YouTube-to-Site Conversion Growth Hacking
Case study examining methods used to increase to-site conversion from the Magoosh TOEFL YouTube channel to product website.
ROLE
Strategist, Producer
PROBLEM
Despite healthy viewership, videos on the Magoosh TOEFL YouTube channel were not generating much traffic to the product website. Further, due to the structure of Youtube's analytics offering, that traffic was difficult to track.
APPROACH
My approach had 4 parts:
Create high value keyword driven videos
Place valuable content related to the video on a landing page. In this case, the content was answers to a practice test that appeared in the video.
Make the links more evident than the standard YouTube link. Here, I put the link on screen in the video itself and also had the on-screen talent refer to it. This allowed me to bypass YouTube's very inconspicuous linking function which is designed to keep users in the platform.
Make the content landing page unique to each video and add a tracking pixel. I then placed another tracking pixel on the product's "purchase complete" page to see how many viewers became customers and which videos drove purchases.
RESULT
The TOEFL practice test videos have become very popular on YouTube with 400-600K views each. Each has driven a high percentage of viewers to the answer landing pages (because who wants to spend a half hour on a practice test and then not check their answers?). Ultimately, these videos led to a 15x increase in YouTube-to-site traffic.
Tracking pixels proved out the effectiveness of these videos in creating purchases and provided a level of granularity that was helpful in future content planning.
My conference talk about this case study, titled “Escape the YouTube Vortex.”