The YouTube Traffic Experiment

There is a lot of chat in the SEO community going on about "social media" optimization and how the activities in facebook, YouTube, digg, twitter, etc. are important in your online marketing mix.

One of our merchants (asgussow) is selling a lot of video tutorials here on tradebit for a few years now and I saw that most of his traffic is coming either from his own domain or from the videos he has online on YouTube. So I thought we start a little test and upload product videos to YouTube, which link back to the detail pages here on Tradebit and see, how many of those 1 billion visitors stuble upon (:-) our videos and come over here:

Visits from YouTube Oct. 2009

So we created around 200 videos of 2-3 minutes length and published these on YouTube over the course of the last 4 weeks. So far I am not very impressed by the traffic amount coming from these videos, but there is more to it:

The traffic from YouTube is highly targetted! That means: the users find our videos there for specific keywords and if they are interested in the product itself, they come over and are much more likely willing to buy than our average user:

Visits from YouTube count

So these users are converting at a 1.7% conversion rate into buyers. That is a crazy figure. I am proud of our 1.15% average conversion rate site wide, but YouTube is sending over a real interested crowd, willing to spend a dime on content.

Yet the work involved to produce quality content videos and posting those on YouTube is heavy. We have tried software titles, music, sounds and some other topics. From what I have learned: not all areas are worth the effort, but now that the videos are uploaded and there: they will bring more traffic over time and including YouTube in your online activities as a publisher can be a real benefit!