Video Case Study: Analysis Of Video Views To Sales Data Over A 6 Month Period For A Typical Real Estate Customer

Overview

A real estate customer contracted Vidlisting to produce, host, and distribute up to 13 real estate videos in English, Spanish, and Portuguese highlighting different real estate developments for sale to buyers and investors.  The customer wanted to have these videos be available on their own site and accessible via both the home page and the listing description page for the property. Prospective buyers that clicked on videos within the client site were redirected to a customer branded player page within the customer's online domain. The visitor never had to leave the customer domain. Vidlisting handled all of the configuration, administration, and bandwidth for content shown on this page.

The customer also wanted to take advantage of the Vidlisting distribution engine to send the video content instantly to real estate listing portals throughout the world. At the customer's request, certain properties were distributed only to a subset of the available distribution list of portals that in some cases did not include the Vidlisting site. Distributed video selected by a visitor on another portal played on the portal's own branded player with contact information back to the original broker.  (we've since released a better way to ensure communication back to the agent)

The customer agreed to ask buyers where possible whether or not they had viewed the videos online.

Setup

Vidlisting prepared the branded widgets to the customer's specification within two days of project start.

Setup of the custom widgets took approximately 2 hours to install and configure three sets of widgets on the customer's website and prepare the content for distribution.  These widgets were as follows:

• Home Page Widget With A Rotating Set of 5 Properties :  This widget randomly selected 5 properties to highlight right on the customer's own home page.

• Listing Description Widget : This widget was for a given property and had a link for the three languages in which the property videos were professionally narrated.

• Player Page Widget : This widget provided both the video and related video choices from the same brokerage. It also kept track of the total number of video views for the respective listing regardless of source or video language.

No other preparation was needed.

Results

Video Views : In the first 6 months, the entire set of development videos generated 74,584 total video views across all languages, sites, and properties.  Of the total, 2032 video views occurred on the customer's site . We know from our internal data for this customer that approximately, 1 in 5 property video widgets displayed resulted in a video being watched on the customer's own site. Between 50% and 55% of the video views resulted in a video being watched through the end of the video. 

Sales:  24 units across the various developments that were sold during the period indicated that they had watched at least one video online before visiting.  Over half of those purchases involving video were to buyers that did not speak the broker's first language as their own first language. Note: The total number of units sold during the period or comparison data from other years would have been helpful but was not provided to us.

Analysis

• Approx. 1 in every 3000 video views may have played some role in closing a sale .  We are still collecting data on an ongoing basis but my "spidey-senses" are telling me that this is probably around the right number. Here's a thought: If you aren't getting 3000 views from your current video service, then chances are high that your video isn't generating sales either. The vast majority of views were generated on real estate listings sites and more likely to be prospective buyers.  None of the videos were further uploaded to Youtube or any other video hosting sites.

• Cost per video view ranged as low as 6 cents for one particular develoment to a high of just over 12 cents per view depending on the property for the 6 month period . This included all costs for a given development plus a % of the common costs for the project (including a bit of custom programming work).  Had the customer only depended on their own site to generate video views, the cost per video view would have been between $3 and $4 per video view.  Given the average of 500 video views or worse for properties posted on Youtube and competing real estate video providers, the cost per video view may well have exceeded $15 per view.

• The broker's original plan was to start with 8 developments. They added more when other area developers asked to be included. 

Disclaimer:  Except for the video view data, the above information is provided on an "AS-IS" basis for comparison purposes only. It is presented to you as it was provided to us from the customer.  It may or may not be accurate and your video performance totals on ours or other video hosting providers may be differ upwards or downwards.