Organic Traffic Drop and Rank Increase After Video Thumbnail added

[OfficeFurn]

So my company has created a large amount of videos and I took a couple of them and created a test video sitemap to see what effect adding a video thumbnail/rich snippet to the SERPs would be.

It worked on one page and gained 2 spots (position 6 to 4) for the highest keyword, but traffic didn't increase too much. Then a week later I tested it with the page that we get the most organic traffic for, which is ranking for a very big keyword. It worked and gained a bit of ranking, but traffic decreased 50% ever since according to Google Analytics.

It seems to me that the traffic from users clicking on the video thumbnail is not be tracked as google / organic even though it lands them on the intended page/doesn't redirect anywhere else. I've looked to see if traffic to this page increased overall to see if it was being tracked via a referral or as something else, but couldn't find any traffic discrepancy. The only thing I did find is that impressions under SEO > Landing Pages > Video Property increased, but this could be from the page ranking in the Video SERPs now.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Do you think having a video snippet could be that big of a turn off for customers that people just aren't clicking like they used to? I don't think so, that's why I'm leaning towards a tracking discrepancy in Google Analytics.

[OfficeFurn]

Agreed. It took about a week to get the thumbs in the SERP, so hopefully I'll have some more information within a week.

[PhilNottingham]

So, I think it would be fair to say that those thumbnails are not great.

If you're a consumer looking to buy a desk, you probably want to at least see the deck you're buying, so i'd advise testing some thumbs with detailed high quality close ups of the product itself.

See if that helps. If not, It could be that for this vertical, video snippets are not particularly valuable.

[OfficeFurn]

Hi Phil,

Here are the URLs in question:

• http://www.nationalbusinessfurniture.com/Reception-Desks-Type.aspx
• The traffic didn't change too much for this page, but the rank briefly increased from 6 to 3 for "reception desk" - currently at 5
• http://www.nationalbusinessfurniture.com/L-Desks-Type.aspx
• This page experienced the traffic drop and briefly increased rank from 8 to 6 for "l shaped desk" - currently at 8

I just submitted an updated sitemap to try to change the video_loc to a product page to get the thumbnail removed from the SERPs for the L-Desks page and change out the thumbnail for the Reception-Desks page to one that reads "Shop Reception Desks" in big letters with branding, etc. I also added the autoplay directive on the updated version, which I've seen doesn't always work.

These videos are technically relevant, however, they are also product specific. We have multiple videos on our product pages so I figured using one in the SERPs for a category page would attract people to our site where they could find many more product videos.

Any insight would be appreciated!

[anthonydnelson]

Exactly this. In my original reply I mentioned "testing a different still image" and by that I meant testing the thumbnail. Make sure the thumbnail gets your attention as well as showcases what you'd want to see for the particular search queries you are targeting.

[PhilNottingham]

Hi Joanna,

as others have said, it's plausible that you have seen a decrease in traffic due to the thumbnails. I've seen this happen very frequently, but without exception this has happened when video thumbs were low quality or unrelated to the page in question.

Video thumbs can increase traffic significantly, but it's not a guarantee - one the most important factors here is what the thumbnail actually is. We could as easily say "meta descriptions can increase click through rate" - which is absolutely true, but it really matters what the description is.

I'd recommend changing the thumbs on your videos and testing a few pages to see if the thumbnail style might be a factor here. If you've increased rankings as well as having gained a snippet, and you're not competing against queries with more relevant snippets (i.e. stars for very transactional queries) then my first port of call would be testing thumbnail variations.

Would you be willing to share the URLs of some of the pages in question here?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Joanna,

That's really interesting. I do not know the answer to whether rankings with thumbnails are treated differently upon a user clicking, but I agree with Anthony that you might be turning visitors off for some queries. It's certainly worth testing if we can confirm that the traffic is not being misappropriated in analytics.

I oversaw a campaign a year or so ago that placed thumbnails on rather transactional pages for a retailer and we did not see traffic decrease dramatically, but the thumbnails only showed up intermittently. I would certainly agree with attempting to keep thumbnails for pages where a visual guide like a video makes sense, given the results you've seen.

[OfficeFurn]

Thanks for your response. I was so excited to realize I could control which videos Google puts in the SERPs, having this traffic drop was a major bummer.

I looked in the SEO > Landing Pages  section of Google Analytics (which pulls from Google Webmaster Tools - so not exact numbers) and it does show that both pages have had a dramatic decrease in CTR (from 4% to less than 1%) . However, it also shows that they've had a decrease in Impressions. Both of these pages are ranking in the top 10 for their highest keyword.

My guess would be that Google may not be serving up the page as often as they were to certain searchers and/or long tail queries because of a video being associated. I'm going to change the thumbnail on one of them and try to get the thumbnail taken off of the other by changing the video content_loc on the video sitemap to a less prominent page.

Interesting note: Since we first started embedding videos on our pages, Google had been intermittently including video thumbnails to the SERPS based on when/if Google picked up on them by crawling our pages naturally. However, when I added a more extensive XML sitemap, Google removed all the videos from the SERPs and we saw a dramatic increase in traffic with no visible dramatic change in ranks (aka the ranks we are watching didn't change).

So I'm hoping the video sitemap will ensure Google only uses the videos on the pages we tell them to. If not, I'll have to talk to my developer on how to ensure Google doesn't pick up on the video links on the page.

At least now I know how not to use videos! Interesting stuff.

[anthonydnelson]

Adding a video snippet to your search result can definitely decrease the CT rate of your organic listing for certain queries. If it's a highly transactional query, like the name of a product, and the searcher is planning on making a purchase, they may mistake your result for a page that only features a video. They will choose other results because they want to purchase.

Adam Audette has been recently talking about this fact and included a slide in a recent SEO for Ecommerce presentation he did.

You are going about this the right way by testing and monitoring your click-through rates. Perhaps you can test a different still image for the video next. Ultimately, you may end up removing the video sitemap. Be sure to test how it effects the actual conversion on the landing page as well.