Hey there! Margot from Wistia here. That’s a great question. We often try to have big smiling faces on our video thumbnails, which we’ve shown has improved the play rate percentage of our videos. We’ll also sometimes do fun things with the play button, such as have someone in the thumbnail hold it, point to it, etc. Here’s a blog post that might help: https://wistia.com/blog/boost-play-rate-and-drive-action

Thanks Margotcodes! I’ll read the post now…

Hey Nancy!

I’ll +1 on Margot’s suggestion. We use Wistia on all of our video campaigns and without sounding like a commercial for Wistia, it checks all of our boxes for what we need to promote conversion.

We also have a handy post that allows your user to view your video while scrolling through your landing page, you can check that out here:

Let us know how things go!

Hi Jess! This is super interesting. Have you seen a tremendous increase in video plays by using the stick video widget? I’m worried that the bounce rate might increase if auto-play is enabled as soon as the user scrolls. Or has it improved conversion rates as well? Will definitely test this!

Hey Nancy!

With that particular script, it doesn’t auto-play the video, it just follows the user as they scroll through the content. In most cases with video play rates, it depends on the video content. Is it an explainer video? Is it customer reviews? There’s a lot of content that is far more valuable in video format than text, but it just depends. You’re on the right track to do some testing, and I’d be curious to know what other members in the Community have seen with their video plays. Perhaps the @Unbounce-Experts have some feedback there? Stay tuned…

Hey Nancy,

Great question! And I totally agree with what @margotcodes and @Jess shared so far. Wistia is awesome. We love their video player, especially because it is so customizable.

Your play button doesn’t really pop out. With something like Wistia, you can really make it pop, so visitors won’t miss it. That would be where I start.

I’d also test a layout where the video is centered on the page, with nothing to the left or right. That way visitors won’t get distracted by surrounding content.

Maybe even hide your form in a lightbox, and just have a button for the form CTA, so that you have more landing page real estate to focus on displaying the video.

Also, try putting in some text above the video with directional cues that tell people to watch the video. Often, it’s just a matter of telling people what they need to do on the page.

And lastly, it looks like one of your videos in your screenshot is a whiteboard video. We’ve heard from a few clients that their whiteboard videos never performed as well as live-action videos. So maybe it’s the thumbnail that is throwing people off, since they may be tired of whiteboard videos. After all, they are everywhere these days! 🙂

Best of luck with your campaign!

Thanks Nicholas! It looks like the bottom line is we need to try Wistia! Completely agree on the form next to the video as well so we’ll see what we can do about creating another version to enlarge the video. The whiteboard video (for us) still continues to perform extremely well but I think it’s b/c we have a niche product. Point well taken on the thumbnail though. Thx again, really appreciate the feedback!