Video can improve the conversion rate on your website, while video ads can be a cheaper way to drive traffic to your site compared to pay-per-click (PPC)

If Adwords PPC is working for your business, odds are it’s your primary channel for driving traffic to your site. Video can help you in 2 ways:

1. Higher conversion rate

A visitor gets intrigued by your PPC ad, clicks and gets on your website. That’s when the real work begins: converting that visitor into a customer!  Unfortunately, that requires them to read your website copy and try to figure out what you really do.

Most websites do a very poor job at that.How many times have you landed on a website, looked at the above-the-fold copy and started scratching your head?

Sometimes the solution is too complex, or the website targets too many audiences at once so it fails to resonate with anyone, or the copy is too “smart” for its own sake and doesn’t make sense.

Check out this short video summary of Oren Klaff’s book to see “why we suck at explaining”.  It’s inevitable that the vast majority of your visitors will be confused and hop off to another website in seconds.

A video done by experts can really help distill your solution to the essentials and showcase your differentiation effectively. With an explainer video, your visitors can visualize a “day in the life” and see how your solution can make their lives better.

You pay good money to drive traffic to your site. And a video can ensure that your traffic will engage with your brand and quickly get up to speed with how you can help. Some studies have found >20% lift in conversion rates (and some claim even more than 80% better results!).

That’s the equivalent of saying that you just got >20% more ad spend for your PPC for a one-time payment to produce a video!

2. Cheaper traffic

You may have noticed that with the same PPC budget you’re getting fewer and fewer visitors. That’s because all your competitors have a website so they can compete head-on with PPC. You’re all bidding up the same keywords! We recently saw certain keywords with close to $1,000 CPC!

In contrast, you can show your video as a pre-roll on YouTube, often for under $0.10. And you can target quite well based on interests, demographics, geography… The most effective way is to find videos that your target audience would watch, and put your video ad in front of those videos only as a pre-roll ad.

Sometimes you can even put your ad in front of a competitor’s video!

But wait, there’s more!

An additional side-benefit of video is that it can increase your SEO rankings. When a visitor comes to your site, they will spend much more time on it watching a video and being more engaged with your brand.

The result? Lower bounce rate and longer time spent on your website. Both these metrics are used by Google’s algorithms to determine the quality of your site. And the higher the quality, the higher your ranking in organic searches.

Imagine the boost to your business by showing up 3-4 spots higher in rankings, simply because you started incorporating video on your site!

Where to go from here?

If you’re spending money on PPC, the natural next step is to look into video ads. There’s no way of knowing if and how well it will work for your business, but it’s probably worth testing out.

As a ballpark measure, if you’re spending more than $20,000 per month on PPC, then a 20% conversion lift would probably cover the cost of video production in 1-2 months. And you can also use that video to drive more and cheaper traffic to your site.  AND get better organic results!

On the other hand, if you’re spending less than $10,000 per month on PPC, maybe you’re not convinced yet that it’s working for your business and testing video might be premature.