Andy Crestodina shares why you should use video to optimize your conversion rate

So keyword research is an easy one. It's a great example of data-driven empathy because all you're doing is figuring out what your audience is searching for, what people on the internet want. So one example we just talked about was using just Google Suggest. So if you type in which videos, it will suggest a bunch of other phrases. Those are phrases people are searching for, that people care about, that people want, that people have questions about. So simple keyword research, even without any tools, just using Google's own Google.com. You can find a bazillion topics that your audience, that someone wants about, that someone cares about, that someone is searching for, that a competitor is ranking for, and they're winning the visitor. Why let them win? We want the visitor. Why can't we win? Like, let's not, like, so fight for that phrase. Make the right page on the topic and win the visitor. So that example was about mostly getting traffic, using keyword research and ranking for a phrase. That's half the battle because getting traffic is half the job. The other half the job is getting the visitor to take an action. So my friend Barry Feldman says, if your website is a mousetrap, the content's the cheese. And that kind of sums it up. There's two main things, right? Getting the visitor and then maximizing the percentage of visitors who take action. So it's about traffic and the conversion rates. So if you go look at your all pages report and you have your goal set up properly, it'll show you a page value. That's the far right column in analytics on the far right for the all pages report. That's under behavior, the behavior section. So if you have pages that are low or pages that are high, you should know that if you want to improve the conversion rate on any page on your website, add a video. That's what video's for. That's what video does. Video is the ultimate. It's the upgraded, you can't beat it, except in live, except in person. If you can't be there in person, then make a video. Because it has tone of voice, it has body language, it builds trust in ways that text never can. Text is so weak. Video is so compelling. It's cynical to say it and it's not exactly true, but we jokingly say, text is for search engines, video is for humans. Well, a lot of people just haven't finished setting it up. So number one is set up goals. Setting up goals is very, very easy if your website has thank you pages. Every desired action, every goal, everything that makes you money or gets you, every conversion should have a thank you page. Conversions are the person converted from a visitor into a subscriber, converted from a visitor into a lead, visitor into a donor, visitor into a job candidate, visitor into an event registrant. Those are all conversions. And they should have thank you pages and a goal set up for each. So setting up the goals and destination goals based on thank you pages is step one. Filter yourself out of analytics or your office, adding a filter for your IP address of your office. These are just basic ways to make your data more accurate. After you do that, I would create dashboards of whichever reports give you the best insights. So anytime, just condition yourself, remind yourself, anytime I'm on a page, I'm gonna look at a report that is giving me something useful, kind of say thank you by adding it to a dashboard. There's a place where you just click add to dashboard. Now that report is gonna be in a place where you can get to it more easily. Build a dashboard of all your favorite reports. You're gonna be more likely to see those reports, get those insights, take those actions and improve your marketing. Oh, I think the best in class, I mean, companies like yours, just go look at the video marketing companies themselves and you'll see some really great examples of how they're using video to answer questions, where they're using video on their pages. I think that there's good and bad ways to do it. Even bootstrap companies that just do a pretty bad job of it. One mistake that I see that anyone can fix is if you put your video on YouTube, this is very common, and you embed that YouTube video on your website, go to the embed code and copy and paste that piece of code that puts it there. Depending on how you grabbed it from YouTube, it might show suggested videos at the end. That's bad. If a visitor on your website is watching totally irrelevant videos, and it's like SpongeBob SquarePants or cooking recipes or whatever weird thing, then you really lost them. To avoid that from happening, you just have to uncheck a box in YouTube before you grab the embed code. That's something that anybody can fix and is a common mistake. Make sure your website is not showing totally irrelevant suggested videos or competitor videos. That's a very easy problem to solve. If you want to really get into analytics and go deeper on these topics, then what you're trying to do is every action you take, measure the impact. Or better yet, before you take an action, look up a report that will either support or reject that action as useful. For example, let's double down on Facebook. Does that make sense? Let me look at the traffic from Facebook. Are those visitors taking this action? Not taking this action? Are they spending a lot of time? Are they seeing many pages? Are they bouncing immediately? Before you take an action, you should actually use analytics to reinforce or support that hypothesis. Then once you double down on Facebook or make the video or whatever you're doing, go look to see if you actually got the impact from that. The more you do this, the more advanced you get and the more sophisticated you'll get with your ideas and your tests. One of the things that I do now is I measure the performance of every piece of content to tell me what percentage of these visitors are actually subscribing. We could share a link or put it in the notes, but there's ways to actually measure the specific performance, the conversion rate from visitor into subscriber from every one of your blog posts. The second you know that that's working, what works, what doesn't, it will change your marketing forever. You'll know right away, wow, I need to be sharing that post. I need to promote that post. I should put this on my homepage. I should put this in my email signature. One percent of people who read this subscribe. Now I know exactly where to focus my time on content promotion. I already have a great mousetrap. All I need now is to add some cheese.