How you incorporate videos on your website can have a big impact on engagement. Context, thumbnail choice and location can encourage visitors to click on video content.
You’ll need to know how to incorporate video content on your site to increase engagement.
These tips and case studies show how successful websites embed videos for maximum engagement.
1. Determine Whether to Embed or Not
You have to make an important decision when you include a video on your website — do you host it directly on your site or a platform like YouTube and embed the video?
This choice may not seem major, but it can have a significant impact on whether or not people will click to watch your video.
Embedded videos sometimes make pages slower to load and take up space on your site, but they’re guaranteed to play without ads. They also give you much more control over the video player and the final product’s look.
Hosting platforms may play ads before or during your video. Users may also click through to the platform while watching, taking them away from your site.
If you choose to host, be sure you select the best video platform for your content. YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook offer various features and may perform differently.
You can also skip embedding or hosting altogether and link the video instead. However, this won’t be as eye-catching as an embedded video. They are also less searchable than embedded versions.
2. Choose the Best Placement
Where you place the video on your page can significantly impact its performance. Often, designers will place videos close to the top of the page, above the “fold,” ensuring visitors will see the video without scrolling.
Not every site takes this approach, however. Sometimes videos need a little bit of context, and tucking them below the fold will ensure visitors read about a topic before starting a video.
This video from York Saw & Knife is tucked beneath the fold, with a bit of context on the video content above. This helps set visitor expectations — when they click on the video, they already have an idea of what they will learn.
When embedding a video on your site, decide if it makes more sense to do so above or below the fold. Above will provide more visibility, but you probably won’t have room to include context for the video, which can help boost viewer engagement.
3. Know When to Use Sound
Not every video has to have sound — and sometimes, it may be better to create video content without audio.
This fullscreen video intro to the site for Coca-Cola Creations, the brand’s “global innovation platform,” shows how no sound can be a good idea:
The intro plays automatically and helps set the tone for the content on the Creations page. Autoplay videos with sound can be extremely frustrating or distracting.
However, there are also good reasons to make videos play automatically — if visitors don’t need to click a video to watch, they’ll be much more likely to engage.
An autoplay video without sound provides these benefits without the frustration audio can cause.
4. Optimize Your Video Length
In general, shorter videos are more likely to grab visitors’ attention. Long video runtimes can be intimidating and encourage visitors to look somewhere else. It has its place, but shorter videos typically perform better. General Electric embeds a video in an article about the company’s recent effort to add gender diversity to a factory in India.
At just over three minutes, this video doesn’t demand a lot out of visitors. It exists to support a medium-length article, so keeping it on the short side helps boost engagement.
When creating video content for your site, consider how length can affect engagement — longer videos may not support certain kinds of content.
Incorporate to Boost Engagement
The right strategy allows you to incorporate your video in a way that will maximize visitor engagement. Placement, use of sound and length will impact how much visitors engage with your content.
Optimizing these aspects of your strategy will help you encourage more visitors to view your video.
