At every stage of the sales funnel, video can capture attention and lead the customer towards conversions.
However, where you choose to host your videos can have a surprising impact on how effectively they drive revenue. For many brands, YouTube is the obvious choice for video hosting — the platform offers unparalleled reach with billions of monthly visitors. But a YouTube-only video strategy can have unintended consequences, particularly when it comes to driving revenue.
In a recent webinar, Vimeo connected with Tommy Landry of Return On Now for a complete look at the risks of a YouTube-only video strategy.
“YouTube has major big-picture issues with revenue risk, most notably with their use of in-stream advertisements and suggested content that pulls viewers away from videos,” said Tommy Landry during the webinar. “It’s also worth remembering that YouTube is blocked in some countries. That’s a big deal if you’re a global business.”
Let’s take a look at three significant challenges brands face when using YouTube on their web properties.
Challenge 1: Exit through the suggested video
Once a brand has captured the attention of a potential customer, its goal is to keep them in the sales funnel. If something distracts a customer from your owned content, it will pose a direct threat to your funnel — and your revenue.
Earlier this year, YouTube introduced server-side ad insertion: a method that avoids ad blockers by placing ads directly within the video content itself. In practice, that means someone watching your brand content could be presented with an ad for a different service — competitive or non-competitive, relevant or irrelevant — that potentially pulls them away. Those in-video ads create exits to your funnel, giving the viewer easy opportunities to leak out.
Brands face the same issue with suggested videos — the content YouTube offers when a viewer hits pause or reaches the end of the video.YouTube matches its suggestions to the video being played — as a result, this means potential customers could be served content from a brand’s closest competitors. YouTube is also likely to suggest videos that are more likely to capture the viewer’s interest based on their viewing history. Instead of finishing your brand video and staying on your site, they fall into a YouTube rabbit hole and forget how they got there in the first place.
For example, when you pause midway through this Slack product tour, YouTube suggests a video comparing Slack with one of its biggest competitors, Discord. Not only could this suggested video pull the viewer away from Slack’s owned product tour, but the video itself could make a stronger case for Slack’s competitor.
Challenge 2: Video SEO and discoverability
YouTube and Vimeo differ fundamentally in their business models, and that difference can impact the performance of a brand’s marketing campaigns. YouTube’s business depends on advertising — attracting viewers to YouTube and keeping viewers there for as long as possible, watching as many ads as possible. Vimeo’s business model isn’t dependent on advertising — as a result, we’re able to help brands maximize the value they get out of their video content.
One way Vimeo does this is using the “indexifembedded” tag. By telling search engines to index a video only if embedded, it’s your site, not ours, that appears in the search engine results for related queries. With YouTube, it’s a different story. When you embed a YouTube video that ranks for your keywords, users are sent to YouTube rather than your website when they click on the video snippet. As a result, you miss the chance to bring customers into your sales funnel and move them towards conversion.
Vimeo also supports your SEO efforts using schemas. Whenever you embed video as an iframe on your website, Vimeo automatically generates the VideoObject (schema.org) markup that contains the video’s title, description, and more. This structured data tells search engines what your video is about — by understanding the content, they can have your video show on results pages for relevant searches. Without a VideoObject, the content inside two iframe tags is essentially a black box to Google crawlers. If the video isn’t showing up in the right search results, customers aren’t going to find it. Other ways in which search engine crawlers understand your content is through tags and categories, as well as video chaptering, which is available with a Vimeo Starter plan or above.
Challenge 3: Slow support leads to lost sales
If you’ve ever had an issue with a video hosted on YouTube, you’ll know how difficult it is to get timely support. YouTube users — even enterprise brands — are small fish in the world’s largest pond, and the chances of a quick fix are slim to none. The longer a problem persists with your video, the more likely you are to see sales opportunities slip away — particularly if it’s a high-value piece of content that plays a key role in your sales cycle.
In comparison, Vimeo provides 24/7 customer support, resolving issues before they ever come close to impacting revenue. Enterprise customers have a dedicated account manager and a guaranteed uptime service-level agreement. If something goes wrong, you’ll know where to find us.
Learn more about Vimeo vs. YouTube
For today’s leading brands, a strong video strategy should strike a balance between the audience benefits of YouTube and the revenue reliability delivered by Vimeo.
Watch the full webinar with myself and Tommy Landry for a deep dive on Vimeo vs. YouTube. Interested in integrating Vimeo into your enterprise video strategy? Reach out to our sales team to schedule a demo.
