Video Traffic Not Converting: Marketing Q&A

Answering entrepreneurs' most burning marketing questions

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Our CEO Vicky Wu brings her 30 years of experience marketing for Fortune 500 companies, multi-million and multi-billion-dollar global corporations to answer your specific marketing questions. Most entrepreneurs aren’t able to find – or afford – access to this level of expertise. And that’s exactly why we’re bringing it to you.

Entrepreneur Question:

Hey Vicky: I have had a couple of videos go viral that I’ve shared to my businesses Facebook page (one reaching 35 million views) and it drives 20-30x more traffic to my site....but doesn’t seem to convert to sales.

Do you have any advice that could help these visits convert? I already link to my site in the description, and add a link to specific product in the comments, sometimes with discounts. Still doesn’t seem to work.

Ben

Expert Answer:

Whenever you’re driving traffic to a page but not converting, then you need to look at the page and everything after … maybe a button isn’t working, or the cart is malfunctioning. Most often just the page needs help to drive sales.

Vicky

Even if I have a decent conversion rate otherwise? It averages 3-6% daily. In the few days I get high traffic from videos it’s 0.1-1.0%. I get that people are curious about the description link, but nearly 100% bounce rate from them?

Ben

Yes.

It can be that they’re not getting what they expect on the page … the video description and what you say in the video, if based on that they have an expectation in their mind that is not being met somehow when they land on the page.

You can’t edit the video (it’s on YouTube, which would require uploading a new video and losing all of the organic traction you’ve built into the existing one). You can edit the description some but let’s face it not everyone is reading the description. The easiest place to make the fix is still on the page itself that you are driving them to.

I would also suggest using a UTM link in the typed description area … that way you can track if they are actually clicking on any links in the description area, versus visiting the page from any other way.

Vicky