Can Viral Videos Drive Traffic?

During the last few years, viral marketing has become very popular on the internet. Viral marketing can be considered as a marketing technique based on social networks that will help you to increase your brand, blog or website awareness. In some cases it can also have a more commercial side to it, in order to achieve other commercial objectives such as a product or service sale. It is very similar to word of mouth but uses various supports to enhance the spontaneous word of mouth enthusiasm. One way to do viral marketing is to use videos and put them online, on various websites such as youtube or dailymotion. Today we will be having a look at whether viral videos can be used or not in order to drive traffic to your blog or website.

To make a viral video, you either need a good camera and do it yourself or use a web agency. Companies mostly use web agencies where as bloggers tend to create viral videos themselves. The goal for companies is to drive traffic where as for bloggers it is mainly for fun and notoriety. But in both cases, creating viral video has a cost as it requires equipment and time.

Marketingexperiments.com created 28 videos which were published on Youtube and Google Video in order to see the effect it had on traffic and whether this method was profitable. or not Each video  was amateurish and had a length between 15 seconds to 8 minutes and included a link to their main website. The total cost for the equipment was $9,600. The goal of their expirement was not to produce videos like an advertising agency would, but to produce more amateur videos as bloggers would do in order to analyse their viral impact on traffic. As a consequence, the videos were not promotional but more humorous oriented. They then tracked during 2 months the amount of times each video was viewed, the click-through rate and subscription rate.

So what were the results? Well they were rather good, as in 2 months the 28 videos had 324,190 views. The amount of clicks to their site from these video was 4,162 which represents a 1.28% click rate! The conversion rate to newsletter subscribtion was 1.49%! What is really interesting in their analysis is that they compared this to PPC Traffic. They found out that the cost for advertising with PPC for the first two months would have been of $1,248.60 which is equal to $20.14 per subscriber where as it would have been free if published on video social media platforms such as Youtube and Google Video.

To sum up, you can clearly see that by creating a viral video you can drive traffic easily and save money compared to Video PPC. Nevertheless creating a viral video is not that easy. To help you, I recommend you to read an article on TechCrunch about the secret strategies behind many viral videos.

Technorati Tags: viral video, viral marketing, traffic, PPC, marketing experiments