pull off. Do you add an image to the end of the video? How do you make it an active link? Can you even control what happens at the end of the video (like with YouTube, where the end of the video is outside the scope of what you can customize)?

As a result, most people settle for a simple fade to black or company logo. Heck, we’ve been guilty of that practice ourselves, mostly because its the easiest thing to do. But all of us have been missing a big opportunity to help influence our audience’s next action. Where can you direct users with a call to action?

  • Free trial or demo: Once you’ve shown off a product in a format where the prospect is a passive viewer, why not offer them the chance to give it a try actively?
  • Contact a sales rep: Help your users find more information by communicating with a person now that you’ve scaled the basics of communication to a video
  • More resources: Guide your users to the next logical step in learning more about whatever your video is trying to teach or show them

With Wistia’s new SuperEmbeds, it’s super easy to add your own call to action to any video. Give it a try in our interactive demo!

Check out a call to action in action below:

What kind of device is your audience watching your videos on? Should you make a mobile version? Should you make an iPhone or an iPad version? What about Android? There’s no incentive for your audience to watch your video if it looks like crap or if the audio is out of sync.

When you’re serving web video, your audience is going to be on different computers, with different connections, and different capabilities. You need to deliver your content in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the message. In the end, it’s all about viewer experience. Here’s to web video that doesn’t suck.